Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

851–860 of 1001 posts

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

#851

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#852

Post by vasili111 »

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.

Any senior developer using in resume term "senior"?

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

#853

Post by macintosh-hd »

whstl wrote: post #290
herodotusxviii wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't mind, could you tell me how I should go about finding a recruiter directly on LinkedIn? I've been out of the market for three years now (had to take care of sick family) and it's extra brutal; I've been contacted by a few recruiters but I'd really like to speed up the process of networking with them if possible. Thank you. (I'm in the Inland Empire in Southern California).

Add them as a friend on LinkedIn and start a conversation. This is how they do it, they don't mind if candidates do it back.

I’ve done this about 50 times at this point with various strategies and have gotten ghosted on about 40, been told they aren’t hiring on 5, and told they had been fired on the other 5. I’m not sure this one works very well, at least at lower YoE.

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

#854

Post by edrxty »

sethaurus wrote: post #631
edrxty wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never reveal ADHD to employers or fellow employees. It will always be used against you.

I've been very disclosive about my diagnosis, and many people I work with have in turn revealed their own diagnoses to me. I'd like to hear more about your experience with this ⸻ how is this info getting used against people?

-If you mention anything about medication, boomers will immediately assume you're taking "meth" because they know the medications have some sort of amphetamine component.

-People who think neurodivergence == lazy/undisciplined/shithead/whatever.

-People who don't understand ADHD will assume you're like that kid in elementary school who was always setting things on fire and interrupting class (and there's a good chance you are, but you've developed management skills by now as to not do that at work).

-People who sort of understand ADHD and know you won't be as mindlessly heads-down as other employees so you're likely to not take well to corporate bullshit/want to work on things you find stimulating rather than .

-People who understand ADHD too well and can keep the dopamine flowing just enough to wring you dry until you burn out.

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

#855

Post by mindcrime »

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?

The over-simplified answer is "The fed started upping interest rates, after having held them ridiculously low for about a decade."

There's arguably more to it than that, but when people talk about "cheap money" they mostly mean "low interest rates". If you just Google terms like "end of cheap money" you'll find lots of discussion on all of this.

Some examples:

https://www.ft.com/content/6d312b6c-9f74-4816-ad7e-7e797c5e0...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-11-30/what-s...

https://fortune.com/2022/12/28/investing-outlook-2023-fed-in...

https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/end-cheap-money-reveal...

and so on.

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

#856

Post by paczki »

rootusrootus wrote: post #667
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…

> bulk of each one of those resumes do not come close to even being in conversation range of the posted JD I've wondered about that. Sometimes I see jobs that sounds super interesting, but I only match maybe 50% of the unique bits of experience they want. Then I see 200 applicants and think ... how many people are just applying for the hell of it, because the job sounds cool, even though they have none of the right e…

I'm always applying for the hell of it, because job descriptions are a mess anyways. These companies actively say they're entry level-junior level and then requires 6+ years experience. If they're gonna waste my time by just trying to get more eyes on their position to game the filter system, then I'm going to waste their time by sending my resume.

Let's not even talk about the companies that actively promote themselves as a remote position, and the chances of it actually being remote are about 10%.

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

#857

Post by yogurthewise »

hapless wrote: post #662
vsareto wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exaggerated, we just hired someone and don't give these kinds of tests or expect this level of correctness. I feel like this is fed by anxiety. I really doubt a large amount of ordinary companies have switched to FAANG leetcode + system design interview formats because of a downtown.

Everyone uses the FAANG loop + system design + leetcode design now I don't know when that change happened but it is practically universal

I've had about 6 different interviews these last couple of months, and none of them gave me leetcode type questions. The closest I got was code snippets where I had to explain what was going on, or very easy fizzbuzz type coding questions.

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

#858

Post by camdenreslink »

troyvit wrote: post #814
bsima wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now we're getting hundreds of resumes a week for each open position, and the bulk of each one of those resumes do not come close to even being in conversation range of the posted JD. What percentage of these resumes do you think are generated by GPT?

The last time I had resumes to look at it was a few years ago, pre-gpt. We had pretty a specific hard requirement (elixir experience), and easily 95% of the resumes had no mention of it. So I don't know if I'd blame artificial intelligence, more like natural stupidity. [edit] And by stupidity I mean people who just spam every job they see trying to get a hit. Like what were you planning to do if you got the job?

Learn Elixir? It's just a programming language...

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

#859

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

bdcravens wrote: post #588
jpadkins wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

flopping interview != quack Everyone knows that interviews have high false negative rates (depending on your hiring criteria). You have to mentally guard yourself that interviews are not a complete judgement of you; they are at best a small pinhole view into your capabilities.

Early in my career I was an ace at learning just enough to talk the talk in an interview (I was playing the risky game that I'd have the chops to learn the skills when I needed them, which thankfully I always did)

I had a boss who was incredibly good at this strategy. She would take the time between the interview and job start to learn what she needed to know.

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

#860

Post by criley2 »

neon_electro wrote: post #840
criley2 wrote: post #764

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the interview or the level but I prefer open-ended situations like "imagine a local small business that sells widgets. They want a backend that keeps track of inventory and a frontend that displays widgets and prices to customers." Or whatever the idea is. Some candidates only need that much and begin asking questions, designing systems, writing code, whatever they want. Others need more guidance and I'm h…

Do you provide feedback to rejected folks so they understand what they should try to improve if they re-apply? The lack of feedback from most places completely puts me off from considering them again, even if that’s what they do to everyone.

I am willing to provide a short communication some times providing information but the reality is usually a lot less interesting than people think.

Reality: I want to hire 1 person, we get say 5 past all the stuff before me, we interview all 5, and then we choose the one that we think fits the best culturally, personality wise, skill wise, etc. So our reply is usually "hey you were great, we wouldn't interview you if you weren't, we just found someone we liked a little bit more". Which isn't very satisfying but you have to think about it from my perspective too. How do you choose between 5 great candidates?

Ultimately, luck is playing a massive role here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LopI4YeC4I

Post reply on HN