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Ask HN: Is the job market brutal? or is it just me?

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191–200 of 274 posts

Re: Ask HN: Is the job market brutal? or is it just me?

#191
post #94

Here in Europe I have noticed that the task of auditing software for safety/privacy compliancy is going to lawyers, chartered accountants, and business consultants. Is it because they are cheaper? Not really, in most of Western Europe these people make the same or more than software developers. We tech people need to be more assertive and protective of our cake. Why does the EverybodyShouldLearnToCode™ movement even…

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Re: Ask HN: Is the job market brutal? or is it just me?

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An hour? Why would a phone screen be an hour. I don't want a hiring manager to ask tech questions and I don't want to talk to one for a whole hour.

Are you thinking of a recruiter screen? I absolutely want to talk to the hiring manager for an hour, or more. This person will be my new boss, the more I know about them the better.

What do you talk about?

Re: Ask HN: Is the job market brutal? or is it just me?

#193

I believe that the market is correcting and that salaries will be going down.

On the contrary… I’m not seeing any evidence of this. If anything, salaries are going up.

As an employer, we have better candidates with more experience at the same salary.

Re: Ask HN: Is the job market brutal? or is it just me?

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you thinking of a recruiter screen? I absolutely want to talk to the hiring manager for an hour, or more. This person will be my new boss, the more I know about them the better.

What do you talk about?

With the hiring manager? How they manage their team, how many people they manage, what does the team make-up look like, what does the day to day look like, how do they measure success, what are the traits they want someone in this position to have, is it easy to get time off, what challenges is the team facing, what are the opportunities for advancement, what's the worst thing about working there, or anything else that will help me understand both them and the team I'm coming in to. Also of course addressing any questions they have about me, since this is the person who will decide if they are offering me the job, and if they do and I accept, the person who will decide what I work on, have the most influence on raises, promotions etc.

Some of this is stuff that the actual engineers will give you a more accurate picture (ex what's the day to day like), but even for those things asking both the engineers and the manager and comparing them can give you an idea of how in touch the manager is with the realities of the team.

Re: Ask HN: Is the job market brutal? or is it just me?

#195

If people added their location it would be a lot more useful.

Location is irrelevant to most, if not all, forms of knowledge work. The pandemic pushed remote work style and it's unlikely to put that genie back in the bottle. Butt-in-seat mentality is for dinosaurs.

Most companies are dinosaurs, you are delusional to think otherwise.

Re: Ask HN: Is the job market brutal? or is it just me?

#196

If people added their location it would be a lot more useful.

Location is irrelevant to most, if not all, forms of knowledge work. The pandemic pushed remote work style and it's unlikely to put that genie back in the bottle. Butt-in-seat mentality is for dinosaurs.

While I agree that location shouldn't be relevant, the fact is that many companies will absolutely use (and probably already are using) this period of time as leverage to push for hybrid/full on-site roles instead of remote. The few remote roles advertised get quickly flooded with applications.

Re: Ask HN: Is the job market brutal? or is it just me?

#197
post #6

Not just you. I would guess, optimistically, I’m averaging a 5% conversion rate of applications to recruiter chats/“stage 0 interviews”. That is, ~95% of applications yield silence or a generic email rejection without any human contact. ~15 YOE, FAANG experience, usually only applying to roles I feel I’m at least a halfway good fit for (i.e. not a complete scattergun approach). I’m (financially) fine for now, which i…

If it's brutal for a person with 15+ years of experience, I don't even want to imagine what it's like joining the job market with 0 years of experience now.

Re: Ask HN: Is the job market brutal? or is it just me?

#198
post #89

Hiring manager here with open REQs. I've been doing multiple phone screens daily, and it's been brutal on my end, too. I structure the hour-long phone screen to be 1/3 coding, 1/3 behavioural questions, and 1/3 career growth and questions for me. We rarely get out of the coding question block. It's a fairly simple question that ChatGPT solves easily. The tightest solution is about 10 lines of code. It can be answered…

ChatGPT is passing quantum physics tests. "ChatGPT can answer it" should not be a thing that we say. ChatGPT can recite every single algorithm known to man, wondering about your interview process.

ChatGPT can regurgitate existing answers, it is very bad at programming when met with novel questions. See how far it can go in AdventOfCode.

Re: Ask HN: Is the job market brutal? or is it just me?

#199
post #89

Hiring manager here with open REQs. I've been doing multiple phone screens daily, and it's been brutal on my end, too. I structure the hour-long phone screen to be 1/3 coding, 1/3 behavioural questions, and 1/3 career growth and questions for me. We rarely get out of the coding question block. It's a fairly simple question that ChatGPT solves easily. The tightest solution is about 10 lines of code. It can be answered…

> We rarely get out of the coding question block. It's a fairly simple question that ChatGPT solves easily. well I guess now we know why its all so brutal. We are being compared to a state of the art AI. Also we gotta have a compiler installed on our heads. That aside, if you are a hiring manager, ask yourself what your company really needs. Because this format of interview is so outdated, its insane.

I mean, I sure hope any junior intern developer is better than ChatGPT at writing actually working code. Converting from one language to another of a solution that exists in its knowledge base is not how one should program.

Re: Ask HN: Is the job market brutal? or is it just me?

#200
CTO here... great thread! Things are definitely taking longer even if the company really wants to and need to hire! But I agree with some of the comments below that for some positions you get a lot of inbounds thus hard to have enough time to review it all so screening for most relevant skillsets first and go from there. I'm certain 25% of the applicants can do the work but you'd want someone that has work on the tech stack already versus someone that hasn't. I have confidence they (or anyone) can learn it.

As for compensation differences, the total comp went crazy upwards the last 3 years thanks to the billions of dollars going into a few company that decides to pay 30-50% above market and everyone else need to keep up.

The downside is that the cost structure for many companies ended up to be too high to ever have a profitable company. It'd be great to get back to the early 2010s... where cash burn is the right level and equity is the upside versus startups are paying cash more than some very profitable companies.

We are actively looking and I read all my DMs on LinkedIn so please take a look here. https://boards.greenhouse.io/getbuilt if your actually have the tech experience we're looking for, send me a DM and I'll make sure you get a phone screen! But please look at the Guiding Principals as well to make sure your values align with it. Everyone company is different make sure it's a great fit from both sides.

Another thing that I do screen people out is too many short stints at companies. Unless your startup when under or some personal emergencies, I look for people that stay at least 3 years at a given company before switching. It takes at least 1 years to learn a domain and be proficient at it. Year 2 or 3 is where you're learning and implementing technologies with deep understanding. By this time you should be at the point to be promoted or get next equity grant. Sometimes it is worth the wait and sometime it's not so definitely understand if people changes company after 3 or 4 years.

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