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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?

#251

Post by RhodesianHunter »

sys_64738 wrote: post #177
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…

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.

This sort of attitude is coming back to bite people, as can be seen in this thread.

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

#252

Post by 93po »

recfab wrote: post #123
93po wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this was what I noticed too. I write custom cover letters for jobs that I apply to, and it often takes 30-60 minutes. Sometimes I'll even tailor my resume for the ad. But I also only apply for a job every week or two, and I only apply to ones that I'm actually very interested in.

Has this been working for you? At times, I've had panic mode set in and _feel_ like I need to apply to every little job that looks remotely decent, but I don't know if that's _actually_ helping.

It's hard to say, it's all relative. I've had a couple first-round interviews for places that I care about, but those were also maybe because I had a referral at those places. In reality I'm not a super strong candidate because my entire resume is 1.5 year stints a decade in, and I haven't work anywhere noteworthy or something people recognize.

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

#253

Post by jselysianeagle »

gigatexal wrote: post #208
jselysianeagle wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for the info!

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

#254

Post by Our_Benefactors »

skyyler wrote: post #249
Our_Benefactors wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the alternative is a world where these weapons systems don't exist? I’m afraid that is a fantasy world which would quickly be ceded to the bigger stick. So consideration of military force requires balance, reverence, and respect. Posting something like “btw if you work in defense you’re a baby killer” is more insult than reasoned debate.

"Defense" weapons being used to slaughter innocent people, including children (you used the phrase "baby killer" first), is well documented fact. It's not insult if it's verifiably true, is it? There are plenty of people that are okay with their work being used to kill babies. They can work defense jobs. I just wanted to provide a little reality check for downtrodden devs considering defense work for the first time,…

> It's not insult if it's verifiably true, is it?

You are being incredibly uncharitable, bordering on dishonesty. Cars kill babies every year too but it’s not why people get into the automobile industry.

And this isn’t the “reality check” own that you think it is. It’s actually very condescending, and reductionist. You have not even attempted to refute the idea that a defense industry is necessary to maintain peace.

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

#255

Post by kirso »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #234
kirso wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I understand the rationale here given the company stage/scale. I recently had a similar discussion with the hiring manager on the same topic where the conclusion is pretty much the same - focusing on minimising false positives, rather than keeping account for false negatives.

There is nothing wrong with this obviously, just statistically speaking you might still miss out on very good talent (not referring to myself by any means).

From my personal experience though, I wouldn't know if that was the reason why the CV was tossed, but once transitioned into the interview stage it was never the issue.

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

#256

Post by hkt »

Our_Benefactors wrote: post #219
hkt wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that an engineer at a FAANG likely owns a miniscule fraction of the stack, whatever that may be. The average company doesn't need or want someone who is so deeply specialised.

This is such a ridiculous notion to be that I find a hard time lending it any credence. The reason average companies pass on FAANG is generally that they can’t afford them. Not “oh, this guy isn’t Jack-of-all-trades enough, we’re really looking for a midrate web contractor that still uses jquery but also knows some SQL”.

There's an entire world between FAANG and what you described. Most places will want something like this:

"We need two or three seniors who, between them, can handle the fact that our cloud resources are split between AWS and Azure 80/20, who understand security well enough to enforce least privilege for users, can write reliable if inelegant code in bash, python, golang and - when we have embedded stuff - lua. We'd also like people to be cost aware since we aren't made of money, and to be able to take ownership of CI, observability, logging, k8s in the form of EKS, a few VMs, and some difficult to change legacy stuff. Plus, provide the devs with a sensible local environment to work in that is as prod-like as you can make it, mentor a junior or two, wrap everything into some kind of infrastructure-as-code setup, present options to architects who are sometimes operating outside their field of expertise, and run the standups a d retros when your manager is on holiday"

Or as they would call it, "devops".

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

#257

Post by jwestbury »

FooBarBizBazz wrote: post #164
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.

Dude, you don't need high tech to slaughter the innocent, any fool can do that. What gold-plated weapons systems do is credibly deter a Chinese landing force from showing up in Taipei, or help the Ukranians achieve the 5+ K/D ratios they need to survive as an independent nation. I'd be happier to know that my code would let a shaped charge target a J20 cockpit in the unlikely event of Really Bad Decision Making, than…

> They don't pay enough for you to ever own a house in a desirable place;

I know plenty of people who took pay cuts to work in cleared jobs at Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. If you're talented, you can make a lot in the defense and intelligence community.

> and your sensitive data will get hacked by China anyway

Hacked? No. Most sensitive data is kept on air-gapped networks. Not really hackable. Can be exfiltrated, sure, but that's part of the point of the extensive background checks.

> it's assumed that you don't know "foreign persons" (hint: This is actually now a mark of the lower-class and uneducated.)

Not even remotely true. You do have to report contacts you know to be non-US citizens, but that's not disqualifying. I knew someone who filled out over 200 pages of foreign contact forms, and still obtained TS/SCI clearance.

> a software engineer without an advanced degree is basically nobody

Not accurate. Most people I knew in the cleared space didn't even have computer science degrees; most of us had bachelor's degrees in unrelated subjects, many even non-STEM (several history/English degrees).

> cloud stuff is mostly off limits

Somewhat true, but surely you're aware of AWS and Azure building out substantial private clouds for intelligence and defense customers?

> work may happen in windowless rooms

Rarely. Most SCIFs have windows, in my experience.

> perks are non-existent

Depends on the employer. But sure.

> and it's embarrassing to answer "so what do you do for a living" if you're trying to exist in blue-state society.

I did cleared work in Seattle. I don't think I've ever voted Republican. I've voted Green on a number of occasions. Same story for most of my coworkers. The most left-leaning people I know never had an issue with my job.

I think there are two ways of thinking about this: First, your presence there means someone more conservative isn't there, and you can maybe effect some small change. Second, any job at a sufficiently large corporation is ultimately killing people, even if indirectly; there's no way you can work to enrich billionaires at the expense of the working class and feel like you're contributing to the net good of society unless you're engaging in some serious cognitive dissonance. At least, IMO.

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

#258

Post by chadQuinlan »

TradingPlaces wrote: post #155

Large non-tech companies and government agencies still hiring. Walmart has 1278 job openings with “software” in the title https://careers.walmart.com/results?q=software&page=1&sort=r... CVS has 458 https://jobs.cvshealth.com/job-search-results/?keyword=softw... UnitedHealth has 625 https://careers.unitedhealthgroup.com/job-search-results/?ke... WSJ just wrote about this https://archive.is/2Ll06 Go down the list https…

I work for CVS. I've made lots of referrals to super-qualified people, for them to be auto-rejected. The company is tightening their belt it seems - no layoffs as far as I've seen, but corporate travel was cancelled and some contractors' contracts weren't renewed.

It's a wonderful company and pays super well, great people, but good luck getting in.

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

#259

Post by theshadowmonkey »

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…

Most leetcode hard or reasonably complex dynamic programming problems have 10 lines of code or less. It is coming up with the logic and solving for edge cases. Maybe its your confirmation bias that the problem is easy considering you have seen all iterations of it multiple times?

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

#260

Post by skyyler »

Our_Benefactors wrote: post #254
skyyler wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Defense" weapons being used to slaughter innocent people, including children (you used the phrase "baby killer" first), is well documented fact. It's not insult if it's verifiably true, is it? There are plenty of people that are okay with their work being used to kill babies. They can work defense jobs. I just wanted to provide a little reality check for downtrodden devs considering defense work for the first time,…

> It's not insult if it's verifiably true, is it? You are being incredibly uncharitable, bordering on dishonesty. Cars kill babies every year too but it’s not why people get into the automobile industry. And this isn’t the “reality check” own that you think it is. It’s actually very condescending, and reductionist. You have not even attempted to refute the idea that a defense industry is necessary to maintain peace.

You're assuming that I think baby-killers shouldn't be working in the defense industry or that I think there shouldn't be a defense industry or something.

No, I want people that aren't baby-killers to avoid it. That's all. The defense industry is important and needs staff, staff that are OK with babies being killed.

It's starting to sound like you're a baby-killing defense industry employee, and if you are I want you to understand that I don't hate you. I just dislike drone strikes against children and hospitals.

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