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Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

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Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

#401

Post by the_absurdist »

tarokun-io wrote: post #257

Interviewed with about 28 companies for almost 3 months, without a single offer! I was starting to get really worried about money and burned out from interviewing. In the past I've never interviewed with more than 2 or 3 before getting an offer I now this is incredibly privileged. I'm not humble-bragging, just observing the change in the market. As things usually turn out, during the last week of the 3-month search I…

What are your skills and what kind of roles have you been applying to?

Your experience has been quite different from mine. Laid off 3 weeks ago, 4 offers at slightly below what I was previously making. I'm a fullstack engineer.

Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

#402

Post by pm90 »

jesse__ wrote: post #390

I've been half-heartedly looking for a new job since Jan 2022, at which time I left my last employer by choice. I've interviewed with ~20 companies this year, usually with folks that reach out to me from the 'Who Wants to be Hired' thread. I've received three pretty decent offers (200-250k base + equity) all at small, early-stage companies. From what I've observed this year, companies that are doing difficult or low-…

> From what I've observed this year, companies that are doing difficult or low-level work are still as starved as ever for senior/staff/architect-level folks that can deliver, and are happily willing to hire them. Probably irrespective of company size, but I pretty much exclusively look for teams of ~5-20 people.

How do you find these companies? I'm trying to find such roles since this is kinda where I excel at, but most of the roles I seem to get interviews for are pretty generic backend roles.

Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

#403

Post by mixmastamyk »

ghiculescu wrote: post #385
FlyingSnake wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not in the USA so I'm not sure how the W2s and SSNs are tied to job/healthcare/401k etc, but how does this double timing work? Won't the Tax office/Finanzamt (IRS) know about this?

It’s not illegal to have two jobs.

Why do so many people think this? Conditioning via plutocracy?

Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

#404

Post by dataexporter »

swyx wrote: post #150
a-bit-of-code wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For that kind of seniority/experience, what fraction of companies asked LeetCodey stuff? Was it easy or medium/hard problems? How much time did you have to spend preparing/practicing?

just chiming in for others that i've had a job specifically waive a coding test because they saw me livecode in front of 2000 people and my fave amazon interview story was a guy that walked in with his laptop open to my blog saying "this is just a formality i've read your work" lol TLDR why leetcode in private when you can work in public* (*yes yes, not everyone can work in public, but i bet a fair amount of you can…

So your suggestion is to just become a content developer and start marketing yourself online? Getting your work in front of others and getting the amount of reach that you have is also a lot of luck. Not everyone can get the same amount of reach as you have - I've seen hundreds of developers shouting out into the void without any recognition.

Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

#405

Post by ghaff »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #376
ryandrake wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need your professor to coach interview candidates. On the "interviewer" side of the table, I can't tell you the number of times I've asked a question that should produce a quick, simple answer, and instead got a 5-10 minute stream-of-consciousness word salad out of the candidate. Or a huge run-on sentence this-and-that-and-this-and-also-that-oh-and-this... without coming up for air. It's so common, I must assume t…

I suspect many interviewers reward using a question as an opportunity to showcase knowledge though, even if it means rewarding that kind of expansive verbosity. I suspect the this and also that you allude to is the candidate not wanting to be called out for failing to mention a corner case or tradeoff. Of course, conversations are rarely legalistically constrained to answering only the precise letter of a question as…

I'll add that, as an interviewer (whether of candidates or doing qualitative research), a pattern of very clipped responses to questions about experiences of various sorts soon makes me feel that I, as an interviewer, have suddenly become responsible for filling airtime. It should be a conversation even if that can involve sometimes going off on tangents.

Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

#406

Post by eat »

alexfromapex wrote: post #382
notfromhere wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not fraud. If you are performing to expectation, no one is being defrauded. Anti-moonlighting clauses are nonsense.

If the expectation is that you're not moonlighting so you sign a contract saying that you're not but you actually are, it's fraud full stop.

You seem very confident of this, so I'm going to assume you're either a lawyer, or have knowledge of some sort of legal precedent here, right?

Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

#407

Post by eptcyka »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #282
westmeal wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've got to be kidding... that's literally what references are for. Insane.

We don't teach pass by reference these days. Anyone you find in the real world under ~30 years old may not even be aware that you can pass a reference and modify it directly without having to make a method return a value. It's super cool to have someone explain to you side effects yet you show them a method with a null return and run it for them showing that the value has changed and they are mesmerized.

What are you on about? Java, Python, Ruby, C#, JavaScript, most languages used to day have reference semantics for objects.

Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

#408

Post by icedchai »

pizza234 wrote: post #344
icedchai wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe this. Almost all mainstream languages use pass-by-reference by default. Java, python, javascript all pass objects by reference.

Passing a reference is semantically different from passing by reference (the latter being a functionality of the language); doing the former (behind the scenes) doesn't imply that the language supports the latter (if one wants to be rigorous, not even C supports pass by reference). The canonical example is a function that swaps the variables passed to a function: a, b = 10, 20 swap_fn(&a, &b) a == 20 # true Since the…

I understand it is semantically different, but the interviewer should not be surprised you can change a variable in a function without returning it, which is the context of this thread. It's syntactic sugar for pointers.

Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

#409

Post by nsxwolf »

fxtentacle wrote: post #371
nsxwolf wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty hard for a software engineer to get bankrupted by the US healthcare system. As long as you maintain your insurance coverage, your biggest worry is the annual "out of pocket maximum", which is the most you can pay in a year, and is usually very low end of 5 digits. There are gotchas with this with uncovered services (i.e., rescue helicopters) but in general, this whole bankruptcy concept is overblown, espe…

"maintain your insurance coverage" sounds like a pretty difficult thing to do for a hypothetical software engineer who just got fired because of burnout.

In this industry severance is common, which often includes some amount of continuation of coverage. You are then usually eligible for COBRA, a law that lets you continue your current policy for 18 months self-funded (often expensive). You have 60 days to elect COBRA, so if you find another job or gain other coverage before needing care you can sometimes avoid paying for it.

You can get your own coverage on the Affordable Care Act exchanges. It's not necessarily a great deal, but again, it's about keeping that out of pocket limit as a safety net.

In all likelihood the burned out hypothetical software engineer is going to recover and find work with employer funded healthcare coverage again.

Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

#410

Post by tootie »

1-6 wrote: post #146
matwood wrote: post #32

Layoffs make news, but if you look at the numbers they are relatively small compared to all the hiring the last few years. We have gone from the best time ever in history to be in IT, to a great time to be in IT. There are a lot of jobs if you step outside big tech (and targeted jobs in big tech with certain skills).

Depending on how you view things, layoffs are only starting. Companies are taking a wait and see approach before taking everything off the table. Some are predicting 2023Q1 to be when it peaks.

ProTip: Absolutely nobody knows. There are indicators this way and that. The predominant point of view I see in the sensible press it that a global recession centered around China is likely for 2023, but the US will likely be more insulated than most. Things could much worse, but it's now considered unlikely with a soft landing looking pretty plausible. But really the data are increasingly hard to predict and looking ahead more than a month or two at a time is mostly guesswork.
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