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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?

#791

Post by JohnBooty »

unethical_ban wrote: post #730
neon_electro wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I have been diagnosed with ADHD (and started medication, to be clear) this year. How do I best tell prospective employers I might need some accommodation in this process? I've been at it on and off for 17 months and have had the worst experience…

What the other guy said about drugs is probably a good idea. Do NOT tell them until you're in the door, if at all. Maybe mention it casually when you need to assert taking an extra long walk or something.

I'd just take the walks. I've never had an employer in the software engineering industry who batted an eye at such things.

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

#792

Post by vasili111 »

noodle wrote: post #704
MentallyRetired wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this tech downturn is all a collusion amongst tech leaders to bring down software developer salaries. How are so many places hiring yet so many are laying off thousands, and most of them in tech/development? Even the places laying people off are still hiring those positions.

Well, to give you my POV - my company is still hiring because the business fundamentals are still strong. We're making money and using that money to pay people. But I have friends in network who had to lay off because they were hiring against VC cash instead of revenue, with the expectation of raising another round later. But they now don't expect to be able to raise that next round so easily so they have to slow the…

> Money WAS cheap and easy for a while, and with everyone trying to use that money to grow, you could throw cash around easy to hire/poach/etc. and had to compete heavily for talent. Now you can't, money is much more expensive and tougher to get and you have to be more deliberate.

Why it changed? What happened?

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

#793

Post by jkachmar »

fnimick wrote: post #722
throwaway2037 wrote: post #697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jesus Christ: Where are you interviewing? This sounds more like Stephen King's The Long Walk, than a job interview! Do they hold a gun to your head while you regurtitate the optimal solution?

Have you interviewed recently? The vast majority of companies won't even have a conversation with you until after you've jumped through this.

fwiw in my experience it's entirely possible to avoid this if you don't submit an application "cold" (i.e. through the careers page), but through a recruiter or referral _IF_ you have a strong portfolio of open source work and/or exposure in technical spaces.

i'm more than happy to do take-home assignments or complete reasonable timed assessments, but i have (politely) refused to complete leetcode-style gotcha screens when they have been presented to me as "just another part of the application process".

idk, though. maybe that's a privileged statement based on my position, but from what i can tell grinding leetcode seems to be much less reliable these days & the toll it takes on a lot of folks is pretty significant.

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

#794

Post by pkaye »

hunterhod wrote: post #712
MentallyRetired wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this tech downturn is all a collusion amongst tech leaders to bring down software developer salaries. How are so many places hiring yet so many are laying off thousands, and most of them in tech/development? Even the places laying people off are still hiring those positions.

How would such a joint-coordinated effort work? Is such collusion possible at this scale?

I don't think its collusion but its possible when one major tech company does it the others think its safe to do it too. But I also think many of these companies over-hired during the pandemic and even with the layoffs have more employees that pre pandemic.

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

#795

Post by JohnBooty »

dublinben wrote: post #618
hoorayimhelping wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have been diagnosed with ADHD this year. How do I best tell prospective employers I might need some accommodation in this process? As someone who was diagnosed with ADHD a decade-and-a-half ago in my 20s: You don't. You don't even think about using your diagnosis as an excuse or a shield for behavior that is unacceptable. You never consider thinking that you deserve special treatment because you were diagnosed wi…

Would you give the same advice to someone who was blind or in a wheelchair and asking for reasonable accommodations at work? ADHD is a legally recognized disability in the US, just like other, more visible disabilities. There are a number of accommodations that OP could ask for that an employer would be obligated to provide. In pragmatic terms, disclosure is probably best kept until after you've been hired somewhere,…

    Would you give the same advice to someone who was blind or in a wheelchair
No, I wouldn't. But as fellow ADHD sufferer (who has struggled greatly at times) I would vouch for the parent poster's advice.

ADHD ultimately comes down to coping strategies. At the end of the day you are going to have to develop strategies to focus and accomplish your work.

In this sense it is different than e.g. blindness. A blind person (I'm partially blind, too! fun!) can't cope their way to sight. But an ADHD sufferer is going to have to figure out a way to focus and accomplish work.

I guess if I was already hired I might consider bringing up the disability thing if my employer was doing some weirdo, directly-hostile thing w.r.t. ADHD like banning headphones in an open office. That would be a plan of last resort.

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

#796

Post by cableshaft »

omniglottal wrote: post #655
Tostino wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't know their situation or work history, why reply with something so negative?

A veteran is someone who has served in the armed forces. It's like saying "I have 10 years tenure" when they're not a tenured professor, but just mean "have worked in the industry/position for 10 years".

That's one definition. A word can have more than one definition.

Cambridge: "a person who has had a lot of experience of a particular activity"[1]

Merriam-Webster: "a person of long experience usually in some occupation or skill (such as politics or the arts)[2]

Oxford: "A person with long experience in a particular (non-military) position, field, or activity; any experienced or ageing person."[3]

Vocabulary.com: "Veteran commonly refers to someone who has fought in a war––think Veterans' Day, the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial––but, in fact, the word can mean anyone with experience in a particular field."[4]

I could go on. They used it correctly. 10 years is plenty of experience for this field to use the term veteran.

[1]: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/veter...

[2]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/veteran

[3]: https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=veter...

[4]: https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/veteran

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

#797

Post by pnutjam »

whstl wrote: post #283
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.

I've given up on applying through company portals for a few years. Last job I applied myself was in 2016. The rest was people reaching me via LinkedIn. I'm not a recruiter and have no vested interest in this, but the experience with recruiters from the candidate side is just completely different to justify their existence. From the company side, we also get better candidates from recruiters. Applying through portals…

Just anecdotally, I got 2 of my last 4 jobs by direct applying with no networking, and 2 from recruiters. One internal and one external. The internal recruiter oversold the job and it was not great. The other jobs were all good and about what I expected.

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

#798

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

MentallyRetired wrote: post #652
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…

I think this tech downturn is all a collusion amongst tech leaders to bring down software developer salaries. How are so many places hiring yet so many are laying off thousands, and most of them in tech/development? Even the places laying people off are still hiring those positions.

What you call "collusion" is what economists call "the market". Collusion doesn't even make sense here when it's so broad based. I could entertain collusion if it were a relatively small number of companies, e.g. in the Apple/Google etc. anti-poaching case. But here tons of companies had layoffs, and it's not hard to see why:

1. There was a ton of over hiring done during the pandemic. I don't think anyone really denies this. We were getting close to the "anyone that can fog a mirror" bar that I last saw during the .com boom.

2. Most people don't understand how the raise in interest rates makes it much more difficult to defend additional headcount even for companies that are hugely profitable. I won't go into the full economic theory, but the short of it is that when cash now earns ~5%, the bar for what new projects need to earn also shoots up. Obviously when cash was earning nothing people were much more willing to make highly speculative investments.

There is no collusion, and I think a lot of folks who didn't start in the job market until after the Great Recession never saw a downturn.

In a note of optimism, I'd argue that I heard all the exact same things during the .com crash, e.g. "they're going to ship all our jobs to India." Yet software dev salaries absolutely exploded in the past 2 decades since. I've talked to some folks who have already seen a marked improvement in the job market over the past month or so - not stellar by any means, but not as awful as it was earlier in the year. In other words, I'm really confident "this too shall pass."

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

#799

Post by arp242 »

jacknews wrote: post #51

Rejection email? You were lucky to get a rejection! Or an email. We used have to lick the bosses boots clean, applying for a job paying penny a year, an' if we were lucky we might get a thrashing to within an inch of our lives, and a rejection screamed in our ear. Luxury.... . Yes sure, I'm in the same boat, but probably with worse prospects (took a 'career break' to work on side projects, etc), and it feels like I'm…

33 applications since 1st of June:

- 2 rejected after interview.

- 2 ghosted after interview.

- 3 declined on my part after interview for various reasons (1 paid essentially below minimum wage, and 2 required relocating to a different country which is fine by me for the right job, but I didn't really have a good feeling about either).

- 8 rejected by email.

- 18 no reply (but some might still reply, since it can take a few weeks).

So that's about a 50% reply rate, give or take (assuming I'll get a reply from a few of the application from the last few days).

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

#800

Post by rsynnott »

vasili111 wrote: post #792
noodle wrote: post #704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, to give you my POV - my company is still hiring because the business fundamentals are still strong. We're making money and using that money to pay people. But I have friends in network who had to lay off because they were hiring against VC cash instead of revenue, with the expectation of raising another round later. But they now don't expect to be able to raise that next round so easily so they have to slow the…

> Money WAS cheap and easy for a while, and with everyone trying to use that money to grow, you could throw cash around easy to hire/poach/etc. and had to compete heavily for talent. Now you can't, money is much more expensive and tougher to get and you have to be more deliberate. Why it changed? What happened?

A combination of fiscal policy (money is literally expensive at the moment, as central banks raise interest rates to combat inflation) and fear (a lot of people have been expecting a recession any day now for the last year, though it keeps getting postponed, and may yet be the recession that never was; while a good few countries dipped briefly into technical recession this year, fear of another proper global recession does seem to be abating a bit).
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