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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?

#231

Post by orihab »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #197
moosedev wrote: 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.

0 years of experience is definitely tough, but for mid level devs (3-6 yrs) it may actually be easier than super seniors, because yes, overqualification... Me personally I just started a job at a Canadian company after low key looking and applying to various companies for the past couple of months. And I definitely got a lot of ghosting/generic rejections but definitely less than 95%.

I'm a good 3-5yr, mid-level dev, without FAANG company experience.

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

#232

Post by roncesvalles »

flashgordon wrote: post #227

No it's not you. It is the market. I am seeing a couple of phenomena: 1. Every company wants to show off it's "really high bar" ... For building yet another crud service ... handling 1qps (that is still a 100k qpd so don't laugh at it). 2. So they read about what the fangs do and naturally copy all the terrible parts (impact impact impact, more artifacts just for evidence, write realms and realms of repeated document…

Some of the difficulty is also because smaller companies are wary about interviewing and hiring people who will leave as soon as the market bounces back. They want a unicorn candidate who is "perfect" technically, will accept significantly less money than their current/previous job, and won't run off to double their TC at a big tech company in 12 months.

When you apply all these filters you're left with... no one.

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

#233

Post by shubhamkr1 »

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…

can you please share that question here ? I am very curious now after all the discussion

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

#234

Post by pcthrowaway »

kirso wrote: post #222
mitnerd wrote: post #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 tec…

The fact that you have guiding principals already puts you in the top bracket of the firms. Kudos! I wouldn't disregard people with short stints, there is so much context out there. Obviously the higher salary hunters is a concern but I have 3x -> 1 year stints on my resume not because I am a terrible human being but others, layoffs, loosing visa, toxic boss, had to move countries due to family illness and all of the…

I agree, there's a lot of context missing whenever a resume gets binned on something seemingly arbitrary, but when you're in a hiring position and you have 1000 resumes, its easy to just toss 900 of those out for arbitrary reasons before contacting the remaining 100.

Maybe there are very good reasons you left jobs after 1 year or less, but from the hiring manager's perspective, its not worth their time when there are 100 resumes to choose of people who never left a job in less than 2 years.

Don't worry though, this isn't the same high-pass filter everyone is applying, and your resume is likely to make it past filters elsewhere.

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

#235

Post by pcthrowaway »

naterkane wrote: post #225

it was almost the same for me. 25 years into my career, and deemed basically unhirable (after years consulting for gov where titles don’t translate back to private sector) after 6 months of job hunting, where even friends who were SVPs couldn’t get me a timely interview, i was left feeling so dehumanized i just gave up and stopped job hunting. then i got an idea. in 2008 i created a company where i wanted to work aft…

this sounds great, but I'd be especially interested if there was a way to use the service that didn't involve a browser extension

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

#236

Post by flashgordon »

roncesvalles wrote: post #232
flashgordon wrote: post #227

No it's not you. It is the market. I am seeing a couple of phenomena: 1. Every company wants to show off it's "really high bar" ... For building yet another crud service ... handling 1qps (that is still a 100k qpd so don't laugh at it). 2. So they read about what the fangs do and naturally copy all the terrible parts (impact impact impact, more artifacts just for evidence, write realms and realms of repeated document…

Some of the difficulty is also because smaller companies are wary about interviewing and hiring people who will leave as soon as the market bounces back. They want a unicorn candidate who is "perfect" technically, will accept significantly less money than their current/previous job, and won't run off to double their TC at a big tech company in 12 months. When you apply all these filters you're left with... no one.

This is the irony - The unicorn candidate (IMO) is a myth. I can assure you (we) faangers wear our pants one leg at a time and dont just "jump" into it :) Having hired at startups - hiring for passion, curiosity and desire has gone a long way rather than trying to act all big. Now key here is to be honest with yourself and the candidate (TC) that your pay is "mediocre" and X,Y,Z are going to be the mutual benefits. Best case scenario company and TC grow together. Otherwise TC learns a lot and is ready for their next role when ever the market bounces and I am glad to be the guy who helped you launch rather than tried to hold you back with BS. Ive literally said that and I mean it.

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

#237

Post by Quozca »

aborsy wrote: post #146

I wonder if finding a job was easier in 90s and 2000s. It feels like finding employment is getting harder and harder. There is much more specialization required nowadays (so many YOE in exactly the same field and software frameworks), rapidly shifting trends (that can leave out many people who are not lucky working in an area that is in demand), elevated expectations (see the number of the rounds of interviews) and i…

[dead]

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

#239

Post by mv4 »

amonith wrote: post #40
mv4 wrote: post #16

It is brutal. Even with 20+ YoE and a couple of FAANGs on the resume, the response rate is 1/10th of what I saw a couple of years ago.

Tbh it was always not that great with "too much experience". I feel that the best response rate is on that sweet spot of around ~5 years, probably because you already know enough but are still relatively cheap for the employer. I imagine that with that much exp and FAANGs on resume you are still negotiating FAANG salary, which are kind of the outliers of the industry. Idk, the dev market in my country (Poland) stills…

You may be right. There just aren't that many strategic roles that require that level of YoE.

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

#240

Post by naterkane »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #235
naterkane wrote: post #225

it was almost the same for me. 25 years into my career, and deemed basically unhirable (after years consulting for gov where titles don’t translate back to private sector) after 6 months of job hunting, where even friends who were SVPs couldn’t get me a timely interview, i was left feeling so dehumanized i just gave up and stopped job hunting. then i got an idea. in 2008 i created a company where i wanted to work aft…

this sounds great, but I'd be especially interested if there was a way to use the service that didn't involve a browser extension

the browser extension is just where i started. a gmail add-on that will be released in the nearish future.

would you mind sharing the issue or concern about using a browser extension?

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