Ask HN: Am I the only “unlucky” software engineer?

I'm a pretty senior IT individual in Scandinavia.

I've been looking for a job that suits me, a meaningful and/or interesting job, in what many call a "hot" market, and I'm at a stage where I wonder if it's raining only on me. Many would say I have unmatchable standards. When in fact, I believe my ask is fairly basic.

For starters, many recruiters/employers seem to get stuck on a keyword in my profile, or lack of a keyword, and want someone to help out with said keyword. It's enough to ask a simple question as "why ?" that they freeze. "What do you mean why should we X? Because that's what everyone does, because otherwise our employers will not find it cool here and leave, etc"

I get that teams want to redo their tech stack at times, but if they don't specifically ask for it, nor does the product/company have plans to expand/grow, then why create unnecessary work? Hire for boring maintenance. Many are happy to do just that. But more work will not make your people happier. It's just maniac managers creating work for them to manage with tech they don't understand.

Sometimes you like the hiring manager (which is important!) and go to the next interview only to find out that the hiring manager is actually about to leave soon, or that the manager is 100% misaligned with the team/product.

Sometimes you go through the entire process, get a really good offer, and they ghost you.

Sometimes they throw at you some shitty challenge, exactly like a school exam where they test your memory and obedience, but not your abilities.

Sometimes they talk so much about fit fit fit, but they don't even bother with a personality or IQ test (which as a former hiring manager, I find very valuable because it allows you to balance the team, not because you see how high/low people score).

Sometimes you rephrase your entire pitch to highlight what you want to do next, but nobody reads that, their eyes still fall on stupid keywords.

Sometimes they think you're a good match, but they dig and dig only to find something that doesn't fit, and then you catch them red-handed: actually a former employer left and now they hire for a replacement, and they are looking for the exact set of skills. A clone. Because a clone will be so happy to replace the quitter... That's some fine logic right there! Not.

Sometimes you get the job and when you start rolling questions and ideas, you get a "talk to the hand" followed by "that's now what you're here for". Why hire a senior person as a poster, if you're not willing to be challenged and listen to different ideas? Nobody is asking you to agree, just play ball with convincing arguments. Too much of an ask, I guess.

I have worked and hired at times some of the nicest, most loyal, most engaged people I'll ever know - almost none of them checked all the boxes. I hired for potential. One of them even confessed years later "I'm baffled why did you take me in without a test, knowing that I don't know the tech stack, etc". Because you had mega potential, and you exceeded everyone's expectations in the end!

Almost nobody seems to hire for potential these days! Everyone wants to be different, by doing the exact same thing as everyone else, and then complain that they can't find good people.

Am I the only one in this dark movie? Am I the only "unlucky" software engineer?

From what I'm seeing, Scandinavian market may be not as hot as some others are. Salaries and contract rates are really high there, and just across the sea you have a vast market of skilled software people that can be hired for a fraction of the cost (I'm speaking of former Soviet Block countries). So, Scandinavian companies are "nearshoring" by the hundreds/thousands there and are sometimes firing instead of hiring at home.

Or a personality test, which will likely be based on the MBTI - complete BS.

Just because there's an entire consulting industry behind convincing you that to build the perfect team you must have "complementary personality types", does not mean it's true.

Not like the IT industry has the luxury of choice based on such a lot of the time either.

> Almost always asking for "meaningful" jobs. What even is that? I'll challenge the notion and call it "An inability to find meaning in the available work."

Having an impact. Right now, I'm stuck in a glue code + terraform + maintaining third party code job. 2 years ago I did platform engineering with high impact features for ~100 people across ~20 teams.

> Sense of entitlement, _YOU_ liking the hiring manager? It's your job to get the hiring manager to like you, not the other way around.

Particularly in tech, if you forego extreme salaries, you should pick who you want to work with. You spend more than half of your time awake with these people after all.

> Not knowing your place: You were supposedly not hired into some leadership position to change the world from day 1, you have opinions, they are based on previous experiences, made elsewhere. Shut up, listen, learn, observe and do your best to do what they ask of you, at least the first half year or more, and then start gently providing input and resistance, show that you can do it their way before trying to get them to do it yours.

This is the kicker. You can make things better, but you have to pick your fights, and even with those you need to be careful and have some diplomacy skills to seem helpful rather than a rude know-it-all. Remember, if you call something crap, you're probably doing it close to the person who is responsible for it being crap. They might even know it's not good but were restricted by time. Choose your words carefully.

I hope you'll understand I'm not arguing against you. I can totally understand the adversity, and by all means people can easily use it as a bias, but it merely gauges how good at "if X then Y" one is, which in turn reflects on how clear the job at hand should be. It's not about being smart/er than others, it should be just one datapoint in a sea of tens of datapoints in the search for "a good fit". And all you're looking for are red-flags, not as many checked checkboxes. Then again, any tool can be misused. Point taken.