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Ask HN: Laid off folks, are you getting hired?

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Re: Ask HN: Laid off folks, are you getting hired?

#41
post #31
post #20

US, looking for remote. 15+ years experience been looking since early January, and I still don't feel like I have traction. Worst job market for engineers I've seen in a long time. I have hope it'll improve in March when budgets are finalized, but at the same time I'm preparing for it to be a long one. First unemployment in my career, up until now I had employers coming to me.

I suspect the remote aspect is the biggest thing slowing you down. I go in once a month, which is practically a remote job, but those who moved during the pandemic and wouldn't fly in and take a hotel on their expense once a month had to leave There are 1000 different flavors of mixed home-office working right now, but not that much fully remote

I agree. Having a hard remote only rule changes your opportunities. The key is being flexible.

Re: Ask HN: Laid off folks, are you getting hired?

#43
post #25

Weirdly, a senior dev from my company was recruited by another company and will be changing jobs in a couple weeks. And to be clear, he is not a unicorn type. He's a good senior developer in a common language. It's hard for me to understand recruiters "fishing in the neighbor's pond" while there are plenty of unemployed, qualified senior devs out there right now.

I don't agree, but I imagine the mindset is "why would I hire someone who didn't make the cut and got laid off when I could poach somebody else that did make the cut at their company."

Re: Ask HN: Laid off folks, are you getting hired?

#44
Laid off Jan 18th from Microsoft, not really the unicorn type I would say but well above average in my field (imo)

Applied to a couple positions ~5-6 and got a couple automated rejections, no interviews or initial calls through this process. I think not having a degree makes it difficult to get past the initial screening

About 2-3 recruiter messages per day on linkedin. I responded to around 10 or so, of which 7 I had initial interviews with the company after my resume was passed up. Had 2 rejections and 3 offers, only 1 of which was under my current salary. I interviewed for mostly 100% remote, I think only 1 company of the ones I was looking at required 2-3 days in office

Re: Ask HN: Laid off folks, are you getting hired?

#45

I was a senior dev at a big tech and got laid off in November. I have applied to hundreds of places. Not a lot of responses. I have been doing interview preps the whole time. It has been very demoralizing and I am thinking of switching careers to something else. I have been considering skilled trades. I like carpentry in particular.

Every programmer eventually becomes a woodworker, whether they like it or not.

Re: Ask HN: Laid off folks, are you getting hired?

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are you looking? How many years experience do you have? What types of positions are you looking for?

Remote US, 9 years experience, backend IC.

Best of luck I hope you find a new opportunity soon.

Re: Ask HN: Laid off folks, are you getting hired?

#48

I was a senior dev at a big tech and got laid off in November. I have applied to hundreds of places. Not a lot of responses. I have been doing interview preps the whole time. It has been very demoralizing and I am thinking of switching careers to something else. I have been considering skilled trades. I like carpentry in particular.

I've been slowly remodeling my tiny condo. Drywall, plumbing, simple electrical, windows, painting, flooring, etc. Teaching myself most of the stuff just off YouTube. It is a lot of manual labor work which is exhausting and gives me a lot of respect for the trade crafts, but I'm enjoying it quite a bit and slowly accumulating all the tools as well. None of this is rocket science.

In the back of my mind, I think of flipping houses as something to do if I ever get laid off from my tech job. I look at places coming up for sale on Zillow that were obvious flips and they all look like the parts all came straight out of Ikea / HomeDepot (and usually the most ugly stuff to choose from).

Re: Ask HN: Laid off folks, are you getting hired?

#49

Remember that there are many reasons why someone would not get hired despite having top work experience. I have seen people out of FAANGs with 10+ years of experience sharing their CV after being laid off and some will struggle to get any interview, let alone get a good job, just because the format of said CV was absolutely awful. If you aren't getting interviews, it's your CV that is the problem.

Can you give some examples of bad format?

Re: Ask HN: Laid off folks, are you getting hired?

#50
I was laid off in November. I've applied to dozens, probably hundreds of jobs. I've had two interviews (one bigtechco) and a YC startup. Both did not work out as they went with more senior candidates. I decided to take a different approach and tailor my resume to each job and narrow the types of jobs I applied too. This has led to an increase in recruiter calls and I'm setting up interviews now.

However it does seem there is still a lot of flux, especially with larger companies who are still trying to allocate headcount. I've had calls with Google that were basically like: "we're interested, but we don't know HC yet, let's circle back in 3 weeks".

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