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Unraveling of the tech hiring market

blogs.janestreet.com

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Re: Unraveling of the tech hiring market

#21

Post by busterarm »

kafkaesq wrote: post #16
busterarm wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's happening outside of schools. In my own network I know roughly 100 or so junior to mid level devs who have sought jobs in the last year and roughly 25% of them have dealt with exploding offers from NY and SF companies -- most frequently from the smallest and/or lowest-paying companies. One of my friends saw an offer explode in less than an hour. They had emailed him at 3pm on a Friday and had made another offer…

What makes it really fun sometimes is when a company ignores you or just dithers for months and months... and then out of nowhere comes at you with "Ummmm, so we'd like to hire you, can you decide in the next 48 hours?"

Yes!

Even better than that is when you turn them down (for offer or interview) because you have another job already and then a month or two later you receive _their_ rejection letter saying that you're not the right candidate.

And I was an employee referral that time -- thanks Mattermark!

Re: Unraveling of the tech hiring market

#22

Post by ap22213 »

pklausler wrote: post #20

Is this not a self-correcting problem? The companies that impose the unrealistic deadlines are going to be more likely to miss out on the better candidates, who are more likely to have other offers, and in the long term that will be self-defeating for those companies.

Maybe eventually. But, usually such things take a long time to play out. People generally don't act independently, but more like a flock of birds. Occasionally, a singleton will appear to successfully break the equilibrium, but it doesn't happen often.

Re: Unraveling of the tech hiring market

#23

Post by browseatwork »

pklausler wrote: post #20

Is this not a self-correcting problem? The companies that impose the unrealistic deadlines are going to be more likely to miss out on the better candidates, who are more likely to have other offers, and in the long term that will be self-defeating for those companies.

You would think. I remember reading about how finance firms and maybe also consultants increasingly interview and make offers earlier to college seniors. If you have lots of debt and the company is a good enough name and they're paying good enough money, people take the offer. People are increasingly anxious, and this helps them know they have a pretty good job, for sure, next year.

This trend helps bigger, more established companies. E.g. Google or Microsoft know they will need many someones next year, and they have the resources and hopefully the desire to train up the people they hire. Startuply Inc may not be around in 9 months, and doesn't really know what they'll need then. Maybe the current sentiment of startups = good helps counterbalance this a little.

Re: Unraveling of the tech hiring market

#24

Post by bcbrown »

joshavant wrote: post #8

This has always been a difficult challenge when job hunting for me, and I'd be curious to hear how others deal with this in their careers. Nearly every job offer I've encountered expects a response within a few days. In practice, I'm usually interviewing at multiple places and at different stages of the interview process at each. The 'exploding offer' system makes applying to multiple companies near impossible for th…

The one time I've been offered an exploding offer, I told them that I couldn't respond in the next two days as I was interviewing elsewhere, and that I was also concerned at the level of compensation. They came back with a higher offer with a longer timeline. I would suggest refusing exploding offers as a matter of principle, and if they merely "expect" a response soon, it's totally fair to push back, say you're still interviewing elsewhere, and give them a rough timeline as to when you think you'll be able to give a response.

Re: Unraveling of the tech hiring market

#25

Post by Retric »

tikhonj wrote: post #15
tosseraccount wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like they are a high frequency trading outfit. It would be interesting to know how these private black box firms actually performed compared with the returns on a transparent security like the Vanguard S&P 500 fund.

They're not really a high-frequency firm by most definitions. They use some high-level strategies that high-frequency firms also use (ie market making) and have some automation, but don't optimize for latency. Nothing about that is high-frequency trading per se —in many securities, you can make markets manually or semi-manually. Market making as a strategy is more like providing a service on the markets than it is li…

Depends, you can make more money as a market maker by expanding the spread than collapsing it. Though this is obviously a risky move.

Re: Unraveling of the tech hiring market

#26

Post by akhilcacharya »

minimaxir wrote: post #2

Helpful context, since Jane Street may be an unfamiliar company to HN users: Jane Street is known as one of the companies with the most technically difficult interview processes, so that gives then a unique perspective regarding tech hiring.

Not only this, but they are well known to only recruit at a very particular set of top schools as well.

Re: Unraveling of the tech hiring market

#29

Post by newman314 »

busterarm wrote: post #19
newman314 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While that absolutely sucks, I would say that he dodged a bullet there. If a company is willing to pull an offer in a hour, there's a very good chance you don't want to work for them.

Total agreement there. There's so many indicators like that though and it's hard to find a company that doesn't tick one of them during the interview process. I lucked out with my current job, for sure, because even though they're sometimes disorganized, my work and my person are valued and treated with respect.

True but I find behavior during the hiring process to be a useful indicator. Purely anecdotal of course but I dissuaded my partner from taking a job because I felt that they did not negotiate in good faith. There was some resentment until I was vindicated several years later when said company was fined millions for fraud.

Re: Unraveling of the tech hiring market

#30

Post by sharpy »

Arcten wrote: post #12
aptimpropriety wrote: post #3

"But this year it seems like the seal is broken, and we've seen major companies delivering internship and full-time offers with 2 week (and less) hard deadlines. Other companies now routinely deliver expiring bonus offers for signing early. Many of these offers circumvent or outright break the guidelines set down by schools, and if past matching markets are a model for this one, next year will come with even earlier…

From personal experience, I can say that Google was only willing to extend an internship offer a week past their initial two week deadline. This is despite the fact that I was still interviewing with other companies at the time. From speaking with my university's career center I am not the only person this happened to.

It really depends on how much they want you, and how you negotiate. I recently changed jobs. I ended up getting multiple offers, and for all but 1 of them, they were willing to wait 3 weeks for me to make a decision. I was very upfront about that if they were not, I wasn't interested in them, however.
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