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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)

#251
post #244

I just got blindsided two weeks back from the best job I've ever had. Not looking forward to the search (taking December off to get married) as I have extreme anxiety when it comes to live coding, and I cannot figure out why. Even basic SQL queries escape me when somebody is watching. I've always been fantastic at test taking so take home assignments or leetcode type tests I can do, and hell, even putting together a…

I feel you on the live coding. As for the physics/math data engineer, hit me up at rferguson at astros.com if you'd like, we're always looking for solid cross discipline folks

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

#252
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask what industry and your seniority (And maybe whether you’re doing 80h weeks?) Been considering a move, trying to calibrate myself on what I’m actually worth.

It’s a data warehousing company and I’m an se2. Sorry but would prefer not to say anything else. I will say that I got this job at the height of the market froth and am not sure if they’re still offering this salary although we are hiring I used levels.fyi to find comparable salaries and my friends in tech said it’s pretty accurate

Cool, thanks for what you’re able to divulge. Every data point helps me figure out what should work for me.

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

#253
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always had an extremely tenous grasp on consistently being employed, and know getting fired is just around the corner. Therefore, saving about 6-12 months of expenses is first step, then I'm allowed to start spending more than $100/m or whatever here and there on stuff. I usually end up needing that savings because getting a new job can easily take that long, and so by the beginning of age 30 this year I was bac…

Are you choosing the right environments to work in? What do you find is the reason for instability in employment?

Variety of reasons, burnout, management style changing or expectations changing in a way that I can't keep up, I guess those are the usual ones and they're closely related. Most companies also just arbitrarily pick 2 week agile sprints with daily stand-ups, often increasing the amount of meetings as time goes on, and this is usually where things start going downward for me. There also tends to be a decrease in autonomy to get my work done over time, which helps me feel like shit on a daily basis, and so it starts a negative spiral.

In one case I was doing reasonably well with my software dev tasks for a while, but then they assigned me to periodic customer support, and I said up front that's not something I'll be good at. At the same time, my manager tried to increase the oversight of my work, because I was getting slower at it. So I'd wake up every waiting for my manager to "check-in" on me like a child, eventually getting to the point where I couldn't bring myself to get anything done and just resented my existence.

I'm in an ok spot now, for now, but who's to say how it'll be by January. All I want is a place I can do good work for, for a reasonable salary, but it's been very difficult to find.

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

#254
I've been at this for almost 40 years, and it's shocking to me how little urgency there is to hiring over the last 5-10 years. I have a sinecure but still interview from time to time. Compared to (say) 1990, it's intensely time-consuming and unproductive.

In principle, I'm likely someone that hiring managers are looking for, and really a pretty good deal. In practice, I'll probably just retire rather than throw my hat into the ring again. Or--since I have a vindictive sense of humor--maybe I'll spend my retirement doing "fake" interviews with prospective employers.

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

#255

> but likely this next week I'll start studying and getting ready. Studying?? For a job interview? Do you seriously need to do whiteboard algorithm reverse a linked list kinda coding as a senior in the US? Or what is it that you need to study before an interview?

Not the OP, but my experience when I had interviews and worked on improvement wasn't that much on technical side as it was on "soft skills" that had a bigger impact on the interview outcome than I was previously willing to admit. But even if the study is technical, that's OK. There are a lot of pieces that rarely occur outside academia and hiring interviews, and after years you'd want to fresh things up, even if it's just to improve recall and answer times during the interview, if nothing else.

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

#256
post #20

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 did something similar. It worked out for me because I live in the midwest US, with a lifestyle that's not actively frugal but is definitely below the average cost of living, but I was working remotely for west coast salaries. That made it really easy to save up money.

I'm nearing the end of it now, and I've spent about $6000 over three months on things I'd categorize as normal living expenses (I took a couple of trips that added a few thousand to that). I'm not so well off that I can call this a trivial amount of money, but it wasn't the hardest decision ever, and I could make it work for much longer if I had to.

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

#257
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 How do you expect the HR folks to validate (or even to have read what you wrote) these claims? A lot of people put the things you’re putting on their resumes. They’re also getting resumes when from Meta, Amazon, Stripe, … engineers. Is it really surprisi…

HR don't validate resumes before you get a call back; that would be super-inefficient. As a hiring manager of course experience at the big co's catches my eye, but unless you're hiring there as well (and most of us are not) I actually figure I can't get them interested anyway, so don't pursue these people. Someone who claims deep technical or experience or people management though? I'm totally going to jump at the ch…

> I actually figure I can't get them interested anyway, so don't pursue these people.

This seems self-fulfilling? People who have applied to your company are saying they are interested in working there. The lack of response is the reason they lose interest.

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

#258
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did you do during these 3 months?

What do you mean? I had a job the entire time, and I interviewed at MSFT and NFLX in the meantime. Otherwise i would just periodically check in with my G recruiter trying to balance some urgency with politeness. I didn’t get an offer from NFLX but they came across extremely well, i’m very bullish on the company solely based on the culture and talent I met. The MSFT experience was the exact opposite!

>I didn’t get an offer from NFLX but they came across extremely well, i’m very bullish on the company solely based on the culture and talent I met. The MSFT experience was the exact opposite!

Maybe the complacency combined with the large organization side?

It feels like MSFT would be 'safer' if less exciting.

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

#259

Let me show you the backdoor: Find a company whose open source projects you are interested in. Dive in and and start fixing things. Then if you really like it after a couple weeks start nudging around for a job. If you do good work they'll just give it to you, no bullshit funnel required. I like this method because you aren't just doing l33t coding exercises to work on some sight unseen codebase that makes you suicid…

Please don’t do this. We don’t need workers to do our work for free. It will make it harder for the rest of us to find jobs (or even getting paid for our current one). If you want to contribute to open source, do so with the mind that you are helping a shared community (or maybe just for fun). Don’t do it because you think it will help you get a job (I’m not even sure parent is correct that it will).

>Don’t do it because you think it will help you get a job (I’m not even sure parent is correct that it will).

As a hiring manager, the open source projects and blogs people sell on their CVs is impressive if it looks like self-motivated interest, and annoying if it looks thinly self-promotive. The two inherently intersect but when it skews to the extreme of self-selling it isn't taken as seriously from what I observe.

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

#260
post #65

Looking to quit w/o anything lined up. Rejected a few offers before the shit hit the fan. Starting to hate the field and need some time to think.

Wait til right before the summer, not only will the picture economically be more clear, but there's a summer to enjoy. Right now is a slower holiday season where you'd expect a more relaxed work experience, and a bad time to travel or enjoy life.

That assumes you're in the northern hemisphere!

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