I've had a flurry of recruiter's contact me lately. A lot more than I usually get. So there is another anecdote for you all.
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Tell HN: Employers are not desperate to hire developers
151–160 of 385 posts
Re: Tell HN: Employers are not desperate to hire developers
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not in the US; if I had to send out 200 or even 100 applications I would change career. If I had to send 50 I would be starting to investigate other careers.
I've been a developer in the US and held... oh... 8 or 9 tech jobs since about the year 2000. I don't think I've ever sent more than 10 applications in a job search. My average is probably 3-4. I'm entirely unremarkable and also didn't have a degree for the first IIRC 4 jobs (I floundered and bailed on a non-tech Bachelor's the first time, then several years later got a CS degree from an unremarkable—but at least not…
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Re: Tell HN: Employers are not desperate to hire developers
#153Contrasting with even just a year ago, the job market is in a lackluster state the way I see it. Don't be gaslit by all the people insisting that it's still a gold rush. It's not that there aren't jobs out there, but many companies right now are either laying off employees, under hiring freezes, or simply aren't that serious about hiring besides through nepotism. Since I got started as a software developer full time…
> To add to your point about resumes, people need to not underestimate the power of networking. Networking has been the key factor to my advancement for the last 3 jobs. It's just the way things are. It's hard to overstate the importance of this. Without networking, your chances of landing the kind of job you _really_ want are vanishingly close to zero. Every single one of my civilian jobs has come about either throu…
To add to your point about meetups, I don't think there's been a better time to start an IRL tech meetup in a long time. The local tech scene in the SoCal area has definitely not been the same since the pandemic, and I recall a few threads on HN with remarks about how local tech meetups didn't come back. If someone can't find a meetup in their area, they might as well start one and have a good chance of getting networking value out of it.
Re: Tell HN: Employers are not desperate to hire developers
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, they are real jobs. But you have to make sure that it is from primary vendors. Often times, many secondary vendors source for the same job listed by primary vendor. One way to cut down secondary vendors, ask for decent rates. If someone asks you to work for $60 per hr, just say NO. Even primary vendors have outsourced their recruiting to India.
$60 per hour isn't a decent rate?
Do the math.
If you can bill 40 hours/week for 50 weeks per year, that's about 2K hours so $120K/year. But you can't. You'll probably do well to bill half that because contracts probably don't fill basically the entire year neatly like that. You probably also want to budget time anyway for vacations/illness/etc., selling, billing, learning, and all the other off-the-clock things you need to do.
So now you're closer to $60K per year and that's with self-employment tax and no benefits including health (unless you're on a partner's plan).
So at $60/hr, even with a fairly full calendar, you're pretty much scraping by in the US.
Re: Tell HN: Employers are not desperate to hire developers
#155I work at Apple and my team has been “hiring” for the last 2 years with no offers so far. Why? Because even if you are a good candidate, hiring is not as easy as people think. Among the many challengues we have I can list the following: 1. The people interested in your profile have minimal influence in the process, 2. There are people who are always chasing for the shiny new object (or person, in this case), 3. There…
This team is not hiring, or at least not taking it seriously. The bar is not high, it's just petty. The only explanation is that you literally need something that only a handful of people can do, in which case you wouldn't be talking to that many people.
Re: Tell HN: Employers are not desperate to hire developers
#156Go for quality vs quantity - which means personalized approaches and use of your network/recruiters. A cold application through an online portal has a very low probability of success but if you go through a recruiter, previous colleague, or just a friend of a friend your chances are much better (and you might get some inside info like are they really hiring or is that open senior position just for appearances/unicorn…
Came here to say this. Rather than a metric of "how many total jobs have I applied to", a perhaps more effective metric would be "how many high quality applications have I put in, how many opportunities have I been exposed to via referral, how many friends do I have looking on my behalf/providing introductions to hiring managers who are actively hiring". Blindly applying to listings you find online with no "in", is g…
OP here. Great advice for people with a big network, though of course if a company is waiting for a strong referral before hiring, they're not really that desperate, which was my thesis.
Re: Tell HN: Employers are not desperate to hire developers
#157I'm not so cynical as to suggest the industry is putting out fake posts like this in order to make it easier on themselves, but I'm not so trustful as to put it past them.
I can only speak for parts of western Europe like the U.K., and it's fine here? I've not had to go looking for work for about 15 years, and I've moved a bunch.
Re: Tell HN: Employers are not desperate to hire developers
#158It's end of the year, hiring managers may be taking weeks off. Businesses are likely in a unannounced hiring freeze without announcing it. This happened all the time in the corporate world with open jobs but an unspoken hiring freeze. Next year's budgets have not been finalized. Hiring someone now means you might have to pay them a bonus come Q1. A lot of different factors. Since you are in the US, I would try to reach out to some recruiters and get feedback. Hopefully one responds with something instead of nothing like the ones you have already contacted. Try to schedule a lunch of coffee with a few. Those metrics are tracked so they have to schedule them at the places I know.
Re: Tell HN: Employers are not desperate to hire developers
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of companies say "we're hiring" but are not hiring , defined as actually extending an offer and actually employing someone. They're fishing, but not catching, or they're catching and releasing. We need a more precise word than "hiring". Everyone can say they're hiring, but they're not actually hiring anyone--they're just fishing.
> We need a more precise word than "hiring". I think it's precise. Two terms: * Hiring -- When you are actually ready to make offers to hire people. * Pretending -- When you are trying to keep the hiring funnel full, or to give the appearance of business doing well, but not ready to actually make offers.
Another way I have heard this is described is, "we're always hiring, and never hiring"
Re: Tell HN: Employers are not desperate to hire developers
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