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2500 Job apps, 46 interviews, 1 offer

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Re: 2500 Job apps, 46 interviews, 1 offer

#111

Post by ninkendo »

rickreynoldssf wrote: post #109
ninkendo wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to chime in with a different take from the rest of the comments: there’s lots of tools that aren’t really appropriate to use during an interview. If you’re being asked to do (say) tree traversal, then in real life it’s totally fine to Google it and copy/paste a code snippet. But during an interview, presumably they want to know how much you can do on your own without “help”. It’s not that much of a stretch to sa…

To add more context. The task included interfacing with a 3rd party API that was poorly documented. In order to even see what a response looked like would have been incredibly hard without a debugger. Dumping it to the console would have been many pages of nested JSON. So sitting there twiddling, trying to make sense of an API doc that didn't provide a clear description of the results rather than just run the thing a…

Yeah, if the exercise is in using a poorly documented API, and the answer depends on fiddly bits of trivia around how the response is structured, then a debugger is absolutely the right approach, even during an interview. You did the right thing here, and the interviewer is a dummy.

Re: 2500 Job apps, 46 interviews, 1 offer

#112

Post by ninkendo »

Posts like this horrify me. I’ve been an engineer for 19 years, and I’ve had 7 jobs in that time, from my very first job in 2004. I think there have been a total of 10 jobs I’ve ever interviewed for, 7 of them with offers that I accepted, 2 with offers I rejected or otherwise stopped the process early, and 1 single time I interviewed and didn’t get an offer. Basically my success rate is 90%… some of the jobs were from recommendations within the network of people I know, but many of them were cold.

But I haven’t been in the job seeking market in 6 years, being gainfully employed in my current role.

The idea of having a 1-2% success rate is terrifying. I don’t think I’d have it in me to press on. I’m used to employers rolling out the red carpet, and I really really don’t want to go back into the job market. Godspeed to anyone who’s going through this right now, you have a lot more guts than I got.

Re: 2500 Job apps, 46 interviews, 1 offer

#113

Post by jgwil2 »

rickreynoldssf wrote: post #48

I'm a 30+ year experience SWE. I had my own successful startup exit and after that I skipped FAANG to join the founding teams at other startups founded by Ex-FAANG big names. Unfortunately none of them panned out. I recently went through a series of interviews with a company that were dragged out over two months. Each went very well. My last interview was with a "Senior Engineer" who graduated in 2020 and had a littl…

Oddly enough, I've heard other interviewers at my company state they were impressed when a candidate for a junior position used a debugger in the interview.

Re: 2500 Job apps, 46 interviews, 1 offer

#114

Post by sethrin »

geysersam wrote: post #103
sethrin wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this sarcasm or epic hubris? No-one writes bug-free code, and thinking otherwise sounds like an enormous red flag.

At our org we originally only hired A+ people. The A+ people hired A++ people and so on. Eventually we ended up with only 10x programmers and since then we haven't written any bugs. If I get around to it I'll eventually write a book about this technique.

What you say is impossible, and it's not worth my time to discover whether you're a liar or merely deluded.

Re: 2500 Job apps, 46 interviews, 1 offer

#115

Post by frfl »

sethrin wrote: post #114
geysersam wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At our org we originally only hired A+ people. The A+ people hired A++ people and so on. Eventually we ended up with only 10x programmers and since then we haven't written any bugs. If I get around to it I'll eventually write a book about this technique.

What you say is impossible, and it's not worth my time to discover whether you're a liar or merely deluded.

this is sarcasm, OP is just having fun

Re: 2500 Job apps, 46 interviews, 1 offer

#116

Post by frankreyes »

rickreynoldssf wrote: post #48

I'm a 30+ year experience SWE. I had my own successful startup exit and after that I skipped FAANG to join the founding teams at other startups founded by Ex-FAANG big names. Unfortunately none of them panned out. I recently went through a series of interviews with a company that were dragged out over two months. Each went very well. My last interview was with a "Senior Engineer" who graduated in 2020 and had a littl…

> "Senior Engineer"

You were rejected not because of your lack of skills but to the contrary, you had more skills than that engineer. And that is a threat to that engineer professional future. You made that engineer look bad.

Re: 2500 Job apps, 46 interviews, 1 offer

#117

Post by ryandrake »

bamfly wrote: post #65
commandlinefan wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have I been incredibly lucky my entire career? I wonder that, too, but the last time I was on the market was 2017. This is the first time in my 30-year programmer career that I've heard anybody looking for programming jobs complaining about anything _other_ than recruiters bothering them too much. I haven't been in this market personally yet, but the tone is definitely a new one since the dawn of the internet.

Stories of people's hundreds- to thousands-of-applications journeys make it on here what seems like a couple times per year, pretty consistently. All I can figure is I've been in a totally different part of the market from these folks. I've never once had a job search that looked like that. Typically, I do 1-3 interviews after 1-5 applications, and come out with 1-2 acceptable offers. I don't think my total applicati…

I’ve maintained a 100:10:1 application:interview:job ratio for about 20 years now. This is for software engineer roles as well as product management and project management roles. It’s been pretty consistent, although I admit I’m usually looking for work when everyone else is: during tech recessions.

Re: 2500 Job apps, 46 interviews, 1 offer

#118

Post by ryandrake »

jmye wrote: post #98
tennisflyi wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not spending time to tailor my resume to get ghosted.

If not tailoring it still gets you interviews, then great. But if you're not getting interviews, and you're refusing to do basic things to help yourself, that seems silly and self-defeating, especially if it's an appealing role or company. As a non-dev, I have between a 90-95% response rate when I do apply because I tailor my resume, and I apply to roles strategically and intentionally. I don't begrudge people who ei…

Chances are, the algorithmic/automation that is at the top of the funnel filtering out 90% of incoming resumes doesn’t know or care if the resume it deletes is carefully hand-tailored with love for weeks or if it’s been shotgunned to 1000 companies.

Re: 2500 Job apps, 46 interviews, 1 offer

#119

Post by hatchoo »

umeshunni wrote: post #19

Job apps, especially if done on LinkedIn or on a company portal are essentially a black hole for your resume. The signal-to-noise ratio on applications that come in through that channel is so poor that unless you're a tiny company that gets only a handful of resumes, recruiters usually ignore them.

Overall from recent experience, I've had better luck in LinkedIn compared to other platforms. The time you send your application matters too. I filter out job postings when they are over a week old. There's usually no point being 100th in line.

Re: 2500 Job apps, 46 interviews, 1 offer

#120

Post by tagyro »

I read the post and the comments here and I honestly can't wrap my head around some of them (comments).

Being jobless takes a huge toll on the mental (and physical) health and instead of being supportive and empathic, we deride the struggle that is finding a job in this market.

In 2023 only, more than 200.000 people have lost their job (source http://layoffs.fyi).

Companies use ATS to discard CVs that don't perfectly align, ghost candidates, make bellow market-rate offers, post fake job ads ...and fire people to show strong quarters and make VCs happy.

And when someone has the courage to speak out, we attack them.

[somewhat "self-promotion": if anyone has a hard time getting past ATS, I built a small website to help align their resume to a specific job ad: https://rolematch.me . The service is free, no data is gathered or stored and the invite code is konami]

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