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Finding a new software developer job

henrikwarne.com

71–80 of 322 posts

Re: Finding a new software developer job

#71
>> The second problem is that it is not possible to get only the latest ads (in LinkedIn) for example ads that are less than a week old. So I ended up having to page through a lot of ads I had already seen

This is by far the worst thing about searching for jobs in LinkedIn. It is horribly inconvenient to simply find the most recent jobs posted in the past 24 hours because all of the old promoted jobs are taking up 90% of the search results

Re: Finding a new software developer job

#72
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rejections are great info, especially quick ones. It's the companies that never respond or start the process then ghost that are the real problem. There you learn absolutely nothing.

You learn nothing regardless. There is never any information about why you get rejected or why you were passed over. The only difference between getting rejected and not getting rejected is that you at least have closure on that application.

I think quick rejections are a good indication to work on your materials and/or position selection, possibly delaying your send rate. Ghosting leaves all the variables hidden on quality vs volume and even leaves it unclear on whether your volume of sends is sufficient (maybe the industry is just slow at coming back and will answer all your past applications.)

Re: Finding a new software developer job

#73
post #2

>For a typical job there were four or five interviews: an initial interview with a recruiter, an interview with a hiring manager, one or two technical interviews (either live coding, or going through a take-home assignment). There could also be an interview with a product manager, and/or one with a CTO or founder. All in all, quite a time commitment. This is not news at this point, but it is pretty crazy.

It's a long day for sure, but honestly I don't really mind it as a candidate, and that boils down to a few reasons

(1) The time cost isn't as high as it seems. If I get as far as a phone screen I'm getting an offer, nearly guaranteed. The flow chart then looks like (a) if I don't get a phone screen, that awful process is no worse than the status quo, (b) if I do, I just find out in the phone screen if the battery of interviews has high latency (an 8hr day is fine, 8hrs over 2 months greatly complicates a job search) and drop out early the 20% of the time that happens, and (c) from there I have an 8hr day to a guaranteed job. Each offer then costs roughly 0.95/0.8~1.2 full interview processes, or 1.2x 4-8 hours.

(2) That time cost is a bit annoying when it comes to competing offers (a single solid day isn't crazily expensive when you're about to get a 40% pay boost, but 5 solid days for a job search is ... 5x as expensive ... fine, but not ideal, and hard when you have finite vacation days). Somewhere around 1/2 of employers don't actually seem to care about producing proof of competing offers though. If they make an offer, you counter that you're worth some fixed XYZ instead (ideally doing enough research to choose the levers they're most likely to accommodate) and will sign immediately if they can make that happen, they'll go above and beyond to agree to your counter-offer. It's a waste of time for the whole industry to require counter-offers in the cases where everyone knows what you're worth (admittedly, when that's not the case, counter-offers are an unfortunate necessity to prove your worth).

(3) The average tech interview is 10-20min solving the techno-babble and 30-50 probing what they know about the company and the team. New companies are very risky, and they work fairly hard to keep damning evidence out of the face of the public. You can mitigate a lot of risk by background-checking the executive team, but a present-day boots-on-the-ground view of things, ideally with the several overlapping/competing views you get from multiple team members, allows you to bounce out of problem situations early.

Re: Finding a new software developer job

#74
> Key Elements for Job Search Microsite

> * Have a professional profile picture

I don't do this, for two reasons:

1. Being a photographer taught me that I'm much better on the buttons side of the camera, not the lens side.

2. Photos really don't belong in hiring in the US. Due to the long history of unfair prejudices, which are still ongoing in some ways. Even better would be if we could remove names, for being cues as to gender, racial/ethnic background, caste, and other socioeconomic status. But photos are easy to eliminate from hiring processes, and in fact we were rid of them in the US, until "social media"-like sites like LinkedIn reintroduced photos to resumes.

Re: Finding a new software developer job

#75
post #11
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now think about being the people doing the recruiting, offering to 1% of the candidates they interview and still failing 30% of them during their trial period. Hiring is a huge time sink for all people involved. The best people are hard to find and the best jobs are hard to get.

Sure but do you actually need the absolute best people around? An average company probably doesn't need exceptional developers. If you're not a tech company and you don't have an extremely challenging setup, your survival as a company doesn't rely on exceptional IT skills. You can do a lot with less than 10 virtual machines, any decent web app framework (Spring? Laravel?), and a version control system. Even apparentl…

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Re: Finding a new software developer job

#77

I don't question that is takes hard work, even for more senior devs like the author, but 30 apps leading to 3 offers is a dream. Most early-career people are probably at >100 app with maybe a few interviews and hopefully one offer.

For the sake of comparison, I applied for jobs mid-2022. I applied for 12 positions and got 5 offers, and explicitly rejected by 2 - the remaining 5 I either rejected myself or didn't have time to complete the process. This was also in Stockholm, same as the OP.

This market is far worse to be looking for a job in.

Re: Finding a new software developer job

#78
post #11
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now think about being the people doing the recruiting, offering to 1% of the candidates they interview and still failing 30% of them during their trial period. Hiring is a huge time sink for all people involved. The best people are hard to find and the best jobs are hard to get.

Sure but do you actually need the absolute best people around? An average company probably doesn't need exceptional developers. If you're not a tech company and you don't have an extremely challenging setup, your survival as a company doesn't rely on exceptional IT skills. You can do a lot with less than 10 virtual machines, any decent web app framework (Spring? Laravel?), and a version control system. Even apparentl…

A business only makes sense if they're aiming to be better than others at a specific angle.

They need to get the very best for their particular thing that makes them different.

Other roles obviously don't matter as much.

Re: Finding a new software developer job

#80
post #74

> Key Elements for Job Search Microsite > * Have a professional profile picture I don't do this, for two reasons: 1. Being a photographer taught me that I'm much better on the buttons side of the camera, not the lens side. 2. Photos really don't belong in hiring in the US. Due to the long history of unfair prejudices, which are still ongoing in some ways. Even better would be if we could remove names, for being cues…

I went through interview training and one of the reasons why they’re so adamant that résumés go into an automated parser was to strip photos and other info like that.
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