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Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

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Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#201

Post by chucky_z »

gavinray wrote: post #158
the_only_law wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What sort of software do you have to be writing besides magic money printing machines for it to be worth that amount of money? My understanding is that you have to get into FAANG or be in certain roles at certain HFT firms. I’m also pretty sure these are TC numbers are large chunks of those numbers are stock options.

Even in FAANG I have a hard time understanding how any developer is worth that amount of money though. I know a solid number of FAANG and ex-FAANG devs -- the stuff they work on (from what I've heard) isn't much different from the sorts of software I assume most people in SaaS startups work on. Outside of scale (which is significant). A lot of it is internal tooling though, which never hits absurd amounts of scale. I…

Currently at a medium-large company. I’ve saved the company 10 years worth of my salary in the first 6 months of my position and continue to make decisions to multiply spending power on things like research.

I also try to make damn well sure everything we use is contributed too financially and we open source as much as possible.

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#202

Post by dasyatidprime »

caeril wrote: post #156
the_only_law wrote: post #100

I hate that the market is so great right now because I really can’t take advantage of it. I would love to start the process, to try and get a salary increase anywhere from 30%-100% but unfortunately I’ve stagnated sharply skills wise. Don’t qualify for the jobs I see I think I’d enjoy, and don’t even qualify for the jobs that meet my salary preferences that I’d otherwise dislike. I also would have to be looking at im…

> I’ve stagnated sharply skills wise I'm sorry, but what does this even mean? Nothing has changed in a significant way since 1996, other than ops per second and memory bandwidth. If you're an old school C programmer who knows how pointer arithmetic and memory allocation works, you're better than 99% of the total trash new-school Node.js/Django/Rails/React developers who think JSX is some sort of "innovation". Having…

Do you have any recommendations on how best to sell yourself from such a position? I have a significant C99-era/close-to-the-assembly fundamentals background, but I see a lot of “if you haven't already AWS'd all the AWS at your last company in production at scale, then there's someone behind you who has”, and that kind of thing has both been a notable lacuna in my experience and something that's notably less fixable independently than e.g. “plow through a React tutorial to familiarize yourself with the basics”. In particular, it seems like in the heavily external-service-integrating style of development, a lot of experience comes in along the lines of “remembering the pitfalls you ran into with particular vendors under particular loads” and the fundamentals don't get you as far. But I hear a lot of conflicting things about this.

I'm someone who's (supposedly) quite good underneath but has stagnated a lot over the last few years (and on and off before that, sadly) as other issues drained away my ability to work. I'm gradually stabilizing things and trying to find the best way to maneuver, and I'm pretty worried that everything's going to pass me by because my experience isn't of the right kind and I'm not legible enough. The people who are getting the jobs with all the traits I want are the ones who got a Real (that is, close to culturally archetypical) Job in 2018 and did their time in the salt mines with the three verifiable contiguous recent years of experience.

If what you say is true, then it's possible what I mostly have is a marketing problem, and it may be that e.g. some of the “actual demonstration of ability” is more readily solvable with “pull some stuff out into public repositories and freshen it up” than I've been imagining.

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#203

Post by JMTQp8lwXL »

cxx wrote: post #115

Not my experience at all. For context, I'm a L6 at FB right now and have more than a decade of experience. I've never seen tech interviews become as stupid as they are now. In the last 3 months I've applied to a few places, including one where I literally built from scratch what the hiring team wanted to do (and got promoted for it at FB), and I've never seen the difficulty of the programming rounds so high as now. I…

You could change the process by being the person who rubber-stamps everyone, regardless of how silly the "process" is. If the person didn't get the PhD algorithm perfect, yet still did a good job, let them in. Anyone who is good enough to be considered for an interview at FB or G is good enough to do the job. That's the truth of the matter. Be the change you want to see-- this somewhat reads as a 'stick-in-mud' approach which may not get your desired outcome.

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#204

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

yosito wrote: post #101
ProjectArcturis wrote: post #10

My personal experience has been quite different. I got a bit burned out on my job and sent in my resume to 10 new places. All remote, some a bit of a stretch, others I was well qualified for. (Data science management and senior DS IC, respectively). I got zero hits. Not a single phone screen. Honestly I was pretty lazy about it, and didn't write cover letters or anything. That might be a contributing factor. That, or…

Consider the fact that many desirable jobs get hundreds of applicants. It's entirely possible that even if your resume is top notch it got lost in a huge pool of candidates. You need to send your resume to hundreds of companies. I have a top-tier resume, and when I job search, I aim to send my resume (and cover letter/email) to 10+ companies per day. On the other side, last time I was hiring, I was shocked at the low…

Why do you care about cover letters? I haven’t written one of those in probably 20 years. If I’m hiring and a candidate includes one, I usually ignore it (when hiring for an individual contributor, engineering role).

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#205

Post by _dark_matter_ »

giantg2 wrote: post #182
bpicolo wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need senior engineers in order to scale training people, so it's a catch-22.

It's only a catch-22 if you don't have the senior people. At least in my experience, companies have 80%+ senior and midlevel developers. The issue is that companies want to be cheap by letting other companies do the training and then taking them.

Honestly at this point as a staff level eng, not having junior levels to work with is a big turn-off. I love being able to break down projects in to tasks and not have to carry out every single one of those. Convincing one of my senior-level peers to work on a project or task can be near impossible, while the junior level folks will jump on them.

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#206

Post by danShumway »

throwanem wrote: post #17
ProjectArcturis wrote: post #10

My personal experience has been quite different. I got a bit burned out on my job and sent in my resume to 10 new places. All remote, some a bit of a stretch, others I was well qualified for. (Data science management and senior DS IC, respectively). I got zero hits. Not a single phone screen. Honestly I was pretty lazy about it, and didn't write cover letters or anything. That might be a contributing factor. That, or…

Find a good recruiter and put a solid profile on LinkedIn. The difference is night and day.

> Find a good recruiter

I'm going to throw my voice into the ring on this specific line; recruiters get a bad name (often deservedly), but I found my current job (coming up on 3 years) through a local recruiter that contacted me. The whole job search once they got involved turned into an incredibly fast, easy process; they were great about finding companies that matched up with my skills/conditions, they even did some salary negotiation (which I am terrible at).

It was a really positive experience. I'm not going to say every recruiter would be like that, I'm sure many (even the majority) are not. But if you're looking for a job and having a lot of difficulty just finding places to apply, think about finding a recruiting firm to help.

Do make sure:

- A) that you aren't required to apply through them for every job. My recruiter let me keep applying for my own jobs on the side while they scouted out.

- B) that they actually have some domain knowledge about the industries you're applying to.

- C) that they're actually meeting with you and putting in some effort to understand what your goals are, not just trying to pressure you into taking every job offer that pops up.

I think if you're already a qualified programmer, recruiters can fill in a lot of the groundwork of finding out who's hiring and getting your resume in front of companies, and that just increases the number of options you have. I expected to completely hate the process and instead I came away feeling like it had made my life a lot easier and a lot less stressful.

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#207

Post by neilv »

cxx wrote: post #115

Not my experience at all. For context, I'm a L6 at FB right now and have more than a decade of experience. I've never seen tech interviews become as stupid as they are now. In the last 3 months I've applied to a few places, including one where I literally built from scratch what the hiring team wanted to do (and got promoted for it at FB), and I've never seen the difficulty of the programming rounds so high as now. I…

If an applicant gets an interviewer who doesn't do the current frat pledge rituals that some CS students (with little/no industry experience) 20 years ago thought would be a good way to gatekeep who could work in industry...

I'd say that the interviewer seeing past that is a very good sign you might want to work with that person. And that person's implicit endorsement of the company is also a good sign for the company.

Separately, responding to something else in the comment... if an interviewer is actively sabotaging their own company's process.. Is the company very broken in this and possibly other regards? Is the company not able to fix itself, to the point of guerilla insurgencies, rather than constructive dialog and processes? Why is this person still there? Why do they think that sabotaging an applicant's individual aspirations is a good idea? Is the company so bad that discouraging the applicant is deemed almost certainly in that person's interests? Or does the person not care how this affects the individual applicant?

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#208

Post by runawaybottle »

caeril wrote: post #156
the_only_law wrote: post #100

I hate that the market is so great right now because I really can’t take advantage of it. I would love to start the process, to try and get a salary increase anywhere from 30%-100% but unfortunately I’ve stagnated sharply skills wise. Don’t qualify for the jobs I see I think I’d enjoy, and don’t even qualify for the jobs that meet my salary preferences that I’d otherwise dislike. I also would have to be looking at im…

> I’ve stagnated sharply skills wise I'm sorry, but what does this even mean? Nothing has changed in a significant way since 1996, other than ops per second and memory bandwidth. If you're an old school C programmer who knows how pointer arithmetic and memory allocation works, you're better than 99% of the total trash new-school Node.js/Django/Rails/React developers who think JSX is some sort of "innovation". Having…

Well, the thing is, the people you described are the ones doing the technical interview. They hire people similar to them.

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#209

Post by the_only_law »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #189
the_only_law wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, by stagnating I mean I’ve barely written code in over a year, and haven’t done any significant greenfield work my whole career. The work I have done has been mostly in legacy or obsolete technologies, and by that I mean mostly old version of stuff that’s still out there. So by stagnating I don’t only mean not up on all the new hype tech, but also the caricature of a “code monkey”. Certainly on paper at least. >…

Start a new project on the side, using the skills you’d like to develop.

How do you balance this on the resume. I got plenty of cool project ideas, but outside of entry level, it just seems odd to list them on the resume (which I presume is the only way they’ll be seen by anyone giving the consensus on LinkedIn and personal sites). o feel it’d just look weird when you have projects and skills that seemingly have no relevance to your work experience especially when applying to roles that are mid level or senior.

It seems that a lot of things are just no possible to learn on the side as well. For example, doing anything at a large scale. That could be HPC stuff or just designing and building systems that need to handle high throughput without slowing or failing. I can’t afford to have the sort of projects that would allow me to learn those things.

The exception I can imagine is working on high visibility OSS projects and is a huge time sink and might as well be a second job.

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#210

Post by Rapzid »

warent wrote: post #92
yosito wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This negotiation tactic works fine if you don't have to do full day coding challenges to get to that phase, while also working a full time job.

These days I just immediately turn those down without a second thought. It's a joke of an interviewing system and your time is way too valuable for that. Happy to do coding questions, but not 8 hour long take-home projects. Those have screwed me too many times

Teleport has a comically large test. Think 20-40 hours.
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