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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?

#81

Post by golergka »

a-bit-of-code wrote: post #10
ryandetzel wrote: post #3

Laid off from Twitter three weeks ago, lots of interest and cool companies out there. I binged interviews and have three offers to consider. Senior eng with 20 years experience

For that kind of seniority/experience, what fraction of companies asked LeetCodey stuff? Was it easy or medium/hard problems? How much time did you have to spend preparing/practicing?

Not OP, 15 years of commercial experience, been writing code since 95. Only two companies did something similar to LeetCode, never prepared — last time I seriously took part in programming competitions was in high school in 2004 — still easily solved everything they asked for. One of the problems was actually famous n queens — which I remembered as a problem, but didn't remember the solution for. Solved it in 40 minutes (with an uncommon solution, as interviewer later told me) anyway.

Most of interesting questions had to do with system design and debugging, soft skills (also system design and debugging, but of systems made out of people instead of code) and code reviews — with me reviewing their production code. Sometimes I got pretty stupid interview questions like remembering REST spec (there isn't one) by heart, but those were companies I wouldn't want to work for anyway.

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

#83

Post by emptyfile »

rvz wrote: post #58
gorbachev wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> ChatGPT is not going to eat all the jobs. Of course. My comment was about 'less programmers' getting hired. Not the extreme of 'All programmers' getting replaced by ChatGPT as you read incorrectly. Believing that programmers don't need to adapt and that managers won't need to reduce or do layoffs especially with programmers, is quite frankly a denial and delusion of what is going on with cutting costs in hiring too…

ChatGPT has quite literally nothing to do with tech lay-offs.

Read a freaking newspaper once in a while.

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

#84

Post by robertlagrant »

UncleMeat wrote: post #35
bigDinosaur wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of people for whom those kinds of tasks are the most difficult programming tasks they'll be doing (more or less) per feature. It's just their job will often involve a lot more than just that (and if it doesn't, goodbye job...)

Right. I don't understand the concern even for people working on small crud apps using widely used frameworks and little specialized business domain modeling. The act of writing code isn't the hard bit.

I agree. People think coding is the hard bit, when for most jobs it isn't.

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

#85

Post by kybernetyk »

throwaway908365 wrote: post #71

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. Alm…

Is this 100k gross or net pay?

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

#86

Post by gorbachev »

rvz wrote: post #58
gorbachev wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> ChatGPT is not going to eat all the jobs. Of course. My comment was about 'less programmers' getting hired. Not the extreme of 'All programmers' getting replaced by ChatGPT as you read incorrectly. Believing that programmers don't need to adapt and that managers won't need to reduce or do layoffs especially with programmers, is quite frankly a denial and delusion of what is going on with cutting costs in hiring too…

No, that will also not happen.

More developers will get hired, because ChatGPT will not perform the higher function tasks most developers actually spend most of their time working on.

The reason this will happen, is because ChatGPT will be more efficient in performing the lower function tasks and there will be more of a need to put all that automatically created code into actual use, integrate it with Enterprise Package FooCPT, figure out what caused the product outage at 2am at night. And on and on and on.

Not to mention that ChatGPT will not be able to talk to your users about what they want next, convince your manager that that's the right thing to do and everything else that you need to do on top of the coding part to be a good developer.

What possibly will happen is that junior developers will have even harder time getting into the industry, because clueless PHBs will see ChatGPT doing all their work "for free". A few years later they're screwed, because nobody at the company knows how their applications work. Except ChatGPT...maybe.

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

#87

Post by hawski »

nicolas_t wrote: post #74
mrjin wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Most certainly not, because they would not work long enough.

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

#88

Post by foldr »

chlmtt wrote: post #20
cosmic_quanta wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have any work for you, but it would have helped if you had described your software engineering / computer science skills in more details. I'm not familiar with CLRS.

The other users correctly disambiguated CLRS. I am not experienced with software other than the rudimentary syntax of Python and Scheme. Read a CS book years ago based on the latter. Anyway, I was just wondering if anyone had any kind of job for me. Maybe something like data entry. Would have to learn coding in earnest after I pick up algo design techniques from CLRS.

>Would have to learn coding in earnest after I pick up algo design techniques from CLRS.

You're almost certainly better off learning to code first and then learning about algorithms once you've got a decent coding level. In a typical entry level coding job you can easily go a whole year without implementing any algorithm more complex than a binary search (if that).

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

#89

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

throwaway908365 wrote: post #71

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. Alm…

>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".

Preach it! CoL in German cities is far too high for how low skilled dev wages are. 100k at 15 years work experience is an insult when you look at Munich/Berlin house prices and that new grads can get 60k.

And DW posted a YouTube video yesterday about how Germany has a shortage of software developers and they need to actively recruit from India and Pakistan. [1]

More like a shortage of desperate people willing to be low balled and a shortage of companies paying good wages.

Companies in Germany need to start paying ICs more and stop complaining about shortage of workers. Simple.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8Mch8xDCZU

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

#90

Post by throw_aws_inter »

gardenhedge wrote: post #42
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…

What was the salary or benefits that made you decide to endure that?

Don't know and I am desperate enough to not care about salary at this point: I apply for jobs everywhere and the only times I have had a reply the last 6 months (except for AWS), I was offered positions with relocating to other countries.
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