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Looking for a Job Is Tough
41–50 of 296 posts
Re: Looking for a Job Is Tough
#42This is the toughest market I've ever seen. I easily made it to on-sites at FAANG a few years ago and now I'm getting resume rejected by no-name startups (and FAANG). The bar has also been raised significantly. I had an interview recently where I solved the algorithm question very quickly, but didn't refactor/clean up my code perfectly and was rejected.
I can’t solve everyone’s problems but I can say that I have 1-2 (depending if an outstanding offer is accepted) open principal engineering roles directly working for me. The process will be talking to the recruiter, then two tech interviews, then an interview with me. This will take you a couple weeks to go through because of our team is tiny and we’re fairly busy. Team is 100% remote and async. All the stuff in the JD applies, the one update that we haven’t gotten out yet is that you must know terraform really well. Comp is scaled for engineers outside the USA.
Apply at https://moduscreate.com/careers/5984037003/?gh_jid=598403700... and feel free to mention that you saw Boris (me) post this on HN.
Re: Looking for a Job Is Tough
#43One piece of advice I usually give is to avoid applying to jobs through company’s career websites or LinkedIn. Instead, tap your social network: see if there is someone you know/have worked with who either works at the company you’re interested in or is connected to it someone (as an advisor, investor, personal friend of someone in a leadership position) and ask them for a warm intro. Social proof gives you an advant…
In my experience, even internal referrals barely give you an edge these days unless the referrer is quite high in the company org. Of course things can change rapidly; perhaps the influx of ai-produced applications may bring this practice back.
Yep. Several months ago I leaned on a friend for a referral. This person is relatively well known in his industry. He’s written books and has spoke at a lot of conferences, and been interviewed by a lot of outlets. I got a personal referral from him, and I didn’t even get a phone call with a recruiter. Crazy.
Re: Looking for a Job Is Tough
#44This is the toughest market I've ever seen. I easily made it to on-sites at FAANG a few years ago and now I'm getting resume rejected by no-name startups (and FAANG). The bar has also been raised significantly. I had an interview recently where I solved the algorithm question very quickly, but didn't refactor/clean up my code perfectly and was rejected.
I’m not sure the bar has been raised. It’s been weirded, but not raised.
Weirded how, if you don't mind elaborating slightly?
For example, does it mean: the actual skill level (e.g., smartness) people actually look for and hire hasn't changed, but the activities that hiring teams require candidates to have experience with are (seemingly weirdly) not a great thing to need anyway and therefore lots of great candidates end up twiddling their thumbs?
In that way, the "height" of the bar is the same, but it's a "weird" bar, in that one could have to accept it for what it is, or even stoop to it, or perhaps shift over to it, in order to pass it?
Or more that the overall interview experiences are weird caricatures in and of themselves?
Weird is a great word, but it can be a little non-specific, so I'm left curious about the intended usage/meaning.
Re: Looking for a Job Is Tough
#45This is the toughest market I've ever seen. I easily made it to on-sites at FAANG a few years ago and now I'm getting resume rejected by no-name startups (and FAANG). The bar has also been raised significantly. I had an interview recently where I solved the algorithm question very quickly, but didn't refactor/clean up my code perfectly and was rejected.
> The bar has also been raised significantly. I had an interview recently where I solved the algorithm question very quickly, but didn't refactor/clean up my code perfectly and was rejected.
Bearing in mind the implicit comparison to "a few years ago", a few years ago I interviewed with Google, at which point the recruiter told me I'd passed the interview, wished me congratulations (!), told me to expect a job offer, and finally, ~6 weeks later, informed me that while I'd "passed" the interviews, my scores were too low for them to make an offer.
It remains a mystery what it might mean to "pass" without actually advancing beyond the threshold you passed.
Re: Looking for a Job Is Tough
#46It's going to get tougher and tougher in this job market. 1. Layoffs happening regularly. 2. Less Senior positions and virtually no junior jobs. 2. AI accelerating and reducing the number of software engineers. 3. Job postings being reposted with less salary and equity in US, EU and especially the UK. You might as well take yourself off the job market / stay in current job, build a paying SMB company or side project…
Congrats on the business, I hope this inspires others to pursue their dreams.
Since you mentioned a specific number of applications (60+), I just wanted to share my job hunt story. When I was last looking for a role (8 months ago), I started out thinking 5 applications a day was good, but then I spoke with an industry mentor, and he laughed me off saying that wasn't close to enough. Turns out he was right.
On his recommendation I started aiming for 50 a day. At first it's very slow, but you build up a corpus of cover letters and other material to submit applications.
This would have been easier if I was employed at the time, since so many places auto-reject if you aren't currently employed. This was also looking for fully-remote in APAC, which has far fewer opportunities than other regions/timezones.
And you might say "but I don't want to work for all these companies" and I would agree. But provided you are applying for a role that you are at least curious about, those ones that are not great fits can provide good interview practice.
Re: Looking for a Job Is Tough
#47This is the toughest market I've ever seen. I easily made it to on-sites at FAANG a few years ago and now I'm getting resume rejected by no-name startups (and FAANG). The bar has also been raised significantly. I had an interview recently where I solved the algorithm question very quickly, but didn't refactor/clean up my code perfectly and was rejected.
Though FAANG offers are usually more attractive than startups (considering pay level and stability), some startups could be more selective since they couldn't afford to hire the wrong candidate.
It’s more about calibration. If you interview 100 people at a FAANG, you get an idea of where the bar is. This idea gets calibrated with a panel of interviewers, along with shadow interviewers.
At a startup… who knows? I had an interviewer burn up 25 minutes on a 45 minute coding question trying to “hint me” towards the solution I mentioned in the first 2 minutes.
Re: Looking for a Job Is Tough
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m not sure the bar has been raised. It’s been weirded, but not raised.
Weirded how, if you don't mind elaborating slightly? For example, does it mean: the actual skill level (e.g., smartness) people actually look for and hire hasn't changed, but the activities that hiring teams require candidates to have experience with are (seemingly weirdly) not a great thing to need anyway and therefore lots of great candidates end up twiddling their thumbs? In that way, the "height" of the bar is th…
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Re: Looking for a Job Is Tough
#49At this point, I view the job search process as stochastic rather than deterministic. I model my job search using the binomial distribution. All that you need to know is what how frequently you get interviews and offers to then explore the probabilities involved. To me at least, that removes a lot of the uncertainty, since I now know that if I apply to X jobs, I will have a Y percent chance of getting at least one of…
Admissions to selective colleges are the same way. For most students it's rather foolish and wasteful to target any one specific college because luck plays a huge factor (or the actual selection criteria are unknown and unknowable, which from the applicant's perspective is indistinguishable from luck).
People cannot discriminate. They must spray and pray because the algorithm demands it of them. Thus, both sides (employer and employee) lose, because every applicant and every institution becomes flattened, generalized.
It used to be, applying to places took time and effort. So students (and job applicants likewise) would discriminate. This allowed employers and institutions to actually build culture. An institution could be different from another institution in large ways, all cultural, all "soft" -- unpronounceable by the machine.
This enriched us all, because it allowed pockets of brilliance to form. Actual, real, human variation.
Now, every job has 2,000 applicants. Every HR person is trained at a school whose curriculum is undifferentiated from Harvard or Yale, because every school has the incentive to emulate Harvard or Yale. Every HR person's classmates all, similarly, could not afford to care which institution they applied to, because their application process was -- again, spray and pray. And thus, every HR person at every company creates the exact same institution.
This flattening, this algorithmization, is like an invasive species which has choked out all of the variable, beautiful, at times brilliant flora and fauna which existed, protected, in its isolated institutional ecology. All of that cultural diversity has been destroyed so that we could click "easy apply."
What's the result? Every job application looks the same. Every interview looks the same. Every internal culture looks the same. Every job is the same, so much so that you could switch jobs every 2 years and nobody would even notice or care. Every 2 years! How much does a 2 year old know!? Every company apes Google in their interview process because Google is the Kudzu that choked out their local flora and fauna.
We're all poorer for it, this mass extinction event. Like you say, it's happening all over, not just in companies and schools.
Re: Looking for a Job Is Tough
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m not sure the bar has been raised. It’s been weirded, but not raised.
Weirded how, if you don't mind elaborating slightly? For example, does it mean: the actual skill level (e.g., smartness) people actually look for and hire hasn't changed, but the activities that hiring teams require candidates to have experience with are (seemingly weirdly) not a great thing to need anyway and therefore lots of great candidates end up twiddling their thumbs? In that way, the "height" of the bar is th…
Many companies are filtering candidates in favor of mercenaries while pretending they are looking for dependable, committed professionals.
If you don’t have specific experience with some CTOs favorite esoteric API or don’t have experience in the same, specific corner of some insurance or usury industry, your ability to actually engineer solutions is considered irrelevant.
It’s as if the industry has forgotten that building software is about the application of algorithms to data structures to accomplish some user need. Instead, company after company wants to hot glue some service via some API using some framework on some cloud platform. And because the MBA decision-maker can write Excel macros with GPT, we don’t need programmers to build systems anymore. Just wire up foo SaaS to bar SaaS and MVPFailFastLeanAgile our way to success!
Sorry for the rant…