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Panic at the Job Market

matt.sh

721–730 of 1001 posts

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#721
post #249

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…

It depends what dialect of C++ they are using but I believe you would need at least 3 months of hard studying to go from zero to a functioning C++ programmer.

I’ve been using C++ for over a decade and I still don’t feel like I know enough about the language. It’s a bottomless pit.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#722
post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do need at least one baker capable of drawing a valid orbital configuration. this way of thinking that contributes to such a toxic job market. there's too many people applying for too few jobs. that's it. this bullcrap about inflation, baking bread, interest rates, team building are all symptoms of entitlement. if you only had 2 applicants you wouldn't be thinking that way.

if you only had 2 applicants you wouldn't be thinking that way. Well, yes of course. As you said yourself, there's an abundance of people applying for jobs. When you have two bakers apply for your job, you'll keep things simple and hire one. When you have two hundred bakers apply for your job, you can introduce levels of complexity in the hope it will help you identify the best bakers of the 200.

> you can introduce levels of complexity

yes, which is why the job market sucks for most people. being able to do the job is no longer good enough.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#723

Agree with a lot of this and have seen a lot of similar stuff as a former developer gone cloud infra guy for most of my career now. The core problem, as he gets to in a lot of this, is that if you work on infra, you are seen as a pure cost, and not adding anything to "revenue" or "product" (which is of course false). One of the most common patterns in hiring I see now is so exasperating it drives me to despair someti…

I just had this experience a week ago. I've worked with C# commercially but for the past 4 - 5 years I've been working with TypeScript mostly.

There was a fun HR girl that sent me a message how she found my profile compelling and we should schedule an interview. I said why not. After 45 minutes of asking me all sorts of questions, she asks if I have experience with .NET 5.

I went on to tell her that for the past years I haven't worked with .NET (though this was obvious from my CV) but have worked across multiple stacks, heavy TypeScript which shares a type system and the same creator bla bla. Then she asks but have you worked with .NET 5? I told her I worked with .NET Core for personal projects, but when I was working in .NET there was no .NET 5. And she stopped it there. "I'm sorry but I don't want to waste your time, they are looking for someone with .NET 5 experience."

Honestly, it's so stupid. I have more than a decade of experience working with software, been founding engineer, CTO, not shabby at DS&A. I can't imagine what kind of company would let their talent pool be so limited by such a factor. Unless you're doing some heavy .NET voodoo, but this wasn't the case.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found a job as a developer after about 10 months of applying for 100 jobs per month. It was very weird this time round. Especially weird considering that my resume is exceptional (lots of experience; corporate, startup, back end, front end, full stack, distributed systems, open source). The list of technologies that I'm competent with is long and, for most of them, I've got open source projects to prove my claims.…

There is something off here. - 1000+ applications, 2 interviews. Holy batman. That’s what, 4+ applications a (work)day for a year straight? How do you even find these positions. - “Air tight”, god-tier CV. - Only doing “PR”s. - Handling “setInterval”s.

same... also that saying "churning out 1k lines of code per day" is automatically good... sounds like churning out 1k points of complexity every day

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#725

Sometimes I feel really bummed out I am getting 1/2 (or less?) of Google compensation. But then I open my eyes - see the workers in my daughter's kindergarten slaving away taking care of 30 toddlers for less than half what I make, nurses and doctors working in conditions I wouldn't be able to tolerate for more than a few months without mentally collapsing, the people in the supermarkets, gas stations, police, fire de…

So much this. My dad was a school caretaker, recently retired. He said how relieved he is because the work was grinding him down so much. My partner is a nurse and actually dreads going to work on a regular basis. I never dread going to work. Far from grinding me down I feel like I'm growing. I would honestly still do it even if I didn't need the money. My job gives me an outlet for something I really enjoy. A way I…

Glad to see you have a healthy perspective on this and I hope your wife will eventually find a healthcare job with better conditions. Its really quite amazing how much we depend on these people yet treat them so poorly.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#726

Sometimes I feel really bummed out I am getting 1/2 (or less?) of Google compensation. But then I open my eyes - see the workers in my daughter's kindergarten slaving away taking care of 30 toddlers for less than half what I make, nurses and doctors working in conditions I wouldn't be able to tolerate for more than a few months without mentally collapsing, the people in the supermarkets, gas stations, police, fire de…

As a Xoogler, I have to say Google isn’t what it once was. You pay for your high salary with the fact that the one thing you can be sure most people you work with care about is how much money they extract out of Google and how they could get more. Taking care of toddlers is ostensibly a better use of the one life you get.

> Taking care of toddlers is ostensibly a better use of the one life you get.

sounds like an extremely subjective assertion. Unless you have a well-off partner/family, it's possible and maybe not even uncommon to be very miserable taking care of toddlers and maxing out around minimum wage for life.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#727
post #454

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…

Don't mean to be rude, but does the job posting list a competitive salary? Now that they're required to list salaries in coastal states I filter for that while searching and don't even consider jobs paying under $[threshold]k.

Very competitive. In the top 10% of developer salaries. This is in Poland.

Btw your question was fair. Thank you for asking to clarify the context.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#728

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…

> It seems the candidates mostly have experience with loading data from one data source, doing some transformation with no regard for performance, calling APIs, and storing data into another data source. You may not like it, but for the vast majority of programming jobs globally, that is pretty much the whole job.

You are correct. There is a need for that kind of work.

I wish there was a way to differentiate these different kinds of develops. Perhaps “integrations developer” vs “software engineer.”

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#729
post #287
post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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…

I LOL’ed at “because I don't use react angles or something”

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#730
post #692

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…

HashMap > - you meant to say Multimap right? :)

Out of the 200 or so people I interviewed where I posed this question, only one went with Multimap.

You’re hired. :)

Kidding aside, going with a map of string lists as a first iteration of a solution for this is perfectly fine. The followup is to optimized the algo for space and time, and there are intuitive steps if you implement it as a map of lists.

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