Unraveling of the tech hiring market

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=OCaml%20Jane%20Street&sort=byP...

Absolutely does, but in my observations, this has lead to the dating market bifurcating. There are some people who are seemingly always in a new relationship, two weeks after they got out of the last one, which often exploded in flames 1-2 years after it started. And then there are some people who are really picky, who go years single before finding their soulmate, who also went years single.

The two groups largely don't intersect. When someone from the latter meets someone from the former, the former person tends to end up in a relationship with someone else well before the latter has made up their mind.

I wonder if something similar is happening in the job market. One set of candidates can't afford to be jobless long, and so they will pick the offer in hand without waiting to see if a better one is around the corner. Another set can afford to be picky, so every job search involves multiple competing offers, and they'll hold out for the job that they really, really want even if it means passing up good immediate opportunities. Oftentimes, because they hold out for a job that both compensates them well and makes them happy, they can afford to be picky in their next job search.

I wonder if Jane Street is trying to position itself in the latter camp and attract more candidates who are picky about their employer with this article.

The article mentions that a side effect of exploding offers is that you don't get to see the full landscape of opportunities and trade-offs you're facing before you make your decision.

On the other hand, after a year of job searching, hundreds of technical phone interviews, dozens of take-home & interactive code tests, and a significant number of job offers that I have turned down, what I can say is that I think I have a pretty good picture of the overall tech job market, and it is exceedingly depressing.

For instance, I have a mild case of misophonia, and so being seated in an open-plan office layout is simply not doable for me, physiologically, and listening to headphones obviously doesn't make sense if the problem is misophonia.

Many companies have been excited about my skills, experience, work ethic, and my ability to communicate.

But they have been 100% no-questions-asked outright indignant at the idea of a candidate negotiating the ability to work in a private office.

Even if I explain that it is related to misophonia, and the extreme aversion I have to ambient noises, conversations, small movements, and so forth, they don't seem to care. In all previous jobs, my teamwork ability and my effort spent collaborating was always praised as one of my best attributes. But in today's job market, collaboration == sitting in an open-plan office.

Far from worrying about exploding offers, I am worried about the overall industry shift that has happened to make it so that it is effectively impossible to work in a private space as a developer.

I feel bad for all of the intrinsically introverted people who are nonetheless excellent collaborators and developers -- the very nature of physical workspaces is harmful to their cognitive health, yet employers outright, under all circumstances, refuse to negotiate about it.

I've never been very interested in the idea of a software union. But the egregious lack of privacy in the workspace has made me start to feel like a union would be truly the only possible solution.

- I have some more questions about the work environment, can we setup a phone call with one of the developers

- I would like to learn more about company benefits, can you send me the relevant information about healthcare options and prices for my review

- the salary offer is slightly below my target, but I am willing to consider it if we can improve the PTO offer: is this a possibility