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What SWE job hunting is like right now

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Re: What SWE job hunting is like right now

#101

Post by scarface_74 »

anonreeeeplor wrote: post #32

I have been interviewing. Everyone is confused right now. Hiring companies are confused. Recruits are confused. My opinion is we are at a severe dislocation period. I have noticed massive changes in the emerging skills, tools and platforms. Pretty much no code, low code and AI. Everything else looks useless or outdated. Meanwhile, tons of startups and big tech companies are dying and laying off. The skills those peop…

What you’re missing is that you don’t need someone “good” to do your bog standard enterprise framework dev. You just need someone “good enough”.

And since many if not most people in the higher income tax brackets own their homes with fix rate mortgages and they aren’t spending every penny they make, they aren’t really seeing the full affects of inflation.

Re: What SWE job hunting is like right now

#102

Post by scarface_74 »

jehb wrote: post #4
MattGaiser wrote: post #2

> Nobody tests, CI automation is unheard of. This seems like a very dangerous attitude from a plane maker, a drug maker, and a healthcare data provider.

Easy - just build everything on top of "enterprise" platforms that offer indemnification clauses. Then nothing is ever your fault, it's always the vendor.

While you joke, at my n-3 job, I was the first hire by a then new director to lead the charge of integration efforts and migrations as they acquired companies. It was a non tech company.

After a few months, I told him and the CTO that they shouldn’t be staffing up a technical team of software developers. It wouldn’t give them an advantage. We transitioned two of the long time Powerbuilder developers who maintained a 20 year old in house EMR to writing reports and overseeing vendors.

We outsourced everything and used COTS and hired contractors when needed.

After that was complete over two years. I walked in and told the director, “you don’t need me anymore you just don’t admit it and are trying to keep me busy”. I had purposefully put myself out of job.

But I had a hell of a story to tell in STAR format when asked at my n-1 job various “tell me about a time when…” interview questions.

Re: What SWE job hunting is like right now

#103

Post by ahahahahah »

and0 wrote: post #44
anonreeeeplor wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My opinion is DEI hires are way out of whack with the market. Low skilled / low talent in many cases and lower competence but in a ZIRP environment I saw so many situations where women and minorities were hired and given leadership roles, with massively streamlined hiring processes. When the bottom line doesn’t matter these kinds of hires really proliferated. I wonder if we will see a hard reset back to competence as…

$180k within four years is more than reasonable if you get into FAANG. I've had plenty of kids right out of college asking for $140k and getting it from other companies, and this was 5 years ago, so within four years of typical ZIRP job hoping I'd say that's relatively normal. Please don't assume anyone is hired for diversity reasons. That's really awful.

Four years?!? $180k is pretty typical first year new grad compensation in faang.

Re: What SWE job hunting is like right now

#104

Post by ofcourseyoudo »

anonreeeeplor wrote: post #36
cj wrote: post #16

As a hiring manager for a relatively small company, a major problem is misaligned salary expectations. Real world example: I recently interviewed an engineer hit by layoffs at Shopify/UPS. The candidate had 4 years of total work experience, and was making $175k in the role that she was let go from, and they won’t accept anything less when looking for a new role. With 4 years of total experience in the workforce. I wo…

My opinion is DEI hires are way out of whack with the market. Low skilled / low talent in many cases and lower competence but in a ZIRP environment I saw so many situations where women and minorities were hired and given leadership roles, with massively streamlined hiring processes. When the bottom line doesn’t matter these kinds of hires really proliferated. I wonder if we will see a hard reset back to competence as…

Cringeworthy dichotomy between "women and minorities" and "competence" you established there.

Re: What SWE job hunting is like right now

#105

Post by jmye »

and0 wrote: post #50
gustavus wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow that's quite the high and mighty response. I have about 10 years experience across multiple domains and can program across a dozen languages. You know what my salary sits around 150k. You're attitude reflects part of the problem. There are a bunch of still relatively new people or especially boot camp grads that were sold on the always unrealistic expectation of making $150k right out of the gate. That was always…

The market is the market, for better or worse. I do think SWE are overvalued socially/monetarily, but I don't see why you're so emotional over someone saying they deserve what they can get. Or if they make more than you if they can swing it.

Accusing someone you disagree with of being “so emotional” is some bottom-of-the-barrel kindergarten crap.

Re: What SWE job hunting is like right now

#106

Post by cvccvroomvroom »

anonreeeeplor wrote: post #32

I have been interviewing. Everyone is confused right now. Hiring companies are confused. Recruits are confused. My opinion is we are at a severe dislocation period. I have noticed massive changes in the emerging skills, tools and platforms. Pretty much no code, low code and AI. Everything else looks useless or outdated. Meanwhile, tons of startups and big tech companies are dying and laying off. The skills those peop…

> The ultra talented person will laugh at the offers that employers are willing to make right now and turn them down.

I'm unmotivated to look for this reason. As an IC6 SRE, I won't get out of bed for less than $250k TC. I have a TC negotiator and an IP employment lawyer to pay before accepting any offer.

If were temporarily unable to find employment, monetizing SaaS product(s) would be my backup plan because there's plenty of potential upside by choosing the category and market fit with solid pricing.

Re: What SWE job hunting is like right now

#107

Post by cvccvroomvroom »

solardev wrote: post #84

I can't speak to St. Louis, but about the tech stack, my personal experience is that the bigger the company (outside of formal tech companies), the older/slower/more bloated the stack. They tend to choose stability and longevity over modernity, so a lot of Oracle, Microsoft, etc., and whatever their people were using ten years ago. It kinda makes sense at their scale. It's not the core of their business, and they don…

You're painting with a broad brush a religious view of an idealized tech stack rather than the problem of motivations at different scales that aren't equal or necessary for each.

Large companies reward resume-grade impact, not cleaning up code, because there is literally no value added (that can be claimed) unless code is used or directly saves money. So spending expensive engineering time refactoring code for future hypothetical concerns isn't viewed as achieving anything, even if it sounds good. It's a shitty reality but necessary to collapse the often disconnect between software engineering and business.

Very large companies also have the staff to roll their own custom everything because COTS FOSS just can't scale up or out well enough at a reasonable cost.

By contrast, startups lack standards and working infrastructure, and are often forced to rely on force multipliers such as potentially expensive SaaS services where they own nothing, not even their data. The upside of startup startups is that there's nowhere for average or lazy engineers to hide: everyone must produce and do things in a maintainable manner or face the consequences of poor operations or paying the price of tech debt.

There are no free lunches, religions, or perfect solutions in real-world web ops. There is only minimizing classes of fires and being able to respond to them in a lasting manner in order to move forward.

Re: What SWE job hunting is like right now

#108

Post by solardev »

cvccvroomvroom wrote: post #107
solardev wrote: post #84

I can't speak to St. Louis, but about the tech stack, my personal experience is that the bigger the company (outside of formal tech companies), the older/slower/more bloated the stack. They tend to choose stability and longevity over modernity, so a lot of Oracle, Microsoft, etc., and whatever their people were using ten years ago. It kinda makes sense at their scale. It's not the core of their business, and they don…

You're painting with a broad brush a religious view of an idealized tech stack rather than the problem of motivations at different scales that aren't equal or necessary for each. Large companies reward resume-grade impact, not cleaning up code, because there is literally no value added (that can be claimed) unless code is used or directly saves money. So spending expensive engineering time refactoring code for future…

I think this makes sense, but might be more of an adjacent argument than a counterpoint? What you said rings true especially for large tech companies, but the OP and I were thinking more of large enterprises whose primary focus isn't in tech (like the St. Louis businesses). Sorry if that wasn't made clear, especially in my post.

The difference, I think, is that large non tech companies don't necessarily think that deeply about their tech stacks. The entrenched bureaucracies and existing vendor relationships (with Microsoft or ESRI, for example) seem to have more sway than the merits of any one stack or another.

Nobody should be refactoring code all the time just for the heck if it, but looking at the architecture once in a while can get you generational improvements in performance, security, user and developer experience, etc. But that's a hard sell in a company that looks at tech as just another basic tooling/infra cost, as opposed to a core part of the business.

Re: What SWE job hunting is like right now

#110

Post by selimthegrim »

scarface_74 wrote: post #94
dangus wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, not quite. Laid off people do get paid unemployment benefits, and they also get the non-monetary benefit of not working. I don’t really consider that lost money to be 1:1 in value when considering you aren’t beholden to a work schedule. If you have a working partner I would say it’s a no brainer to take your time. Jump on their healthcare and chill. Oh yeah, if you have kids, you can put childcare costs on hold…

In my previous state of residency GA, unemployment maxes out at $375 a week. In Florida my current state, it’s $275 a week To put that in context, the day I found out I was being Amazoned and a week before my last day, I reached out to a former CTO that couldn’t afford to hire me. But he did need some work/troubleshooting done in my area of specialty and I billed at $135 an hour and that was cheap. Trust me, I know h…

Wait until you hear about Louisiana.
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