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Panic at the Job Market

matt.sh

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Re: Panic at the Job Market

#921

Post by rprospero »

darth_avocado wrote: post #442
Aurornis wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most jobs are now hoops after hoops, not taking into consideration your particular profile or the contributions you can make. I’ve done some mentoring of CS grads for the past few years. We some times get people with unreasonable interview demands, like companies asking them to make an entire app or website for the interview process. We advise them to decline the really excessive ones. However, it’s rare to see tha…

> I think the expectations for interviews became really distorted during the period a few years ago when some companies were hiring anyone willing to do a short interview. I find this whole thread really enlightening. As someone who has been trying to move around in tech in the Bay Area, outside of Amazon who hired en masse, most companies have had 6-8 interviews as a standard hiring process for almost the last entir…

I also find this thread interesting from the opposite direction as someone not in the Bay Area. In the past ten years, the longest job interview I had was two hours long. Honestly, most of the interviews I've been in (on both sides of the table) have been closer to half an hour.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#922

Post by ai4ever »

williamDafoe wrote: post #459
jldugger wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have many friends (in Europe) EU kind of in a recession though. And there's a well known link between interest rates and unemployment. So it's really not surprising to hear that employment in the EU is harder after the ECB raised rates. And good news: they're lowering them now. What really needs explaining is why, despite the unusually strong general US job market[1] for several years now, the US tech market spec…

Three reasons for techmageddon right now. (1) USA had a boomer savings bubble 2010-2022 with boomers in the peak savings years of their lives, resulting in the lowest interest rates in a century, never to return, (2) Covid19 created a work from home and therefore tech bubble, pulling lots of demand forward, (c) IMHO after a decade of lies from FAANGs about how easy it is to get a $200k salary, and how easy it is to s…

Being an old-timer in the valley, I was shocked to see the pay-packages from FANGs starting in about 2012 or so when facebook went IPO.

The monopolies and new-age SAAS companies (meta,google,netflix, salesforce, servicenow) went crazy in the comp for sw engineers, and the others had to play catchup. Specifically, the companies used RSUs which could be hidden in non-gaap earnings statements. gaap earnings were ignored in the zero-interest era for high growth sw firms.

The more established (low-growth) firms from a previous era (cisco, ibm, hp) saw the unsustainability of the comp structure, but could not do anything.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#923

Post by ivandenysov »

Etheryte wrote: post #800
voiceblue wrote: post #715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You know that feeling you get when you see a screaming toddler board a plane? Now imagine that's your work, times a dozen, eight hours a day, every day.

I sometimes also want to scream after going through passport control and security check. That doesn’t mean I would scream the whole time if a nice lady took care of me and 29 other grown up people

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#924

Post by lnxg33k1 »

engineer_22 wrote: post #898
lnxg33k1 wrote: post #858

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have to complain about people who are exploiting all of us, instead of looking at the people in the kindergarten look at people like Elon musk stealing billions

Psst... it's the government

No, this is Patrick

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#925

Post by 7thpower »

mr90210 wrote: post #569
7thpower wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I am doing right now. I don’t want to risk part timing it, not finding something (been at this a whole week) and then wondering “what if I squandered my time?”. Sadly I’m forgoing working on my startup because I just enjoy it too much and won’t make progress on getting a role, but themes the brakes!

I am in the same boat. Btw, what are you working on?

Working on a product comparison platform that automates a lot of sorting through different self published content.

It’s rough but seem to like it so far and I like working on it. Feel free to hit me up on X if you are working on something you’d like to share or have questions!

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#926

Post by scottLobster »

PheonixPharts wrote: post #405
scottLobster wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's coding interviews and coding interviews. Asking basic questions that will be directly applicable to the job? Sure Filtering for basic knowledge to make sure the candidate isn't lying about their experience? Sure. Examining my thought process and producing working code is a nice-to-have? Sure. Asking me to solve an extremely esoteric problem that has zero relevance to my day-to-day and if the solution I come u…

> Asking me to solve an extremely esoteric problem that has zero relevance to my day-to-day I'm always surprised how useless something is when I don't know it, and suddenly once I do know it, I solve lots of problems with it! I've heard programmers grumble about how useless calculus is, before I learned calc I used to grumble about that too. After I learned it there were countless problems I unlocked solutions for by…

That section was less complaining about the nature of the problem and more about the harshness of judging the solution. The irrelevance to day-to-day work merely emphasizes the unfairness of the judgement.

If I'm put on the spot, under time pressure, to solve a problem I've never seen before and will likely never see again on the job, AND you reject me because my solution was slightly incorrect or naive, well it's obvious what the nature of the job is at that point. You're filtering for candidates that can and will devote dozens of hours to Cracking the Coding Interview and LeetCode. Sorry, I have a full-time engineering job and two young kids, and you clearly don't value my capabilities or experience or time, you value my willingness to spend my extremely limited free time studying to ace your half-baked engineering IQ test, for the honor of possibly working for you.

I once had a company cancel a scheduled interview when I informed them I had received an offer from another company, but was more interested in them and was wondering if I could step up the interview schedule. They told me unless I was willing to reject the existing offer and submit to their multi-week interview process we couldn't move forward. Esoteric, irrelevant algorithm questions with strict judgements are just a different version of that same arrogance.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#927

Post by scottLobster »

sealeck wrote: post #908
scottLobster wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's coding interviews and coding interviews. Asking basic questions that will be directly applicable to the job? Sure Filtering for basic knowledge to make sure the candidate isn't lying about their experience? Sure. Examining my thought process and producing working code is a nice-to-have? Sure. Asking me to solve an extremely esoteric problem that has zero relevance to my day-to-day and if the solution I come u…

> Asking me to solve an extremely esoteric problem that has zero relevance to my day-to-day and if the solution I come up with on the spot under time pressure is incorrect or even just not the most efficient I'm rejected? At that point you're just filtering for starry-eyed recent grads you can underpay. Eh I think it's fine to try to find people who are interested in solving problems and will give any maths problem a…

I'll give anything a go, I just expect my solution to not be harshly judged in the context of a job interview.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#928

Post by [deleted] »

486sx33 wrote: post #507

In a market with a population of 150k. I ran a job ad and got 292 applicants in under 24 hrs 2 years ago, I’d be lucky to get 8 applicants in a week, with probably 4-6 of those living in India or Pakistan with no way to North America So it’s an absolutely exponential job market crash. Most are sitting tight currently, no one wants to play musical chairs and be left standing.

[deleted]

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#929

Post by shagie »

bedobi wrote: post #151
Peroni wrote: post #86

Hiring people (mostly engineers) has been my full-time job now for about 15 years and I found myself emphatically agreeing with a lot of Matt's criticisms of modern hiring. Most tech interviews are as relevant to job performance as if hiring a baker required interviewing them about how electron orbitals bind worked gluten together then rejecting bakers who don’t immediately draw a valid orbital configuration. Matt's…

except that referral hiring isn't a thing almost anywhere I know because I've referred people I KNOW are great SE's and I'm literally willing to vouch my own employment for, and they still get treated no different to any other candidate

Back in the '00s, referrals were a bonus if they were able to hire the person away from their current employer. I was a referral from a person who I regularly met at the Irish pub in Mountain View (the SGI / Netapp thirsty Thursday - one was on the decline while the other was on the way up). When the $1000 went through, a round of drinks was bought for the group.

Now it seems that referrals are a "You want a referral? Like me on Linked In and I'll put your name in."

Instead of a few high quality referrals over the course of a year it is dozens of people trying to skip the first filter a month.

I am *NOT* advocating this and think its the problem with why referral hiring isn't a thing - https://www.tryexponent.com/jobs/referrals

And with that - it's why a referral is no different than any other send an application in anymore.

How does HR separate the "I know this person and have worked with them before" from "this person messaged me on Linked In because I worked here"?

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#930

Post by shadowgovt »

bmitc wrote: post #249
evrimoztamur wrote: post #23

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…

In C++ in particular... Yes. A lack of recent C++ experience is a real hindrance.

The spec is longer than double the King James Bible, and depending on what firm you're working with various parts of the language are either banned or best practice. These days I don't generally find that familiarity with any other language (including C++ from 10 years ago) translates well to fluency with modern C++.

Of course, I solve this problem by avoiding the language like the plague, because why do I want to write code in a language that I'm going to have to work that hard to find developers to extend and maintain?

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