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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?

#261
post #38

We're hiring at our company. We've had a lot of people come through from the recent waves of layoffs, and usually so far there has been a mix of too high expectations, remote work mismatches as well as just lots of people not making the bar (we are a small company). Still on the lookout for senior rust engineers who want to work at a company that's remote-first with a minimal-meetings culture. You can message me on t…

This is the impression that I'm getting from a lot of these posts and what I've heard and experienced on my job hunt. I'm seeing plenty of "I was laid off from Meta/Google..." etc posts and can't help but wonder what the comp was. Maybe the big names on resumes look like high price tags these days?

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

#262

Senior SWE, 20+ years of experience, based in the bay area, laid off from Meta in November. I reached out to my network and had a couple applications in same-day. One of those panned out and I just started this week. I also did a bunch of cold job applications, but didn't get a callback from any of them. The whole process led to a ton of anxiety and was really nerve-wracking, especially reading about layoffs from oth…

Man, there's definitely something broken with the cold application process. I'd estimate my success rate of getting an interview from a cold application is something like 1-5%. I almost always resort to referrals or getting lucky networking with recruiters.

A lot of companies are on a hiring freeze but have not taken down their job listings because of the image connotations.

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

#263

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.

As software developers, everything we build will be obsolete, discarded or dead in 5-10 years. We are craftsmen of the ephemeral.

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

#264
Sr. Software Dev with some hardware background. Laid off in early December. Started looking about a month ago. One phone interview so far with a startup that seemed a bit sketchy (didn't know where the funding was coming from) and in a very inconvenient timezone (I'd likely have to wake up at 3AM for meetings).

Many recruiter pings/week, but mostly not great fits (they glom onto a keyword that doesn't mean what they think it does) and often it's easy to tell that several emails from different recruiters are for the same exact job. Hardware verification and FPGA seems to be in great demand, but it's been too many years since I worked in that space so I don't feel like my experience would still be relevant for those.

Talked to a recruiter today who said things are starting to slow down on his end - not getting as many jobs to recruit for. This is to be expected, I think.

So far it's pretty easy to make my 5 contacts/week as required by the unemployment dept.

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

#265
post #216
post #93

I just got back into the market after taking a hiatus to write a novel (finished it, deleted it afterward cus I'm not proud of it) and work on my music,(more success but I'm not good enough to think I can make a career out of it). There's a definite hiring slowdown due to current market circumstances and the fact that "Senior" really doesn't mean what it used to, so there's a lot more competition for those roles now.…

> There's a definite hiring slowdown due to current market circumstances and the fact that "Senior" really doesn't mean what it used to, so there's a lot more competition for those roles now. What do you mean by "Senior" changing meaning?

Meaning title inflation. Senior used to mean 5-8 years of experience. Principal or Staff 10-20.

So now a lot of people that have experience sort into the bucket of Senior.

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

#267

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.

Wood does not suddenly change its weight by 10000% in the middle of a project.

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

#268
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.

If the neighbor is your competitor, it makes a lot of sense to fish in their pond.

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

#269
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lookout for senior rust engineers Interesting how companies have trouble hiring for hyper specific tech that they might abandon in a few years. Then what happens to these "rust engineers", do they get laidoff for the next hiring of "X engineers".

any reasonably good eng culture recognizes that the language is often the least important aspect of engineering a solution. A rust engineer that knows why the borrow checker exists and can safely do unsafe operations likely will do fine in C,C++, Go, Java and many others.

That was before. Now they can pay attention to even the least important things.

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

#270

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.

As software developers, everything we build will be obsolete, discarded or dead in 5-10 years. We are craftsmen of the ephemeral.

Ah, I miss the view of someone that has never worked outside of startups or technology sectors.
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