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Ask HN: How's the job hunt going? (For those laid off)

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Re: Ask HN: How's the job hunt going? (For those laid off)

#61

Post by throwaway20382 »

I have 15 years experience, run large production sites, our company sold for near a billion dollars to a foreign company recently, and they are doing layoffs based on "order by salary desc" . My days are numbered. I do SRE mainly, but I code all day and run teams.

Company 1: Terrible over-engineered music firm (no users). Full 7 rounds, exams (which were easy shit), but "VP" ghosted me, he was a former twitter guy, seems like he wants to hire a twitter guy.

Company 2: Credit card company. Full 5 rounds. Four hours of exams. The recruiter feedback from team was "too much of a people manager", then ghosted. Someone lied and said I was non technical - yet i passed the technical exams. I used the term "we" too much explaining projects.

Company 3 (automatic): Finished the exam in LUA for a openresty opensource project (didn't even know lua). Everything worked nicely. I was told he didn't like how i laid out the lua.

Company 4: "Not enough of a people manager."

Company 5,6,7,...: Recuriters make me do calls and exams then ghosted. I don't think they have jobs - just recruiting cause that is what they do.

Exams:

1) using openrusty to create a application load balancer in lua

2) using python to create a url shortener

3) using php, complex input file, then output file (sorting, hasing, parsing)

4) using ruby, connect to an oracle db then do complex queries (outer joins etc). Just for hazing sake, they named the tables keywords eg: "join".

I will say the take home tests at these companies are fun. I have a family and I am very nervous.

Re: Ask HN: How's the job hunt going? (For those laid off)

#62

Post by revskill »

greenpeas wrote: post #55
revskill wrote: post #4

No longer hunt for work. Instead will spend 1 year to build product for my own customers. Again, software engineering is such a great career, when you can create valuable things for others in case of crisis.

This is intriguing. Can you provide more details? Did you have customers prior to deciding to "no longer hunt for work"? Or do you plan to find customers/build a new product?

I actually have enough credits from "potential customers", who always ask me to build products for them. One of main reason is, i told them, cloud products are shit (due to pricing, customization, and quality of codebase they made), but got no time to actually focus on building the product. So this is the time i want to settle down and make the progress for them.

One example, they have no idea on how to build fast, secure and cheap websites!

Re: Ask HN: How's the job hunt going? (For those laid off)

#63

Post by nathanaldensr »

bigcloud1299 wrote: post #26
abadger9 wrote: post #7

I'm not laid off but actively looking to change after spending a couple of years at my current employer. Despite being a staff engineer, managing 12 engineers, and having a solid revenue stream tied to my current team - I've mostly gotten rejections without interviews, 1-2 low ball offers, or radio silence. I cannot imagine how hard this must be for those laid-off, hopefully this storm passes soon. EDIT: you cannot m…

I am looking for a senior manager at a top 5 retailer. We are not as shiny as big tech but pay well with great work life balance. Job security etc. let me know if anyone want to connect. I have 5 positions open for senior dev to lead dev. We are .net and Java shop. But all cloud based.

I'd love to know more, but you have nothing in your HN profile.

Re: Ask HN: How's the job hunt going? (For those laid off)

#64

Post by granshaw »

oceanplexian wrote: post #40
throw1234651234 wrote: post #25

For those who did get laid off from F(/M)AANG, are you considering "lower" end positions or looking for comparable total comp at comparably sized, tech-focused companies? Just curious, as a flyover midwesterner, it seems like no one here is affected, nor are we getting any interviewees from FAANG into the pipeline suddenly.

There are a lot of FAANG-adjacent companies that offer competitive comp, Stripe, AirBNB, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. I left Amazon a year ago to work for one, most of my peers are AWS or Google engineers and the quality of life is much better. I interviewed at smaller companies but the main problem was they were out of touch with TC and unwilling to offer equity, and at least one place was kind of rude about it when I…

We will see, but I think there’s a real chance the former FAANG “market rate” due to their high flying RSUs might be gone for good for Engineering ICs, unless you’re well known in your area

Re: Ask HN: How's the job hunt going? (For those laid off)

#66

Post by est31 »

ummonk wrote: post #50
est31 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah there is a lot of space between "has savings for 8-12 months" and "is independently wealthy, i.e. can live off interest of their own savings". Former is extremely easy to achieve if you can save significant portions of your salary. If you can save 30%, you can achieve it after 3 years. Latter takes a bit longer.

Less than 3 years, since your expenses are only 70% of your salary.

Good point, I've just calculated it and you'll need 2 years and 4 months to save one year's expenses that make up 70% of your salary, at a saving rate of 30%.

Re: Ask HN: How's the job hunt going? (For those laid off)

#68

Post by VirusNewbie »

chihuahua wrote: post #17

I keep getting the same amount of emails from recruiters as before, mostly startups. Found a new job (non-startup) by responding to one of those. Signed the offer and was going to quit FB on a certain date, then got the FB layoff severance package a week before that date as a nice bonus. I also interviewed at Google and got the thumbs up to proceed to team matching, but no team matches after a month. This makes me be…

Took me three months for team match. I had five team match interviews and three selected me, two lost headcount.

Re: Ask HN: How's the job hunt going? (For those laid off)

#69

Post by HDThoreaun »

300bps wrote: post #20
that_guy_iain wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've not been laid off either. I'm currently taking a break from jobs. I'm starting to think that it's time to go back to full-time employment. But I'm looking at the job market and think it might be better to give it 4-6 months. Let all the companies that are going to do layoffs have their layoffs and then join a company still looking for new devs in a few months.

>But I'm looking at the job market and think it might be better to give it 4-6 months. I'm fascinated by this. How does one do this? Two options I can think of are being independently wealthy and being dependent on another. Are there other ways to accomplish being so comfortable with, "eh, gonna be unemployed another 4-6 months and see what happens"?

I make 180k and spend around 35k a year. Easy to save money when only providing for yourself and living with roommates. I live in a major American city and don’t feel like I’m penny pinching at all, but I’m not really into “classic” money spending activities like drinking and shopping. Saved well over 3 years of expenses this year alone.

Re: Ask HN: How's the job hunt going? (For those laid off)

#70

Post by throwaway20382 »

jlarocco wrote: post #60
krn wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are there other ways to accomplish being so comfortable with, "eh, gonna be unemployed another 4-6 months and see what happens"? It's not that hard to accomplish for those who can be(come) location independent. For instance[1]: > You would need around 2,582.16$ in Budapest to maintain the same standard of life that you can have with 8,700.00$ in San Francisco, CA (assuming you rent in both cities). [1] https://www.…

Budapest is a strange choice for comparison. Just about anywhere in the United States will be a lot cheaper than SF, too, without the huge inconvenience of moving internationally.

Well yeah. And it isn't America, they will arrest you and throw you out of the country after a year.
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