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2500 Job apps, 46 interviews, 1 offer

teamblind.com

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Re: 2500 Job apps, 46 interviews, 1 offer

#61

Post by carabiner »

buildbot wrote: post #36

Have I been incredibly lucky my entire career? I don't think I've applied for more than 10 jobs at once. I have heard stories like this before - maybe the market has shifted drastically, or maybe spamming 2500 applications means each one is ... less good than one might think? Tailoring your application to each job has worked well for me at least. 46 Interviews is also a huge amount. I've done less than that my entire…

2500 apps is with his wife and brother helping. 46 phone screens out of that, a 1.8% conversion rate, is totally realistic. My rate was 6% but I was very targeted. I had 32 phone screens. These usually only take 30 minutes and don't require much prep.

> maybe the market has shifted drastically

You're catching on. This is the worst job market in 20 years, far worse than the 2009 recession. In 2009, tons of college kids were still getting in Amazon but new grads today are struggling to find anything. This is a tectonic shift causing mountains to crumble, and we will be feeling the effects for decades.

Re: 2500 Job apps, 46 interviews, 1 offer

#62

Post by carabiner »

vsareto wrote: post #38
buildbot wrote: post #36

Have I been incredibly lucky my entire career? I don't think I've applied for more than 10 jobs at once. I have heard stories like this before - maybe the market has shifted drastically, or maybe spamming 2500 applications means each one is ... less good than one might think? Tailoring your application to each job has worked well for me at least. 46 Interviews is also a huge amount. I've done less than that my entire…

>I agree with others, something else may be off here. IMO Blind is generally full of shit

IMO it's the best tech career advice you can find on the internet. Literally life changing for so many people, search "thank you blind."

Re: 2500 Job apps, 46 interviews, 1 offer

#63

Post by javajosh »

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…

Out of (morbid) curiosity - what was his objection to using a debugger?

Re: 2500 Job apps, 46 interviews, 1 offer

#64

Post by vehementi »

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…

Probably a sign of the previous bad overhiring, and title inflation as you point out. Not so much the job market as a shitty company

Re: 2500 Job apps, 46 interviews, 1 offer

#65

Post by bamfly »

commandlinefan wrote: post #42
buildbot wrote: post #36

Have I been incredibly lucky my entire career? I don't think I've applied for more than 10 jobs at once. I have heard stories like this before - maybe the market has shifted drastically, or maybe spamming 2500 applications means each one is ... less good than one might think? Tailoring your application to each job has worked well for me at least. 46 Interviews is also a huge amount. I've done less than that my entire…

> 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 application count in a given search has ever come very close to 10, let alone 100 or 1,000. Or, the last couple times, I've just gone, "yo, I'm looking" and had someone in my network hand me a job (I get that's a later-career thing—but my early-career searches never, ever looked like these application-gauntlets, either).

I doubt I've sent 50 total applications in a 20+ year career, which career includes most of the usual job-hopping-for-more-pay, so it's not because I'm doing very-long stints with single employers.

Re: 2500 Job apps, 46 interviews, 1 offer

#66

Post by vehementi »

buildbot wrote: post #36

Have I been incredibly lucky my entire career? I don't think I've applied for more than 10 jobs at once. I have heard stories like this before - maybe the market has shifted drastically, or maybe spamming 2500 applications means each one is ... less good than one might think? Tailoring your application to each job has worked well for me at least. 46 Interviews is also a huge amount. I've done less than that my entire…

Yeah I'd love to see what the conversion rate is on actual referrals.

Re: 2500 Job apps, 46 interviews, 1 offer

#67

Post by rickreynoldssf »

javajosh wrote: post #63
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…

Out of (morbid) curiosity - what was his objection to using a debugger?

Just that I used it at all. There's a contingent of engineers who feel using a debugger is a waste of time and or a sign of weakness. They're the ones who like to stare at code and "run it in their heads" and dump crazy amounts of "got here" into the logs. Evidently this guy is one of them.

Re: 2500 Job apps, 46 interviews, 1 offer

#68

Post by geysersam »

javajosh wrote: post #63
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…

Out of (morbid) curiosity - what was his objection to using a debugger?

Isn't it obvious?

Using a debugger implies that you expect the code you write to have bugs. Not a mindset I'd like my coworkers to have.

Re: 2500 Job apps, 46 interviews, 1 offer

#69

Post by titanomachy »

Product manager is an unusual role. There are few positions, making it very competitive. It's also an expensive role to interview and hire for, and the consequences of a bad hire are high.

The market dynamics are totally different from software engineering. PM positions come up infrequently and they're often looking for someone quite specific. Prestige also seems to factor into it a lot: I think every PM I've worked with has had a Stanford or Harvard MBA.

My recent experience as a senior engineer was less gloomy than this. I applied to ~10 open positions whose needs matched my experience well, was offered an interview at 5, and did 2 full interviews which both resulted in decent offers. My comp decreased slightly (from FAANG-level) but was still reasonable. I also applied to ~5 companies that I knew were a long shot (i.e. no well-matched positions, or significantly more competitive than Google/Meta) and heard back from none of them.

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