Panic at the Job Market • Hacker News Board

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#461

Post by ozim » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 9:20 PM UTC

bluefirebrand wrote: post #422

Aurornis wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most jobs are now hoops after hoops, not taking into consideration your particular profile or the contributions you can make. I’ve done some mentoring of CS grads for the past few years. We some times get people with unreasonable interview demands, like companies asking them to make an entire app or website for the interview process. We advise them to decline the really excessive ones. However, it’s rare to see tha…

> when they describe the process it adds up to around 4-5 hours total 4-5 hours is pretty excessive for an interview process actually. A candidate cannot be doing 4-5 hours for an interview process just to hear a no at the end. Successful job hunts need to have many irons in the fire at once and if each one is taking 4-5 hours there's only so much you can realistically take on I know that interview processes generall…

No one does 4-5 hours in one go for me it would be impossible to interview 3-5 candidates that way.

It is more like 1 hour a week in 2-3 weeks and then 1-2 hours for take home.

After each step you can get a no - but you definitely get yes/no answer in those 3 weeks from me and I try to say no as soon as possible not to waste people time.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#462

Post by tcbawo » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 9:21 PM UTC

bmitc wrote: post #249

evrimoztamur wrote: post #23

I will add my two cents for people who believe that this might be related only to the SWE and tangent industries: It's really not. I have many friends (in Europe) who are trying to get through to different jobs in unrelated industries ranging from finance to fashion, or just trying to get promoted vertically (or horizontally), failing rather miserably. Most jobs are now hoops after hoops, not taking into consideratio…

> Most jobs are now hoops after hoops, not taking into consideration your particular profile or the contributions you can make. This is really key. I have applied for jobs before, and then get questions like: "what's your experience with C++ or advanced graph algorithms?". Only that, none of that shows up in my profile or resume. But they act surprised and completely shrug off how a decade of software and other relev…

> And they have zero idea how to mentor and train

From my experience, they have zero _interest_ in mentoring or training. For C++, there are ways other than professionally to get experience. Despite the hate it gets here, there are examples of large, solid C++ codebases to peruse and learn from. Taking the initiative to learn a language prior to a phone screen or interview goes a long way. If a C++ job is what you’re after, it might be worth investing the time to use it on a non-toy project and narrowing your search focus.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#463

Post by Matticus_Rex » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 9:22 PM UTC

csomar wrote: post #62

Matticus_Rex wrote: post #15

Wild that explanations of the tech job market like this are still being written without referencing the tax consequences of Section 174 changes.

No one understands or is willing to research these things anymore. Everyone (or at least everyone who is screaming and being heard) is mumbling points about interest, boom/bust, AI, etc... The reality, in my opinion, the governments have made it so hard to start and maintain a business that the market is not liquid for employment anymore. It's not catastrophic, but rather dead (as not moving). Here are the employment…

Prime age employment is flat. The overall percentage change is largely a demographic effect (boomers aging out of the workforce).

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#464

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 9:23 PM UTC

not_wyoming wrote: post #171

mavamaarten wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never understood why people hate them so much. From the employer side of things it only makes sense to get a feeling for someone's abilities other than an impression based on words alone. You can't believe the amount of shit solutions we've gotten from candidates. We just let you make a very simple kata. A tiny program that generates some console output, you have to refactor it to make it prettier and you need t…

> From the employer side of things it only makes sense to get a feeling for someone's abilities other than an impression based on words alone. I'd like to believe this is true, but it fails to explain why candidates for other business functions don't receive the same scrutiny. I'm not aware of analogous evaluations to get hired to other business roles (e.g. marketer candidates aren't asked to demonstrate a working kn…

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Re: Panic at the Job Market

#465

Post by dakiol » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 9:27 PM UTC

koliber wrote: post #436

The job market is weird. It seems there are more and more candidates on the market. However, whenever I recruit for senior roles, it seems the candidates are less and less skilled. This is highly anecdotal. The job post is the same: sr. java developer. Everyone has 5+ years of experience. I need someone who can: - explain in depth how a HashMap works - verbally pseudocode a program that solves a problem, where an ade…

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Re: Panic at the Job Market

#466

Post by voganmother42 » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 9:29 PM UTC

trogdor wrote: post #228

morgante wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's absurd. He has no concept of market rates (and frankly I'm unsurprised that he's not getting hired if his expectations are this out of whack). His resume even confirms this[0], because he seemingly thinks the appropriate level at FAANG would be L10 which is extremely rare . There is a 0% chance that his experience would level him that high. The entire article can be chocked up to a massively inflated sense of en…

Oh. My. God. His resume starts with a quote of himself stating that he has “seen things you people wouldn't believe.” It goes on to highlight that he purchased a domain name in 1997. He claims to have developed “the highest performing in-memory database in the world” but complains that “nobody really wants to buy it when free worse performing choies [sic] exist.” The part about nobody wanting to buy his product is in…

I think there may indeed be some satire or silly fun going on, for instance: "By the power of drawing two lines, we see correlation is causation and you can’t argue otherwise" and the "goal is to earn $69,420 per month"

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#467

Post by SoftTalker » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 9:30 PM UTC

advael wrote: post #417

I think the most common way to try to insult someone right now is to call them a "con artist", and this can sometimes get very silly, but the core kernel underlying that reality is that we've built a world by and for people whose only skillset is bullshitting each other (Sometimes with fancy graphs, soaring speeches, business school language stripped of its context, lots of ways to skin that cat but they're all bulls…

And AI excells at this. The river of bullshit is turning into a flood.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#468

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 9:31 PM UTC

gushogg-blake wrote: post #428

fallinditch wrote: post #279

The current state of the tech job market, as discussed here, highlights a significant opportunity for grassroots innovation. While we're focusing on the challenges, we might be overlooking the potential for creating new, more resilient models of work and business. Consider the rise of digital cooperatives or platform co-ops. These could provide an alternative to the traditional tech company structure, offering worker…

Yes! I was just thinking of this. My thinking started along the lines of tech workers getting together to apply for jobs, discussing who would be best for each role etc, so instead of each role getting 100 varying quality applications it gets just one reasonable application that the company can take or leave. Then I made a couple of obvious leaps and realised I was quickly converging on existing ideas like unions, an…

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Re: Panic at the Job Market

#469

Post by gigatexal » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 9:32 PM UTC

Yeah I thought about job hopping but not in this economy and not in Berlin. I’m getting interest in my profile but it’s far rougher than it was in the hay day or zero interest rates.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#470

Post by nextos » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 9:32 PM UTC

bmitc wrote: post #303

klyrs wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a literal graph theorist, I cannot tell you how frustrating it is that (a) nobody seems to understand my work except (b) interviewers use it as a shibboleth to exclude people from jobs that will never need high performance graph algorithms. That, I never get called for these interviews because I don't use react angles or something, but if they did, I'd crush the interview and fall asleep at my desk once they start…

In general, people are completely uninterested in experience that they don't understand, I've found. They don't want to even ask about it because it would showcase that they, gasp, don't know something that you do.

True. 9/10 of the interviewers I have met only focus on exact experience by matching keywords, and they won't be able to identify superior candidates with slightly different experience. The reason is simply time and effort.

The upside of this is that being able to position yourself in a hot niche will get you tons of interviews without even applying. The downside is that careers become extremely path dependent, which is a bit scary.