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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?

#731

Post by moneywoes »

ulfw wrote: post #32

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…

Have you considered your own venture with that experience? Would love to connect

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

#732

Post by neon_electro »

flanbiscuit wrote: post #666
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…

At my job I created a slack bot that posts a daily random leetcode challenge every morning (easy and medium difficulty only, for now). It's there for fun because we're a team of devs who love coding. But I also created it so I can practice every day just in case I get laid off (we had 2 rounds of layoffs within a year). But honestly, I'd still enjoy the daily challenge either way

And your company doesn't mind you doing that during work hours?

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

#733

Post by user_named »

randomdata wrote: post #511
tough wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If I were hiring for my farm business, I would consider years of experience to have some relevance. Every year brings a new environment (e.g. drought, rainy, etc.) and, with the work being largely seasonal, it takes a whole year for a chance to try again. As each year brings new challenges, having another year of experience does strongly indicate that you faced a new challenge each time. If I were hiring for my tech…

All this tells me is you've never worked in agricw, and no other industry than tech at a professional level, because you think it's unique. It's not.

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

#734

Post by neon_electro »

fnimick wrote: post #705
criley2 wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In hindsight nobody asked anything _super_ hard, but you cannot make a single mistake, or a suboptimal solution, or give the wrong response to a question right now. >I've started grinding leetcode, reviewing system design, and behavioral questions. You MUST memorize perfect responses to regurgitate as fast as possible on the interview. Again, you cannot afford a single mistake in process right now or they will pass…

I got explicitly failed from a first round interview because I took too long to solve a graph traversal problem. I reasoned my way through and got to the optimal solution, the interviewer confirmed that it was the optimal solution, then said I "should have recognized a variant of Dijkstra's algorithm" and that I had failed for not knowing it in advance. Personally, I think developing it from scratch shows more promis…

Did that experience actually reflect what you'd be doing on the job, or was it just another bullshit interview experience?

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

#735

Post by surajrmal »

whaleofatw2022 wrote: post #710
noodle wrote: post #602

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 e…

> and the bulk of each one of those resumes do not come close to even being in conversation range of the posted JD. Been seeing a lot of this too. Backend specific job, .NET, and we get a bunch of folks who are front-end devs with maybe python or node.

I'm curious why you wouldn't consider those people just because their existing experience doesn't 100% overlap your tech stack? Could they not be trained on how to write backend .net? Wouldn't the diversity of experience be helpful for your team?

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

#736

Post by nicoburns »

pwpw wrote: post #668
nicoburns wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possibly "Engineering Manager"

That’s a good thought, but I do want to stay on the technical side for now. Perhaps that would be to my detriment, but I find the actual developing and problem solving so exciting! The company said they needed an in-house invoicing system, and I had a blast designing it, creating it, and finally delivering it this past week.

I guess perhaps you can express your technical and leadership/management skills separately? "mid-level developer, but with prior professional experience in another industry and strong leadership skills" or something. It'll take a bit of work to explain, but I reckon it should be doable. (I have a similar issue with several years of non-professional programming experience I have prior to my first job).

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

#737

Post by throwaway2037 »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #605
dorfsmay wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The most economically efficient companies in my career always make it insanely hard to add head count to the team. They tease you with "might get a head count next quarter". Then frequently freeze the head count during your search. They are trying to squeeze as much as they can. I'm not saying this is a pleasant working environment, but it is very good for the bottom line. Also, it is sometimes more efficient for them to give modest pay rises to best performers off-cycle to motivate them to work even harder.

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

#738

Post by jimbokun »

pc86 wrote: post #523
ryanbrunner wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5 years for junior for better or worse is well out of step with the industry - while you're right that you can get some massively inflated titles that are out of step with the norm, the norm is that you're an intermediate developer at a minimum and most likely a senior after 5 years. It's dumb, but it is the standard nowadays.

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.

Might be better to just ignore job titles altogether and only look at descriptions of what they actually did.

Employees generally don't decide on the job titles used in their company.

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

#739

Post by neon_electro »

criley2 wrote: post #647
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…

>In hindsight nobody asked anything _super_ hard, but you cannot make a single mistake, or a suboptimal solution, or give the wrong response to a question right now. >I've started grinding leetcode, reviewing system design, and behavioral questions. You MUST memorize perfect responses to regurgitate as fast as possible on the interview. Again, you cannot afford a single mistake in process right now or they will pass…

What kind of time pressure do you put on candidates? Do you expect them to sit there live for 45 minutes and complete something that reflects what it would be like to work there day to day?

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

#740

Post by user_named »

pwpw wrote: post #668
nicoburns wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possibly "Engineering Manager"

That’s a good thought, but I do want to stay on the technical side for now. Perhaps that would be to my detriment, but I find the actual developing and problem solving so exciting! The company said they needed an in-house invoicing system, and I had a blast designing it, creating it, and finally delivering it this past week.

Tech lead.
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