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Panic at the Job Market

matt.sh

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Re: Panic at the Job Market

#951

Post by ryandrake »

knallfrosch wrote: post #781
ThalesX wrote: post #723

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 year…

The trick is to say that you do have .NET 5 experience. That 25 yo female recruiter hired for looks won't be able to stop you. You'll then get an invite to the technical interview where you can talk to people who actually know whether C+ exists.

Yea, it's gotten to the point where you just have to say "YES" to every obvious gatekeeping/filtering question. Whatever it takes to get to the next gate. Out of 10 written job requirements, only 1, maybe 2 are actual dealbreakers. If the job really requires specifically .NET 5, then the technical interviews will grill you on it, and you'd fail for the right reasons.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#952

Post by [deleted] »

levlaz wrote: post #443
silenced_trope wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Behavioral interviews seem like the new way to reject candidates based on "culture" without saying that though, because saying a candidate was rejected due to "culture incompatibility" can be taken as a bias or discrimination. I interviewed at Netflix. The market is tough right now and they pay really well. I really wanted to pass. I did great on their tech rounds. Their "culture round" is notoriously hard, people th…

Apologies if I am misreading you, but the fact that you keep putting culture and EQ into quotes signals to me that you think these are not important things. If that is the case, then yes, your EQ is bad.

[deleted]

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#953

Post by xcv123 »

levlaz wrote: post #443
silenced_trope wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Behavioral interviews seem like the new way to reject candidates based on "culture" without saying that though, because saying a candidate was rejected due to "culture incompatibility" can be taken as a bias or discrimination. I interviewed at Netflix. The market is tough right now and they pay really well. I really wanted to pass. I did great on their tech rounds. Their "culture round" is notoriously hard, people th…

Apologies if I am misreading you, but the fact that you keep putting culture and EQ into quotes signals to me that you think these are not important things. If that is the case, then yes, your EQ is bad.

The quotes indicate the subjectivity and lack of transparency in how "culture" and "EQ" are evaluated.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#954

Post by ryandrake »

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…

> I've been wondering how I could go about making my resume not look 'ai generated'

Just add "but write it in such a way that it doesn't look like ChatGPT wrote it." to the end of your prompt.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#955

Post by ryandrake »

simoncion wrote: post #629
theredsix wrote: post #448

The author's tone is condescending, angry and entitled. If everyday interactions with him followed the same tone, I would argue that he is the exact type of person behavioral interviews are meant to screen out (technically competent but a nightmare to work with).

If this guy has reasonable technical chops, he seems like someone who would be great to work with. It's always, always good to have people in your group who are willing to call a steaming shitpile a steaming shitpile. It's also always good to have people in your group who can fairly rapidly turn a steaming shitpile into something that's fit for purpose and reasonably maintainable.

> It's always, always good to have people in your group who are willing to call a steaming shitpile a steaming shitpile.

A lot of companies really don't want that. They'd rather someone who will say, in Bill Lumbergh's voice "Yeaaaaaaa, I think we ought to maybe workshop that a bit, okay?"

Saying "This code is no good and I'm not going to continue the review" will not pass muster at any modern American office where everyone is expected to wear a positivity-mask.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#956

Post by hoosieree »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #425
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…

I've helped hire three different developers where I work now, and been a part of countless interviews. I've found it much more beneficial to look for people who think like programmers than know any given language. Unless you're talking really specific, deep stuff in a given language, the syntax and whatnot are trainable. What you can't really train people to do is take a large task that we want our software to accomp…

I feel like this is a pretty common opinion among HN comments, and yet the vast majority of interviews follow the known-bad pattern instead.

Are HN commenters simply too rare to make a dent in the larger hiring landscape, or are they not walking the talk?

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#957

Post by avidphantasm »

dennis_jeeves2 wrote: post #828
avidphantasm wrote: post #812

If you look outside of “tech” companies, you can find pockets of high demand for software engineers. I work in hydrography and private companies and government agencies in this field are starving for good software engineers. The pay is decent (though not as good as FAANG or maybe even some start-ups of yore), but more importantly the work is really interesting.

>If you look outside of “tech” companies, you can find pockets of high demand for software engineers. List them please, I cannot find them.

Don't want to name particular firms, but they can found at places like these: https://www.thsoa.org, https://chc2024.org/en/about/partners, https://www.hydro-international.com/members.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#958

Post by phlakaton »

red_admiral wrote: post #758

> A secondary goal of the “behavioral interview” is personality homogenization where companies want to enforce not hiring anybody “too different” from their current mean personality engram. Yet, the tech industry is historically full of weird divergent people doing great things for their own reasons (though, due to just basic population growth over the past 20 years, there are tens of millions more “normie computer p…

I did get told at one gig that I was almost not hired for the sin of showing up to the interview in a black collared shirt and jeans. They might have been taking the mickey out of me, though.

I mean, I thought it was the Silly Valley dress code! Heck, I'm pretty sure I wore sandals with socks!

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#959

Post by synicalx »

voiceblue wrote: post #715
weatherlite wrote: post #701

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.

> 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.

That's every job though, right? I only work because my employer pays me and either them or someone else will probably pay me more in the future. I'm not here because I just LOVE writing code for someone else, I'm here because I like money and want lots of it.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#960

Post by xp84 »

nickff wrote: post #94
kredd wrote: post #64

It really sucks right now, but recent grads and juniors are suffering the most right now, to my understanding. There's an over-production of CS grads, as the industry looked very lucrative, so a lot of people decided to go software engineering route. It's hard to make a case for start ups to bet on inexperienced people. For mature companies, why pay for 2 juniors, when you can get a senior for 1.5 price, who might do…

> ” It's hard to make a case for start ups to bet on inexperienced people. For mature companies, why pay for 2 juniors, when you can get a senior for 1.5 price, who might do the same work. In the previous years even C-level companies had internship-to-full-time pipelines, but now it looks more scarce.” I agree with you, and think the value proposition for these companies to hire junior talent is especially unappealin…

Not to mention ai. Copilot works much better for the kind of things I would have asked an inexperienced developer to do: very well defined and documented tasks that aren’t too esoteric or requiring of obscure company-specific domain knowledge.

While it’s true that some of those green juniors would mature into tomorrow’s seniors, who can do things that Copilot can’t (yet?) the short-term mindset that rules business makes it hard to justify hiring these entry level positions, sadly.

I really feel for the young people who made a completely rational decision in 2019 to get a cs degree and be a developer. They really didn’t expect this.

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