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

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

#201

Post by austin-cheney »

pkaler wrote: 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…

My experience is that some developers can write code but most memorize patterns and follow trends. If your questions require some solution different from a memorized pattern they will fail.

Another way to approach this: can the candidate communicate? If they cannot write original code odds are they probably cannot clearly write steps of simple instructions explaining a problem or solution as they do not have experience thinking through the problem without a lot of help.

Most places I interviewed at last year claimed to be looking for senior developers but in practice were only looking for trend chasers doing things in a very limited way that appeals primarily to beginners memorizing patterns.

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

#202

Post by gigatexal »

sneed_chucker wrote: post #136
gigatexal wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

*forgot to add context: I’m an American living in Germany for the last 5 years.

How did you handle your initial relocation? I'm an American with German citizenship and a decent (~C1) grasp of the language and I toy with the idea of moving there from time to time. But it seems like first you need to get a company that's willing to hire you and wait for you to relocate before starting, no?

As jselysianeagle points out in response to this it seems it's tough here, too. I guess that's the case. I had a former colleague who is very much a stronger Data Engineer than I am take about 3 months to find their ideal role. The thing is when the layoffs happened at his old firm he got the 3 months notice period that is common here plus some severance that held him over for a few months on top of that which meant finding new work was not a stressor.

But as the OP points out if you're a competent person and interview well and are good at what you do (and one would hope someone at the highest tiers of the industry working at places like Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc. are) then finding work here in the EU is not hard.

From what I have seen EU companies would all but kill for really strong US talent. They can't get this talent because would be folks be they in the US or abroad want to go or stay in the US for those bonkers high salaries. But if living and working in the EU is appealing then the perks are really, really nice. ~30 days of vacation time on top of public/bank holidays. Family leave for the birth of children. Really long notice periods in the case of being fired or laid off. Good severance. And then all the perks of social welfare states like subsidized or social medicine, good public transit, good travel to other countries etc., etc.

So to answer sneed_chucker's question:

A few years ago while perusing the Who's Hiring here on HN I saw that a startup based in Hamburg (I didn't know where that was at the time) was hiring for a Python engineer. I applied (only having taught myself Python to an beginner+_level but was eager to learn) and I got the role!

They handled all the visa paperwork and for a while my visa was tied to my employer. It's called a blue card here. Think of it like a green card. And as long as I was making > 50k euros and such I could live in Germany. When I changed employers I had to get my blue card updated. Since I've been here about 5 years now I have an open ended one so when I change employers I do not have to get it updated.

I really do like it here a lot.

Small plug: DeliveryHero, based in Berlin, -- the company I work for currently -- regularly (well we used to, let's see when hiring picks up again) hired folks from abroad and upon the first salary was often a relocation bonus of 5k euros or more to help folks get settled here. It's based on where you're coming from so if you were coming from the US I'd think it'd be closer to 7.5k or 10k even.

Hope that helps!

> But it seems like first you need to get a company that's willing to hire you and wait for you to relocate before starting, no?

Yes. DO NOT JUST SHOW UP IN GERMANY ON A 90 DAY VISA HOPING TO FIND WORK. Most apartments won't even give you a lease without a job and it's hard to get a job without a proper visa. Do the work before hand.

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

#203

Post by whiplash451 »

There is also a compounding factor happening at least in EU.

Because many candidates are now readily available without notice period, companies can hire much faster and as a consequence decide to hire more slowly because their hiring budget for H1 is almost entirely spent already.

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

#204

Post by aklemm »

Our_Benefactors wrote: post #91
skyyler wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/19/us/politics/afghanistan-d... Anyone that gets into defense because of this thread, remember that the technologies you develop will be used to slaughter the innocent.

For a more balanced take, “Why I chose a gun” https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_van_uhm_why_i_chose_a_gun

Why is that a “more balanced take?”

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

#206

Post by goodpoint »

etimberg wrote: post #39
goodpoint wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"willy nilly"??

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willy_nilly "Willy nilly is an idiom that means "haphazardly" or "spontaneously"."

Thanks, I thought it had only the first meaning:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/willy-nilly

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

#207

Post by illusiveman »

I'm in the process of considering a change, still not actively applying, but I do get several LinkedIn DMs every week from first party recruiters. I don't work with third party staffing agencies.

There is a common theme: they are looking for leadership roles with active contribution and with deep expertise in the tech stack used by the company.

So, where's the issue here? IMO, the market is saturated with generic software engineers, that is, people who can code, who are good at leetcode, but who really don't stand out of the crowd in any particular technology. That's your typical FAANG engineer. And don't get me wrong, there is a lot of talent in FAANG, but most engineers commit to the grinding to join and then just coast through.

And related to that, there is the unrealistic expectations game. As others have mentioned, people in FAANG were living in their own bubble of unreal financial compensations. Now that the bubble exploded, some have unrealistic expectations that decline even high offers just because it's not what they had before.

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

#208

Post by gigatexal »

jselysianeagle wrote: post #141
gigatexal wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

*forgot to add context: I’m an American living in Germany for the last 5 years.

Someone elsewhere in this very thread is claiming that the market for Senior/Lead level roles in EU right now is in fact tough. In your experience is getting a visa sponsorship in Germany as hard and limiting as it is here in the US?

I’m not too familiar with the H1B visa situation in the US but from what I understand if you lose your job there’s a clock to get another one or get deported.

In Germany for example there’s a longer lead time to getting laid off or being fired. And the bigger companies often help, especially those on visas, find work. I’d say the only “easier” thing is the time and that you don’t lose healthcare and such. And there’s an unemployment insurance that taps out at some 2500 or so euros a month that you can tap into.

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

#209

Post by yoav »

Everyone mass spamming their resume blindly to hundreds of positions in response to the flooded market is only making it harder for companies to sift through applications or actually read resumes.

AI is getting people past initial screen and then ghosted and the “right fit” people not even getting looked at.

It’s self fulfilling and will eventually resolve itself when the market picks up and standards are lowered. (Assuming that happens before GPT5.

If you can sit this cycle out for 6+ months and work on your own stuff or take a sabbatical you can help accelerate us out of this period of chaos.

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

#210

Post by tmb5cg »

jacknews wrote: post #189
moosedev wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really regret quitting - I was getting pretty depressed at my previous job, and not working at all was a vast improvement. I perhaps could've persuaded myself to jump back in 3-6 months earlier, before the job market fell off a cliff.

Actually I lied, I was laid off at the height of covid (company folded), I just decided to take a long sabbatical and try other things rather than going right back to a job; looking after family (kids were off school for almost a year), side projects etc. I also don't regret the time doing other things, only the lost opportunity to make bank and I suppose the 'not-a-wage-slave hole' in my CV, but now I need money soo…

Reminds me of recent WSJ article, laid of WhatsApp engineer saying he isn’t applying to anything in this environment:

“ Com­pet­ing with thou­sands of other work­ers for po­si­tions he sus­pected might not ac­tu­ally get filled or get­ting a low­ball of­fer didn’t ap­peal, so Mr. Moyni­han has in­stead been lever­ag­ing his strate­gic part­ner­ship skills to help clients on a project ba­sis at a rate of $300 an hour.

“It’s a cau­tion­ary tale for the ti­tans be­cause I do think amaz­ing tal­ent is be­ing dis­persed into smaller tech com­pa­nies that even­tu­ally end up com­pet­ing,” he said.“

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