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Ask HN: Are you unable to find employment?

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Re: Ask HN: Are you unable to find employment?

#561

Anecdotally.. but not really. I was worried about the job market but this was unfounded, for me... I started applying in October and had four offers from large tech companies by end of November. A lot of this was through networking to be fair, not “cold applying” (1 was through cold applying, the other 3 through networking). reach out to former coworkers or friends and ask for referrals. YMMV, but I do not think it i…

> A lot of this was through networking to be fair

Networking is the best way to find jobs nowadays. Bar none.

Re: Ask HN: Are you unable to find employment?

#562
post #87

35, male, American citizen. applied to 800 jobs, few technical interviews, no offers. i believe with the advent of AI, the landscape has changed faster than the job market has corrected for it. It will never go back to the glory days of tech people getting hired, its over.

> 35, male, American citizen. applied to 800 jobs, few technical interviews, no offers.

Is your network nonexistent?

Re: Ask HN: Are you unable to find employment?

#563

> Have you been fired in favor of foreign workers? 1) I work at a large company everyone in the US has heard of. When I walk in the public areas of the company or at lunch, it looks like we are based in Mumbai. There is no "diversity", it's one country in particular, which is India. (Funnily enough, this demographic isn't reflected in management) 2) I overheard the 4th level (above me) manager complaining to another…

> The last interview I gave was to an H1B who had an audio link in his earbuds to someone who feed him answers to my technical questions.

How did you detect that?

Re: Ask HN: Are you unable to find employment?

#564

Creating a throwaway account for simplicity. I was/am a hiring manager, mostly for startups. Market is rough right now for sure but I also want to share some flags I’d personally note when looking at your website / LinkedIn. 1. You have experience in a lot of technologies, which sometimes is good, but can also be the case where you don’t have expertise in any of them. 2. According to LinkedIn since 2016 most of your…

this, especially points 1, 2 and 3, are precisely why the recruitment industry needs to be completely disrupted. most recruiters have absolutely no understanding of how to read developer skills and history, nor how to match them to a company's requirements. i've worked with many, many recruiters over the years, and only a handful who weren't actively interfering with finding a good dev / company fit. between that, au…

Their feedback was the last push I needed to motivate me to delete my LinkedIn account. I'll take my chances and apply to jobs without one.

I completely agree that we need a disruption on the hiring front. The entire hiring process is broken.

Re: Ask HN: Are you unable to find employment?

#565

Creating a throwaway account for simplicity. I was/am a hiring manager, mostly for startups. Market is rough right now for sure but I also want to share some flags I’d personally note when looking at your website / LinkedIn. 1. You have experience in a lot of technologies, which sometimes is good, but can also be the case where you don’t have expertise in any of them. 2. According to LinkedIn since 2016 most of your…

I actually didn't ask for feedback on my personal situation. But since you've decided to dig into my profile and offer up advice from a throwaway publicly i will defend myself publicly - 1. > No expertise in technology: Strongly disagree. I'm an expert in python, javascript, c#, application development, object oriented programming, agile, communication, and much more. I guess this isn't shining through on my profiles…

You don't have to correct throwaway's opinion, you have to correct your online appearance. People reviewing your submission don't know these details you're giving and they won't ask. Unjust or not, that's the shallow first impression he got.

It's like if a user does something wrong in your app, you don't blame or explain to the user what they did wrong. You figure out how to improve your UX.

I came to similar conclusions from your public profile. The defensiveness of your response would be a 7th red flag.

Re: Ask HN: Are you unable to find employment?

#567
post #86

It's not just you. I have an Ivy league degree, worked in deep learning since alexnet at a leading startup in the space, was a CTO of a startup that got acquired and have referrals from very senior people at the top FANG companies and still struggled to get interviews. I also have research scientist friends with Neurips papers, ones that solved long standing open math problems and even they are struggling to get hire…

NYC is a much more attractive location than Warsaw, not just because of the salary, so I fully expect the open roles in NYC to be filled very quickly. I always wondered why American companies have offices in such unattractive locations. Last time I saw a company whose only European office was in Belgrade. Who are you going to convince to move to Belgrade to work for your company, lol? This is not like the US were all…

I went to Belgrade a few years back over Christmas by myself and had quite a good time.

In particular, the Nikola Tesla Museum, free walking city tour, massages, and some cool bars.

Everything was really inexpensive compared to say Germany, and the women over there... they are stunning!

Of course it'd be different to live over there, but it really wouldn't be the worst place to end up if you were earning a decent salary.

Only obvious downside for me was smoking in restaurants (I can't remember but probably bars as well). Not sure if it's still the same now.

Re: Ask HN: Are you unable to find employment?

#568
post #164
post #97

[flagged]

The irony is palpable. For many years, FAANGs and the likes have made billions across the world without hiring any significant amount of people in nearly all of those economies. Zero profit for the non-US countries. Take a random one, Denmark. Google and Apple sure have been making great money off of the Danes. What has Denmark gotten in return for it? Nothing. It's all gone towards (generally US) investor returns, a…

Voluntary trade benefits both parties by definition.

If Google is making money off of people in e.g. Denmark, it's probably also giving them something that is really valuable to them, like access to the Google search engine.

So I don't actually think Denmark would be better off by banning doing business with Google, Facebook, Netflix, etc.

Re: Ask HN: Are you unable to find employment?

#569
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And we see PG talking up H1B on twitter. I'd like to think that if he still read HN he might not do that. Really companies should be banned from importing more people[1] if they laid off a certain number in the last year. That way the job market would be more likely to self correct. [1] I think they should still be allowed to hire people who are already in the country on a visa, as it's unfair to make their risk of b…

> companies should be banned from importing more people Reverse outsourcing. Don't send the job overseas, send the overseas person here!

Literally “If Mountain View won’t go to Mohammed, then Mohammed must come to Mountain View” :D

Re: Ask HN: Are you unable to find employment?

#570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you got this from one episode on foxnews This is such a common and tired meme. It aims to stomp on something that someone said with a nonsensical argument. A bit of shooting the messenger and an appeal to authority (the veil attack being that everything that isn't Fox News is true and pure). Fox News has its problem, every media outlet has. And yet, 95% of so-called reliable "news" outlets lied to the entire nation…

* Well, I am not sure what to say other than: You are wrong. We might actually have one of the worst.* if you believe this and your children are here in the US that would be borderline child abuse to subject your own flesh and blood to the worst educational system… I said FoxNews mostly because you are tauting word-for-word party-line garbage without any thought of your own on the matter. people from all over the wor…

> shitting on US education is ring-wing garbage you are trying to sell and you should not be selling it cause no sane person will be buying it.

First of all, your right-wing characterization is wrong, insulting and distasteful. You have revealed much about yourself when choosing to take this approach instead of having a conversation, so I do not expect you to apologize. So be it.

It is really interesting to me to see just how common it is for some to attempt to attack ideas or discourse by making such accusations. The parallels to the story from Hans Christian Andersen's "The Emperors New Clothes" and even Plato's Allegory of the Cave are impossible to ignore.

Once again, the most recent examples of the delusion being the massive lies and deception around Biden's mental health, the southern border and the crime it brought into our nation, to name just a few. These are truths that stand on their won, regardless of where they might be printed, heard or viewed.

> I said FoxNews mostly because you are tauting word-for-word party-line garbage without any thought of your own on the matter.

Again, you make assumptions and deliver insults. It appears one cannot possibly be critical of the Emperor, who actually is naked, without being accused of all sorts of things. He is naked my friend. Can't you see?

> if you believe this and your children are here in the US that would be borderline child abuse to subject your own flesh and blood to the worst educational system…

No, you are wrong, and what you are saying is a ridiculous stretch. You are not thinking.

I want education in the US to improve for all children, because a better-educated people will improve things for everyone. The only way this happens is if we are honest and critical. Thinking that education in the West is, as you put it, the absolute best, is like being chained in Plato's cave confusing shadows for reality.

> If polled random 100 people from developer nations to name 10 non-US universities roughly 99 of them would stop at like 6.

I would suggest you stop here. What is being revealed about you isn't good at all. Either you are young and not ready to understand or confused, and maybe both. There are amazing universities all over the world, in both developed and developing nations. Yes, the US might have some of the most recognizable names in the world. And, in most cases, with good reason. Yet, that does not mean the world is a barren wasteland. In fact, some of the most prominent companies in the US are loaded with people who graduated from schools outside of the US, people who have driven innovation and wonderful things for decades. Don't take that approach. It is wrong and misinformed.

US education has problems that can be fixed with the right approach and incentives. This is not insurmountable, it simply requires recognizing the issues and acting in the best interest of future generations and the nation.

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