Panic at the Job Market • Hacker News Board

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#941

Post by TranquilMarmot » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 5:04 PM UTC

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #34

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…

Brave new world man. I am lucky I am where I am, but I am wondering how far away from the axe I currently stand. They need me now.. because we are in the midst of high stakes project, but later..

I got laid off for the first time in my life last year and spent three months doing an absolutely grueling job search. I got extremely lucky and found work eventually, but now I have that fear implanted in my brain that there's no way to know how long it will last.

Now I save as much money as I possibly can so that next time it happens, I have a comfortable amount of time to find a job.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#942

Post by Simon_ORourke » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 5:20 PM UTC

robotnikman wrote: post #523

Simon_ORourke wrote: post #497

I'm hiring two senior SWE roles right now, after many many months alternatively cajoling and threatening various VPs in my org. They kinda admitted at the start of the year we were due some headcount after some other engineers left last year... But I digress. Today alone I spent three hours going through resumes generated mostly by ChatGPT to find anyone with even sufficient experience to make it to interview. I spen…

>resumes generated mostly by ChatGPT I've been wondering how I could go about making my resume not look 'ai generated', but I'm not sure how someone would go about approaching such a problem. Best I could come up with was keeping it down to one page, and only fitting in relevant skills, keeping it 'humble' in comparison to pages among pages that something like chatGPT might generate. Unfortunately it does not seem li…

Yes, and don't list skills like git, numpy, scipy, in some massively long bullet pointed list. Two pages max. Qualifications and experience, with previous role title front and center.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#943

Post by batshit_beaver » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 5:30 PM UTC

jojobas wrote: post #689

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…

The point is never to have a working graph clusterization algo. It's to see that you not only theoretically know the difference between deque and heapq, but also know which is the right thing for a particular task you're working on. I've had people claiming 15 years of dev experience fail to find the 20th last comma in a file and not even being close after an hour. You only start getting it once you see how bad 9 out…

Is it that they're bad, or is it that your tests stumble upon a small area in the huge realm of software engineering that those particular engineers struggled with on those particular days? Or, if you're asking these people the same group of questions and seeing a 90% failure rate, maybe your chosen questions have little overlap with common engineering tasks?

Why is it so hard to believe that even after 15 years of producing useful, quality software someone might still struggle with a random problem in an interview setting? What level of arrogance leads to this holier than thou thinking?

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#944

Post by randomdata » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 6:12 PM UTC

lovich wrote: post #25

I generally like the article but the author seems to have a really inflated view of what jobs are paying. At one point he’s claiming that a stable non tech company like a tractor manufacturer is paying 5k-10k. Even assuming that’s including taxes so divide by two, and constraining to just software employees for that claim. There is no way the average pay is nearly a million a year. The average software engineer in th…

> At one point he’s claiming that a stable non tech company like a tractor manufacturer is paying 5k-10k.

Seems a bit strange to call the tractor manufacturers non-tech companies. The modern tractor you can see is essentially just a case around what is a rather advanced computer. Hell, the Right to Repair topic that has garnered attention in semi-recent times centres specifically around tractors having become computers. What is tech if not that?

Sure, the typical worker – even when constraining to software engineers – isn't making anywhere near that much (nor are they at any company, not even FAANG), but it is likely that certain key players are.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#945

Post by whoknowsidont » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 7:12 PM UTC

phpnode wrote: post #884

The author of this article has a reputation for an incredible sense of self-entitlement, he's the person who tried to do a hostile takeover of Redis after making a few minor contributions[0]. In light of that it's not too surprising that he's finding it difficult to find a job that meets his expectations. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9176800

They were not minor. What are you talking about?

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#946

Post by helicalmix » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 7:36 PM UTC

solidsnack9000 wrote: post #931

lmm wrote: post #512

Just like "if it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid", if you were smart enough to see all the problems in all your past jobs but those companies still went bankrupt, maybe you weren't actually the ideal employee you think you are. And if programming interviews are beneath you and only passed by your inferiors but you can't pay rent, maybe they're not actually so far beneath you. Using your l33t knowledge of AWS t…

What is the McKinsey parable?

https://www.nycp.com/elements/HA1/1345

Basically, in business and life, if you're too in love with craftsmanship of a specific function, but can't relate that well to the general goal, you're more of a liability than an asset.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#947

Post by Willish42 » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 7:45 PM UTC

This author strikes me as one of the greatest "counter examples" for our hiring system. They sound more useful and experienced (IMO) than myself and most coworkers I know, and I think most companies would be lucky to have them. Dark times we're in... darker times ahead.
> How do we try to exist when we need income, but almost all jobs have become impossible fantasy roles overloaded with divergent tasks trying to cram 5 departments worth of concurrent work into single people? Is it time to rip up our tech industry membership cards and just leave all the roles to overworked amateurs who only know the broken world since they haven’t ever seen a functioning company with professionals in single-purpose professional roles? I don’t know anymore.
Nailed it! I think the cynical answer here is obviously "yes". This was a problem 10 years ago and continues to get worse, not better. After layoffs and outages and enshittification, it all seems to be "holding together", so I'm truly not sure what the "breaking point" is. Probably social revolution or labor camps (half kidding).
> The tech roles at most companies are completely busted it seems. I didn’t sign up to be a “software servant” to non-technical product teams who just define tasks and priorities for actually capable people to implement every day. Somewhere along the way the entire industry lost its heart and now most companies are more interested in “playing company” instead of actually carving out created creative contraptions? There is a thing called “Engineering-led management” where, imagine this, the people doing the work are also the ones defining the product and talking to users and defining requirements while implementing features all themselves. You can’t create good products if you have less capable “product idea people” controlling implementation capability. Office Space wasn’t supposed to be our destiny.
This was probably my favorite part. As one of the "5+ years at " people, this is inescapable in my experience "from the inside". I'll also note I don't make $5-10k per day like the author assumes, nor do any of my peers, even the "extremely highly paid" ones. The peak is mostly $2-4k per day but most people make 0.5-1k per day. I highly recommend http://levels.fyi as a reference for these types of data points.

- or not, from comments they seem to have a bit of a "reputation" in the redis community. I don't have time to figure out how veritable these claims are. At a minimum they sound experienced and talented enough to get into one of these high paying tech firms they seem to not be able to get into. I don't think it's indicative of an "individual problem" in the current environment.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#948

Post by johnnyanmac » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 10:08 PM UTC

tzs wrote: post #578

melbourne_mat wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my country, last year it was definitely a candidate's market: I had recruiters reaching out all the time and I got the first job I applied for. This month I've been applying for jobs and not getting interviews. From the conversations I've had it seems recruiters want someone who has an exact skill match for the job. They don't care what else you have done or how many years you have under your belt it's gotta be th…

If the internet is to be believed the average software engineer changes jobs every couple of years. If that's true it makes some sense for a company to want to only hire people whose skills exactly match the specific thing they are hiring them to work on. If they only think the new hire is not going to be around long term why put resources into teaching them new skills?

>it makes some sense for a company to want to only hire people whose skills exactly match the specific thing they are hiring them to work on

The good ol' "10 years of experience in Swift" approach... Though that joke is so old now that it probably is possible to legitimately have that.

That approach would make sense if the requirements seemed possible to begin with. And the salary was enough to attract that kind of niche talent. You're basically asking for a consultant for an employee's salary at that point.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#949

Post by johnnyanmac » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 10:13 PM UTC

jen729w wrote: post #749

bmitc wrote: 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 lifetime contractor, I felt this all the time. So I spoke to the boss of one of the recruitment agencies and said, hey. Isn’t this a job I’d be good at? Recruiting? Because I actually know what the hell I’m on about? And he said, sure, and I’d hire you! But you’d be bored to death within a week because every day is exactly the same.

The older I get, the less I understand the "you'd be bored" excuse for not hiring someone. Is that boss really jumping out of bed every morning excited to talk to more candidates of varying quality and moving them into other, mostly boring, companies. And have boring meetings about what metrics to hit?

Restraint and overcoming boredom is one of the basic essences of growing up. You'd think management would understand this.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#950

Post by mtoohig » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 11:04 PM UTC

Simon_ORourke wrote: post #497

I'm hiring two senior SWE roles right now, after many many months alternatively cajoling and threatening various VPs in my org. They kinda admitted at the start of the year we were due some headcount after some other engineers left last year... But I digress. Today alone I spent three hours going through resumes generated mostly by ChatGPT to find anyone with even sufficient experience to make it to interview. I spen…

Hello, I'm looking for a senior SWE role may I submit a resume to you. I wrote it myself without chatGPT :) but I would be curious if I appear like some who does use chatGPT.

https://michaeltoohig.com/michael-toohig-resume.pdf