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Ask HN: How to overcome job search exhaustion?

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Re: Ask HN: How to overcome job search exhaustion?

#21
post #15

Has the market become this tough/bad?

I don’t think so? I got a job as a team lead two months ago with seven years experience. Not sure what OP is doing wrong here. The market was HOT earlier this year, but I don’t think it’s “bad” at this point. We just hired another dev and are hiring another team lead probably next year to spin off a new team. Maybe OP needs to consider doing mock interviews or something to figure out what it is that’s going wrong? I’…

I was also going to suggest mock interviews, especially after 40 interviews and no offer.

Re: Ask HN: How to overcome job search exhaustion?

#22
If you have done 40 interviews, you are clearly qualified for the roles. I think you need to be more selective about what roles you apply to, and spent more time preparing for the interviews. Answer basic questions like why are you applying to that company? What do you gain from that role? People can smell desperation.

I only started job searching seriously in July and I even took 2 weeks off in August. I was also unemployed. I only interviewed for the roles that I clearly felt was what I wanted. I spent weeks preparing for them and only did 2 final interviews. One I got rejected due to hiring freeze, but I got an offer for the second one in mid September.

So my advice is to really ask yourself why do you want to apply for a role. Don’t machine gun it.

Re: Ask HN: How to overcome job search exhaustion?

#23
There's a lot of woo-woo going on in this thread.

You need to find the actual problem. You're making it to the interview, so all these companies feel you're at least minimally qualified for the job. Are you just getting unlucky that all these companies are in a hiring freeze and aren't willing to commit right now? Have you changed up your interviewing, tried anything new? Are you having further post-interview discussions that are turning sour? Money discussions?

I would look at doing a few paid practice interviews online. Their services are designed to provide you honest feedback to help you. There may be something going on that you're not aware of and interviewers don't want to tell you.

Re: Ask HN: How to overcome job search exhaustion?

#24
>Technical lead with over 10 years experience. I often get praises during interviews, but never an offer.

If you have 10 years tech lead experience I assume you are applying for 200k+ base salary positions. The competition for these staff/lead roles is steeper, especially for remote roles during a recession.

Take a couple interviews for less senior positions and knock them outta the park, get your confidence back. Probably won't require too much prep and will be low stress if the job is in your stack.

Getting an offer feels nice - it's validating, especially in a dry spell.

Re: Ask HN: How to overcome job search exhaustion?

#25
I don’t know OP, I’m a tech lead who has done his fair share of interviews and based on your few comments on HN there seem to be some red flags with how you’re viewing the interview process. Saying “one person derails things because I’d outshine them” seems to externalize the blame. I don’t know that I’ve ever worked with any engineer who thinks they’d be worse off by hiring an extremely intelligent engineer. I’d love to be “outshined” as it’d make my life easier to have someone competent writing code with me and teaching me new things. I have a strong suspicion “I’m too smart” isn’t the issue here.

Also, do you honestly think this has been the case at over forty places? That in dozens of separate cases you weren’t the problem, the interviewers were? This seems like an extraordinarily hostile and pessimistic worldview and I’d guess it’d come across in an interview. Eventually you need to do some soul searching into what’s going awry in the interviews. I have a good friend who is a software engineer and is autistic. He speaks about his interviews similarly to what you’ve said. Maybe ask a friend about what they might think is the problem. Be prepared though, because often if you solicit honest feedback from friends you won’t like what they have to say.

Also why are you only applying at places that do leetcode style interviews? There’s plenty of places where that’s not the case, especially if you work outside of tech companies. There’s plenty of great Fortune 500 companies that will expect a 9-5 and are doing good engineering out there. Most of them are hiring remote. Although if you’re expecting FAANG salaries it might be harder to find that type of place.

I wish you the best and hope you get to a better place. Good luck!

Re: Ask HN: How to overcome job search exhaustion?

#26
post #17
post #5

You gotta change something up. Get a certification or learn a new skill if you have the savings to do it. Get a job in another field that hires everyone -- I once took a job as an SAT teacher while I was between jobs because at least it gave me something to do. Volunteer. Especially if you can volunteer at a relevant industry conference, where you can at least mingle with people who might be able to give you a job le…

Last time I had trouble getting a job I just looked at what the most popular language was in my city. Then proceeded to read a book on C# and make a quick and dirty demo project. Had a job within two weeks after looking for months. It was kind of annoying switching to Windows dev but whatever do what you gotta do.

How did you find programming language popularity by city?

Re: Ask HN: How to overcome job search exhaustion?

#28
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I had trouble getting a job I just looked at what the most popular language was in my city. Then proceeded to read a book on C# and make a quick and dirty demo project. Had a job within two weeks after looking for months. It was kind of annoying switching to Windows dev but whatever do what you gotta do.

How did you find programming language popularity by city?

I mean at the time like five years ago I just literally opened LinkedIn, searched for software engineering jobs, and did a tally of the first 200 jobs or so on a piece of paper. About 50 were C# and 50 were Java, and then a mixture of other stuff.

Pretty low tech but it got me a job. I came from a background of doing Elixir and Node.js backend which if someone recognized Elixir seemed to get me brownie points for doing something interesting. I guess whatever site you’re using to look for job listings you could do the same.

Re: Ask HN: How to overcome job search exhaustion?

#29
If you're a former tech lead with 10 years of experience, and struggling to get a job then you're doing something wrong.

Have a friend / former colleague who knows you and the industry. Get them to look at your CV and do a mock interview. Then listen to their advice.

You are probably making a basic mistake like badmouthing former employers / being bad at leetcode / not having good reasons for gaps / unreasonable requirements ...

Increasing resilliance will just make you keep failing. You need to fix the problem that has caused you to fail 40 interviews despite 10 years of experience.

Re: Ask HN: How to overcome job search exhaustion?

#30
post #17
post #5

You gotta change something up. Get a certification or learn a new skill if you have the savings to do it. Get a job in another field that hires everyone -- I once took a job as an SAT teacher while I was between jobs because at least it gave me something to do. Volunteer. Especially if you can volunteer at a relevant industry conference, where you can at least mingle with people who might be able to give you a job le…

Last time I had trouble getting a job I just looked at what the most popular language was in my city. Then proceeded to read a book on C# and make a quick and dirty demo project. Had a job within two weeks after looking for months. It was kind of annoying switching to Windows dev but whatever do what you gotta do.

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