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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?

#821

Post by randomdata »

user_named wrote: post #733
randomdata wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> All this tells me is you've never worked in agricw

Honestly, I don't even know what agricw is, so that is no doubt true. I've been working on farms for 30-some-odd years, though, and my farming operation has been going for 17 years now, so I speak from that background. We plant once a year, we harvest once a year, etc. so the lessons to learn only come around once a year. Thus years of experience starts to become a decent proxy for what you are really trying to measure. Indeed, that doesn't work in every industry.

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

#822

Post by scarface_74 »

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 my suggestion is, do what you can to stand out

Really, once you are unemployed and looking for a job, it’s too late to do anything to stand out. The time to do something to standout is while you are working.

How will emailing someone directly help if he doesn’t have a unique set of skills that helps him stand out? If he is just another generic developer (no offense intended I don’t know anything about him and that’s how I would have described myself until 5 years ago) why would emdilokb

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

#823

Post by scarface_74 »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #706
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.

Tech leaders colluding with the government by abusing the H1B program and ultra-lax enforcement of anti-trust laws to absolutely crater tech salaries has been the name of the game for 15+ years.

The number of H1B visas in relationship to the entire market is just a drop in the bucket.

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

#824

Post by DonHopkins »

TheCaptain4815 wrote: post #604
Macha wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Inhumane Resources

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

#825

Post by the_only_law »

softwaredoug wrote: post #429

I’ll be honest. Some people are bad at interviewing and selling themselves. Some of the best people I’ve worked with are getting passed over because they’re quiet and undersell themselves. Some of the more incompetent people can bullshit their way through the process and really oversell themselves. They think they’re gods gift to the field, and believing that, they can sell it. It’s 100% Dunning Kruger. I don’t know…

> Some of the best people I’ve worked with are getting passed over because they’re quiet and undersell themselves.

I think this was my biggest issue in the beginning after the layoff. There were a few interviews I had that went well until they asked me about my expertise with X, at which point I would get a bit cautious. In some cases, I found out they the company and I had very different definitions of “expertise”.

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

#826

Post by underlipton »

taylodl wrote: post #748
karaterobot wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interpret it as a figure of speech, otherwise there's going to be someone from the great depression who shows up and clicks his tongue at all of us.

True. I'm also trying to provide some perspective to younger job hunters that while now it is more difficult to get a job than anytime since the Obama era, it was much, much harder during the George Bush Jr. era which wasn't all that long ago and I suspect there are a lot of folks here on HN who were working back then. Personally, I can go further. Things weren't too great during George Bush Sr. era where we had a re…

I don't know about that. During all previous major downturns, the base-level credential was a high school diploma or lower (yes, even during the GFC). That's no longer the case. Whatever our older siblings, parents, grandparents, etc. had to do, tack on another 4 years just to get your foot in the door.

A lot of the people being hit today got their first wallops during 2008 (and were affected by their older relatives' struggles during 2001), so you're dealing with compounding misfortune. Oh, also, more people. There are almost 3 times as many people in the US today than during the Great Depression; almost 100 million (~30%) more people than in 1990. It's fundamentally more competitive just on a body count basis.

The only change I see is that the media is more savvy about pretending things are better than they actually are, at the behest of their financiers. You'll finally admit that we had it the worst sometime after your recognition would have made any difference, I suspect.

EDIT: Did I mention the relative cost of housing (most people's largest expensive), transportation, and food in 2023 vs 1987? Because it's bad. Borrowing the lingo of my juniors: "You gripe because you had to pump gas or bag groceries for a few months to pay rent. I, forcing myself to DoorDash knowing that I won't be able to pay rent, am smothering the icebolt of panic in my breast with the bare hope that if I survive another month, there's a chance the markets will crash and the affluent Boomers in charge will FINALLY have to admit how bad things are and be forced to do something. We are not the same."

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

#827

Post by scarface_74 »

mettamage wrote: post #743
surajrmal wrote: post #735

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yep they could but companies usually don't do it. I've done it. OOP is OOP, there are only different flavors. I wonder to what extent an OOP person would be able to do a Haskell job (or a similar functional language).

Anyone can learn a language. The .Net framework and the related ecosystem is huge. I’ve done front end work maybe a decade ago, I still do backend JavaScript and I know the basics of web technologies. But anyone would be a fool to hire me if they wanted a front end developer.

Even if I knew Java that doesn’t mean I could just jump in and start doing Android development.

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

#828

Post by Mixtape »

scarface_74 wrote: post #822
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 my suggestion is, do what you can to stand out Really, once you are unemployed and looking for a job, it’s too late to do anything to stand out. The time to do something to standout is while you are working. How will emailing someone directly help if he doesn’t have a unique set of skills that helps him stand out? If he is just another generic developer (no offense intended I don’t know anything about him a…

> The time to do something to standout is while you are working.

This is an issue I ran into recently during my post-undergrad job hunt. Having exited college without an internship, it was difficult to distinguish myself in any meaningful way. In my opinion, major, career-defining work needs to be at least six months' worth of dedication to be of any importance on a resume. Most people don't have the savings to go that long between jobs.

I was fortunate enough to secure a well-paying internship over the next six months, but in all honesty I think I got lucky. It's tough out there if you don't have the existing background to set yourself apart.

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

#829

Post by pluijzer »

ryanbrunner wrote: post #442
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…

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.

I have to read a lot of cv's and the job title part is just some empty noise for me. Developer, engineer, programmer they're just terms that go in and out of fashion. At first they will become more and more pompous, Senior 10x-Ninja, or whatever, until they become so ridiculous that the actual capable people will call themselves humbly just a programmer.

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

#830

Post by DonHopkins »

TheCaptain4815 wrote: post #696
Macha wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's already automated systems that do this. We do it manually just because we don't want to risk a system automatically discarding a candidate we might actually like.

That's kind of my point, I wonder if LLMs (especially something new like GPT4) could surpass those 'old school' automation methods for this given their 'understanding of context'.

Then applicants will start jailbreaking the LLMs in their cover letters to get to the front of the line. Which will be great if you're trying to hire prompt engineers.
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