Panic at the Job Market

over the last few years it was annoying seeing noobs getting 6 figures for easy work while I never got a penny for my near decade of effort, but looking at how it has flipped recently, im glad that I invested that time in myself rather than becoming employable

was never really a decision tbh, i was on this path before I realised i was on it, and id rather be dead than working for a random corporate company, having to take part in the team and culture, having to do things and be places on someone elses timetable

im sure there are a very small number of software "jobs" I would like, that use bleeding edge tech, where devs run the show, but I suspect theyd be a needle in the haystack of soul destruction, id rather be welding in a workshop for peanuts than working on legacy code for a boomer boss

Doctors and lawyers have a nonprofit credentialing body that makes them take an industry respected test that is the equivalent of our tech interviews. We have nothing like that in dev work. Would love to see it.

MBA and marketing people rely very heavily on their networks. Those without these networks are at a severe disadvantage, and their prior work is usually very close to the bottom line of a company. Devs could do this kind of stuff more, but don't largely for cultural and organizational reasons.

IQ test would be great if they weren't illegal.

I'm not doing take-home work unless I'm staring down the barrel of not paying my mortgage, and I don't trust anyone showing me there's didn't ask ChatGPT.

Dev work is sensitive and exacting. I want to see the candidate actually do it in front of my face without phoning a friend or copying from github.

> 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

You misunderstood. 4-5 hours is for the entire process inclusive of all steps.

Not a single 4-5 hour session.

Companies generally don’t allocate a lot of time up front to every candidate. They have stages starting with a screen and moving up from there.

This is clear to me. My performance on tech tests is extremely mixed. I either do extremely well or I don't finish the test due to time constraints. With long-format tests where they give at least 2 hours, I tend to do well but some tests have contrived explanations and unclear requirements and short durations... Like sometime, they give you a weird, contrived goal which could only exist under lab conditions but they don't tell you up-front that your solution needs to be efficient as if it was built for the real world... Then you run their tests they provide and realize that some of them fail because your solution doesn't meet the efficiency requirements and it wasn't the exact same solution they were looking for... Ok fine, I can do that way too but you just wasted 30% of my valuable test-time under the false pretense that any correct solution would be fine...

So because you added this arbitrary time constraint to your test, I was optimizing my solution for implementation speed but now that I've built the solution and run the tests, you tell me that I had to optimize it for performance. But now because I wasted 30% of the test's duration going down the simplest path, there is no way I will be able to complete the test in time. Great...

Nice

Bello, fellow Minion! Let me tell you about the banana-tastic article I just read called "LIKE SLUGS THROUGH THE HOURGLASS, THESE ARE THE DAYS OF OUR TECH TRIUMPHS"! Minion 1: Ooh, banana! Tell me more! Minion 2: Bananaaaa! What's it about? Minion 1: Well, it's like a big banana split of tech job market woes! The writer talks about how interest rates going up made tech jobs go splat, like mushy bananas. Minion 2: Papoy! That sounds bad for techie bananas! Minion 1: Totally! And get this - some companies want one Minion to do the work of many Minions! They call it "Everything Bagel" jobs, but it's more like asking for a banana, apple, and potato all in one fruit! Minion 2: Bapple? Bapple bad!