Panic at the Job Market

In the past I've interviewed dozens of people who mention five DBMS in their resume but can't say when they'd use one over the other.

there might be less low hanging jobs, but finding competent devs beyond mid-level is getting harder and harder. it seems they stop job hopping.

A particular LoB had ignored our warnings that their technology selection would not scale, implemented a website that was incapable of scaling, paid the developer of the tech for a cluster license (5000 bucks per quarter per server I was told) and implemented the technology in such a way that they could not identify when 1 member of the cluster had failed to automate fail over.

Instead of fixing it (a months development time to port to another web platform max), they simply planned to have a tech online for their high traffic events to manually pull cluster members that stopped responding out of the cluster, reboot them, then add them back into the pool for 3 hours straight.

Then they would throw more resources at the VM, and grunt about the infrastructure team not doing their jobs. It was insane. This platform would quit responding at What was extra fun was when they paid a very large AWS integrator to move the cluster to the cloud. When the AWS integrator got a look at it they just walked away. So instead they paid a local mob to do it.

At the time, pulling a windows environment up and down via cloud formation was not something that automated easily. They got 50% of the way through and realised oh shit, this is either going to cost us 10x the contract value or might even be impossible, so that local group ghosted them taking 100% of contract funds (I got to be in the meeting where they actually read the contract, and they had a very good contract that no one had read that allowed them to declare a technical impasse and bail with all paid monies. OFC they paid 100% in advance) too. So they ate the spend, and just called AWS the "DEV" environment, deleted the cloud formation scripts, and started packaging deployments back to "Prod" which was running on the infrastructure they would never stop hating on.

Once that was done they called an all staff meeting to praise the team for completing their project only 3 years late.

Oh yes. One sticks in my mind. All of these details were present in my resume.

Job Ad:

> Expert level health insurance system knowledge and experience interfacing between EHR providers and partners.

Me: Director of Product for a claim benefits management software company (i.e. the software that insurers use to run their business, cut checks to providers, process premiums, calculate deductibles, etc., repricing, the whole nine yards). Also have worked extensively with EPIC, Cerner, ESOsuite. Have also worked in platform development, third party API integrations.

I get that it was probably the boilerplate, but stung that twenty minutes later:

"We apologize, but we are looking for someone whose skillset and experience better our aligns with our requirements for this position."

Huh. I may well not have been the ideal candidate, but not sure how much more closely my experience could have been "aligned".

>90% of postings I see are beyond mid-level and seem to be inflexible in those requirements.

From where I'm standing, jobseeking as a senior looks like a candidates market.

- if it's a super difficult problem, remark how fascinating it is and ask the interviewer how often they're doing this stuff

- if it's FizzBuzz or something else that is solved and has a known value, propose hardcoding the answer as a constant and printing it without doing any computation, and see how that goes over

- if it's not one of these, you might be in a 10% case

My favorite was when I applied at, let's call it "StoreJogger" at as entry level engineer. This guy comes in for the technical interview and asks me a question that basically boils down to "how would you make StoreJogger?" and I remember thinking that if I knew the answer, I sure as shit wouldn't be in there. Yeah I guess it was technically a relevant question.