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

971–980 of 1001 posts

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

#971

Post by 93po »

timacles wrote: post #649
cosmojg wrote: post #564

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? You don't. In my experience, any mention of anything resembling mental illness will result in rejection (but obviously they'll cite some other reason to avoid a lawsuit).

As a general life advice (this may sound harsh (but thats life)) ... never admit weakness or flaw to anyone that you're selling yourself to. They will immediately ignore your 99 other good qualities and only focus on the flaw you mention. Selling yourself is a game, and the ones "buying" you dont have the cognitive head space to make difficult decisions across many candidates. They will always choose the mentally eas…

This is good advice if you want to work at a place with this sort of culture

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

#972

Post by 93po »

neon_electro wrote: post #732
flanbiscuit wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Are work hours a thing anymore, anywhere? My jobs have all just been working as needed 24/7 with no ability to set boundaries

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

#973

Post by shrimp_emoji »

93po wrote: post #972
neon_electro wrote: post #732

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Are work hours a thing anymore, anywhere? My jobs have all just been working as needed 24/7 with no ability to set boundaries

Oh, yah. Ours are aggressively tracked, logged, re-logged in a totally separate system for fun, and we're not allowed to exceed 40 per week.

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

#975

Post by whstl »

macintosh-hd wrote: post #853
whstl wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interesting, I had better luck. You might be right that experience could be the difference, I'm 15 YoE.

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

#976

Post by tornato7 »

jimbokun wrote: post #715
WinLychee wrote: post #670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the first round is usually a timed coding interview where the goal is to get an optimal solution as fast as possible. You should not be talking much with the interviewer. The intro (if there is one) is a quick exchange of names and last job worked at, then immediately diving into coding problem. You cannot start with a naive solution, interviewer will ask you to skip and go straight to optimal (this happened to m…

This would be funny if it wasn't so sad. When people started asking these questions, the whole point was to see how people reason about a new problem they haven't solved before. There are almost no work problems that require you to regurgitate something verbatim you saw on leetcode before. It's seriously making me question the intelligence of these interviewers. Although at the same time I realize it's mainly just to…

Especially today with Copilot and GPT-4, if I need to merge two sorted lists with optimal time complexity, I'll just ask GPT-4 and it'll give me the leetcode-optimal solution adapted to my language and variable names. Leetcode is less relevant than it has ever been.

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

#977

Post by MollyRealized »

My initial thoughts (gotta help out a fellow Chicagoan):

* Let your resume be your landing page, rather than the recent work - save a click. And make your resume viewable on the web, with a PDF version downloadable. Point being, you want to reduce friction. As it stands, if you want someone to look at your resume, they need to (1) visit the site; (2) (i) find and then (ii) click 'Resume'; (3) locate the downloaded PDF; and (4) open it. Compare that to: (1) go to your site.

* I do not recognize any of the names on your 'Recent work' landing page. This may be a fault of mine as my field is not particularly IT-heavy . But for those who might be clueless, it may be worthwhile to briefly state who they are, or what type of work they do.

* FWIW, have someone look at it for grammar/spelling, and tell them to be picky. "Self-taught", for example. When people are trying to seek reasons to wade through tons of candidates, even the smallest stupid mistakes can be used as sorting criteria, under the umbrella of "showing attention to detial."

* I'm not sure if "self-taught" is something to advertise; I see the appeal, but if I'm someone anal, then I may wonder what holes that left. Self-taught means you only had to meet your own standards.

* Are you saying - with your education - that with your Bachelor's, you expect to enroll this fall? I would take this completely off your resume; it's not an existing skill, then. It also is going to leave a lot of people thinking that your focus will be split.

* Generally, overall, retool/rewrite a LOT of your items by backing up claims and orient it more as a sales pitch. If you are an employer, what version of this tiny little sentence would make you want to hire you? You don't want to just say 'experience in...', you want to say the things you did. "Shepherded six major projects in high-level companies from brainstorming to rolling out the door." You don't want to say what you're seeking, you want to say what you can do for the person looking at your resume.

* Some of your verb choices are very passive. "Acted as the developer of" -- no, it's "Developed". "Experienced in implementing a range of" -- "Implemented eight contant management systems" - use active voice and provide specifics.

Look into whether you want some items on your resume at all, given the impression they might give. The National Safety Council was a two-month gig; Thrive Creative was an eight-month gig. If you just HAVE to include it but there are things that explain it, incorporate it into your resume. "(Short-Term Assignment)", etc.

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

#978

Post by jokethrowaway »

blitz_skull wrote: post #435
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…

> whereas everyone else would call that person [with 5 years experience] a junior engineer I’ve met people with 3 years experience who I’d consider more senior than myself (8 years). Some folks just learn really fast and/or don’t do much else other than work. Not sure time is relevant to your skills or title after about 2-3 years.

I don't think it's about learning very fast. You learn the technology as you use it.

It's about having the brain to reason around problems efficiently.

I worked with someone who become senior & team lead after 2 years (and a really good one at that), after having done business PowerPoints for their entire working life.

I link IQs test (in informal channels) and all the juniors who picked up development really quickly and become very effective, all have high IQ.

If it were allowed, I would definitely use IQ tests in an interview setting.

I think leetcoding started as a proxy for IQ tests (which could totally be, if people couldn't prepare on the subject) but nowadays it's just testing people's ability to memorise different cases and being comfortable enough with coding to be able to implement (and mix and match) them.

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

#979

Post by Cypher »

I've been looking for 6 months too, I'd say I've had 5 or 6 that got to the interview stage. Lots of screening calls and nothing much afterwards. Came close 2 twice to landing a job but too much competition. It's a bad market. I have another 2 interviews Monday but I'm dreading one that is like a pair programming test which I get anxiety over just thinking about it. I much prefer take homes but IDK we just gotta keep looking and hope things bounce back I guess.

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

#980

Post by flagrant_taco »

tough wrote: post #835
flagrant_taco wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never really considered the ability to write the code without handholding to be the line between junior/senior. If anything that's more the line of being a competent developer with a particular toolset. I may be a competent framer that can stud out the plans for a house, but I may not totally understand why the walls are positioned that way or how the roofline will work with the landscape to avoid water issues l…

I see it like the most abstract up the ladder you get, the more senior you are. Anyone can fix a button's css. Not anyone can refactor big parts of a codebase into something better, or help them create from scratch in a cohesive, modular, future-proof way. Every time I get into a new job I get a various degrees of this. The more business-context you have, the better you can solve business requirements with tech, the…

One caveat I have is that companies are generally terrible at recognizing senior+ level independent contributors (ICs). Many companies don't even have a career path defined for this.

I have worked with some of those individuals and they really are worth every bit as much as, if not more than, a systems-level thinker that enjoys mapping business needs to technical solutions.

Most large tech companies I've seen promote standout ICs to either architect or manager, assuming that the skillset and interest largely transfers. I've seen this blow up many times, it's painful to watch and I really hate it for everyone involved.

Post reply on HN