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Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?

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661–670 of 1001 posts

Re: Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?

#661

Everyone wants to work remotely. But that means now you are probably competing with hundreds of other applicants for any halfway interesting job.

And many of them for a lot less TC

Yep, exactly. I've known some really great devs who lived in the midwest, and didn't want to move to the coasts. They're totally okay with half the comp someone would look for in one of the big cities.

Re: Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?

#662

I've gotten plenty, though I am a decent bit more senior than you. It's very hard to get an offer right now, but for sure you can get interviews. I think I've interviewed with ~10 companies for positions since June, and all passed on me, but it's mostly because I didn't take the time required to prepare. In hindsight nobody asked anything _super_ hard, but you cannot make a single mistake, or a suboptimal solution, o…

This is exaggerated, we just hired someone and don't give these kinds of tests or expect this level of correctness. I feel like this is fed by anxiety. I really doubt a large amount of ordinary companies have switched to FAANG leetcode + system design interview formats because of a downtown.

Everyone uses the FAANG loop + system design + leetcode design now

I don't know when that change happened but it is practically universal

Re: Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?

#663

It's not a good job market, but it doesn't seem normal to spend six months applying and only get _one_ interview. It might be worth asking friends or former colleagues, ideally people who actually are involved in recruiting (hiring managers etc) to take a look at your resume and LinkedIn profile and see if there's anything glaringly wrong with them. Is your resume in a weird format, or is it structurally weird/overde…

I haven't looked for jobs in nearly 9 years now. Is a LinkedIn profile essential nowadays? I have dropped all social media and LinkedIn is one of the most invasive. I really dislike how it notifies you for everything

A linkedin profile isn’t essential, I last moved jobs less than a year ago and discovered I had an incredibly out of date profile when somebody mentioned they had searched for me and couldn’t find me on there.

I did however have talks and interviews on podcasts and other things they could find, and a history of things I’ve worked on which I can talk about, and a previous colleague had referred me so I already had an in.

Re: Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?

#664
post #2

I've had similar issues - so much so that I've created Resgen[0] just because it was tough getting call backs. It turns out I really needed to tailor my resume to each job and it resulted in a lot more call backs. [0] https://resgen.app

i've bookmarked ResGen in case i ever become desperate / crazy enough to rejoin the working class. But may I just say sir, I LOVE your lightweight pixel inspired web page -- so clean! We need more sites like this, well organized and thoughtful without the clutter

Pixel inspired? I think it looks like a Lichtenstein painting. Neat.

Re: Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?

#665
post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> whereas everyone else would call that person a junior engineer. Does anyone have advice on what I should call myself? I was a senior in public accounting (~3 years of experience) when I switched into software development after self-teaching for 5 years on the side. I settled for an entry-level role to get my foot in the door, but after 7 months I was made the lead of one of a few teams with the rest being led by pr…

Possibly "Engineering Manager"

Not with 2 people, and it's not even clear if they are their line managers and manage them in terms of promotions, raises, hiring and so on.

Re: Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?

#666

I've gotten plenty, though I am a decent bit more senior than you. It's very hard to get an offer right now, but for sure you can get interviews. I think I've interviewed with ~10 companies for positions since June, and all passed on me, but it's mostly because I didn't take the time required to prepare. In hindsight nobody asked anything _super_ hard, but you cannot make a single mistake, or a suboptimal solution, o…

At my job I created a slack bot that posts a daily random leetcode challenge every morning (easy and medium difficulty only, for now). It's there for fun because we're a team of devs who love coding. But I also created it so I can practice every day just in case I get laid off (we had 2 rounds of layoffs within a year).

But honestly, I'd still enjoy the daily challenge either way

Re: Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?

#667
post #602

As someone on the other side, with open positions we're hiring for: There are probably fewer job openings than there were, but I don't think my company or anyone in my network have changed HOW they're hiring, but we have definitely noticed a huge uptick in volume of applications. Earlier in the year, we were getting almost nothing. Now we're getting hundreds of resumes a week for each open position, and the bulk of e…

> bulk of each one of those resumes do not come close to even being in conversation range of the posted JD

I've wondered about that. Sometimes I see jobs that sounds super interesting, but I only match maybe 50% of the unique bits of experience they want. Then I see 200 applicants and think ... how many people are just applying for the hell of it, because the job sounds cool, even though they have none of the right experience?

Re: Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?

#668
post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> whereas everyone else would call that person a junior engineer. Does anyone have advice on what I should call myself? I was a senior in public accounting (~3 years of experience) when I switched into software development after self-teaching for 5 years on the side. I settled for an entry-level role to get my foot in the door, but after 7 months I was made the lead of one of a few teams with the rest being led by pr…

Possibly "Engineering Manager"

That’s a good thought, but I do want to stay on the technical side for now. Perhaps that would be to my detriment, but I find the actual developing and problem solving so exciting! The company said they needed an in-house invoicing system, and I had a blast designing it, creating it, and finally delivering it this past week.

Re: Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?

#669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have been diagnosed with ADHD this year. How do I best tell prospective employers I might need some accommodation in this process? As someone who was diagnosed with ADHD a decade-and-a-half ago in my 20s: You don't. You don't even think about using your diagnosis as an excuse or a shield for behavior that is unacceptable. You never consider thinking that you deserve special treatment because you were diagnosed wi…

I see ADHD as a trait. It's only a disability if it holds you back. It's akin to multi-threading; there's more complexity, and risk of thrashing, BUT when managed properly the parallel-processing can be a significant advantage compared to neurotypical minds.

Hmm, which advantages does ADHD give you in the workplace?

Re: Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?

#670

I've gotten plenty, though I am a decent bit more senior than you. It's very hard to get an offer right now, but for sure you can get interviews. I think I've interviewed with ~10 companies for positions since June, and all passed on me, but it's mostly because I didn't take the time required to prepare. In hindsight nobody asked anything _super_ hard, but you cannot make a single mistake, or a suboptimal solution, o…

> I've started grinding leetcode, reviewing system design, and behavioral questions. You MUST memorize perfect responses to regurgitate as fast as possible on the interview. Again, you cannot afford a single mistake in process right now or they will pass on you. I'm not discounting that it is hard to find tech jobs right now, but have you considered that this attitude of "grinding leetcode" is possibly contributing t…

No, the first round is usually a timed coding interview where the goal is to get an optimal solution as fast as possible. You should not be talking much with the interviewer. The intro (if there is one) is a quick exchange of names and last job worked at, then immediately diving into coding problem. You cannot start with a naive solution, interviewer will ask you to skip and go straight to optimal (this happened to me more than once). If you solve that, they ask followup questions to probe your knowledge, and if you beat that, you get a second problem.

After that might be more rounds of coding, system design, and hiring manager interview.

The part where you can be charismatic is once you pass the initial technical bar(s). The talking/behavior is a later point in time and is relatively easy IMO.

Examples of questions I've been asked:

1) https://leetcode.com/problems/non-overlapping-intervals/

2) https://leetcode.com/problems/design-add-and-search-words-da...

3) https://leetcode.com/problems/detect-cycles-in-2d-grid/

4) https://leetcode.com/problems/evaluate-reverse-polish-notati...

5) https://leetcode.com/problems/word-search/

So nothing too hard but you have to instantly solve it, and optimally. The hardest one I got was some type of AI search problem, where you have to find a way to navigate obstacles in a 2d grid, and another geometry problem I've not seen before.

Along with this questions like: what pitfalls arise in concurrency? Explain how you would design a pointer type that can be shared between threads, what is epoll? How do you debug a distributed system? etc.

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