Finding a new software developer job

For a typical job there were four or five interviews: an initial interview with a recruiter, an interview with a hiring manager, one or two technical interviews (either live coding, or going through a take-home assignment). There could also be an interview with a product manager, and/or one with a CTO or founder. All in all, quite a time commitment.

This is not news at this point, but it is pretty crazy.

That's not crazy. Some of these are probably what 30 minutes? Tech interviews 60 mins? So what, five hours?

Remember when on-site interviews meant an hour total commute plus say six hours of total interview plus lunch event. Some high demand companies put candidates through more than one round of that. Not to mention if you were flying from out of town... I remember a friend who interviewed with Google and got stuck in SF for three weeks due to snow storms on the east coast and got fired from Accenture as a result.

Compared to this four-six hours scheduled at your leisure seems great, even if fragmented over a few days

I remember when on-site interviews were an hour and that was it. All this stuff companies do now is insane. If a person isn't performant, you'll know within 30 days, but you'll never know by interviewing them.

I haven't had to cold interview in 20+ years. I hope I never have to based on how it works now. I get all my jobs from previous colleagues. Companies are closing the door to a lot of great talent based on this silliness, but they'll never learn.

Sometimes you’ll know during interviews. A long time ago, I interviewed someone who claimed something like 5+ years of Java development, and literally couldn’t write:

class Foo {

}

On the whiteboard.

In any context.

That one saved us a lot of time.

It wasn’t some weird out of context thing either, he just literally didn’t know how to write Java at all. Even approximately.

Yes, but you knew that within 1 hour. It (hopefully) didn't take you 6 hours to realize this person was a dud.

Of course. I apologized for wasting their time and walked them out within 30 minutes. They had clearly flat out lied about their qualifications.

I also got lectured by senior management for exposing them to liability since I didn’t ’go through the whole process’.

And this was a middle aged white dude candidate, a small company, and about 20 years ago.

The risk tolerance has only decreased since then.

I also got lectured by senior management for exposing them to liability since I didn’t ’go through the whole process’.

I work in an "at will" state. Our 3 people are usually on teams chatting about the interview going on and will decide to end it early and not waste everyone's time if it's not going well. We've never had anyone tell us they were concerned about that. What liability was senior management at your company concerned about?

The same one FAANG used to tell us that we couldn't do it either.

To paraphase "We want to give the candidate every chance to prove themselves, and cutting the interview short gives them a bad impression of the company (and it would make it easier to sue us for unfair discrimination)."

Since it was just a few (or in this case 1) interviews, and that makes it easier to claim that I cut it short because queue whatever protected class. Which, if someone was going to be that kind of jerk to a candidate, I guess doing it on the first interview WOULD be the one, eh? It would just be my word against theirs, instead of x interviewers vs theirs.

And I guess the riskiest type of candidate for that kind of crazy behavior WOULD be the person who felt okay blatantly lying on their resume about such a fundamental fact AND EVEN SHOWING UP FOR THE INTERVIEW, come to think about it.

We didn't get sued in this case though. I think the interviewee was just surprised someone was interviewing him who actually knew how to code.

God I couldn't imagine conducting 6+ hours of interviews for a candidate I knew failed it within the first 30 minutes. Ain't nobody got time for that.

I literally couldn’t let it happen. The thought was roughly as palatable as intentionally ‘groining’ a coworker on a guardrail or letting a kid walk into traffic.

After getting chewed out, I never walked them out early though.

I guess that is why FAANG told us to not talk between ourselves and put everything into the system for the HC independently - so we wouldn’t know what we were in for, and would give each individual interview a fresh shot without all the anticipated pain and suffering. Makes it easier when you can’t see the nut shot coming I guess?

Makes sense, but yeah - terrible.

To be fair though, out of hundreds of interviews I’ve done, that was top 5ish for bad. Most were much better.

I interviewed at Google nearly 15 years ago and it was already phone screen + a marathon of on-site interviews. Maybe 4 in a row.

The problem is companies are having people run the gauntlet -- or in any case displaying a cavalier attitude about milking folks for their time and patience -- despite not offering anything comparable (in terms of intrinsic attractiveness of the role or compensation) to what FAANG-tier companies do. On top of flaky (or flakier than the used to be), sometimes weird even, communications, etc.

Most companies are not Google however. ~10 years ago when I applied for jobs in small-to-medium non-FAANG companies it was really just a 1hr onsite at most.

Ya Google kinda pioneered that. It helps that Google makes millionaires out of many of its employees over 15 years. Would you go through that process for say Baskin and Robbins corporate?

I hate the modern interview loop as much as the next person, but from a business perspective why would you want to risk 30 days of nothing vs a few extra hours to verify?

We should fix the modern interview loop (very hard) but the idea we’d ever go back to one hour is kind of out there.

That is making the assumption that any time spent over the traditional 1 hour helps you confirm whether the candidate is performant or not. I dispute that assumption and figure any time outside of that initial hour makes a hiring mistake that much more expensive.

Calculate it this way. I can spend 3x 1 hour (3 people interviewing a candidate for 1 hour) and have a 60% chance of hiring a performant person. I could also spend 3x 6 hours and have about the same chance. When that 40% non-performant candidate shows up and I have to repeat the hiring cycle, It's significantly less expensive in both labor costs and opportunity costs for the 3x1 interview style than the 3x6 interview style.

This doesn't take into account all the talent that has no need or interest to go through a 3x6 interview process (I am one of them).

the idea we’d ever go back to one hour is kind of out there.

Ya like I said, the industry just kinda does what it does, complains about not being able to find talent, and will never learn.

> I dispute that assumption and figure any time outside of that initial hour makes a hiring mistake that much more expensive.

Okay, sure - dispute it if you want. It doesn't change the fact that the industry seemingly collectively decided that 1 hour isn't a sufficient amount of time to gauge fit/effectiveness/etc.

My point to you is that given the above, you have to make a choice. Spending the extra few hours gives you some hopeful assurance of what you're getting.

I once again will note it's not a good system, but there is to date seemingly no widely agreed upon good system.

Microsoft in the early 90s was a half day of onsite interviews with 5 or 6 people, plus lunch. And this was for a summer internship.

I remember a friend who interviewed with Google and got stuck in SF for three weeks due to snow storms on the east coast

This is literally unbelievable. I cannot remember a time when the east coast was inaccessible for three weeks…

It probably wouldn’t have saved his job to reach any random spot on the east coast, so you don’t have to think of a time when it was all inaccessible.

Do you think that the parent I was responding to didn’t understand my intent? Did you really think I meant any random location on the east coast?

Yes, because otherwise it doesn’t seem like an outlandish enough scenario to justify literally saying you don’t believe him. Hurricane Sandy was the first thing that sprang to my mind, but there have been plenty of major travel disruptions over the years, and I wouldn’t expect to hear every time some smaller city was unreachable from California.

Given their response above, they figured out my intention even without being super pedantic.

Snowpocalypse/snowmageddon. 2010

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_5%E2%80%936,_2010_N...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_25%E2%80%9327,_2010...

Two back to back storms, there was about 12 hour window where you could get in or out. This poor guy was supposed to fly back during the first, got pushed to a flight during the second, and then the pile-on of rebookings pushed him further. I don't remember if he got trapped due to the third storm too.

It wasn't completely cut off. During the first storm, I got head notice of the next one and rebooked my flight out of the east coast to be one day earlier, and threaded the needle by politely asking customer service. I was in and out of the east coast for a week.

Anyways, Some cities on the east coast are less prepared than others for this sort of thing.

I’m familiar with travel in that storm. It sounds like they didn’t really make an effort. They _didn’t_ get back, which is different from they _couldn’t_ get back. Which is probably why they got fired.

Overall, though, it doesn’t change your original point about interviews, and I didn’t really need to take us on this tangent.

When flights get cancelled, if you really need to get back, you can book your own flight and hope for reimbursement. Getting rebooked through an airline is usually a horrible process in my experience.

There was a year (maybe 2012? I was in Philadelphia at the time) where we had back to back snow storms of more than 12" accumulation, about a week and a half apart. It came at a bad time of poor investment in snow clearing equipment and services, so many places had done no cleanup of the first storm before the second one hit. I don't know how the airports faired, but the roads were a deathtrap for weeks.

I was in NJ during that time, and it was really bad. One meter of snow accumulation everywhere was normal, roads were unsafe for days.

I remember a friend who interviewed with Google and got stuck in SF for three weeks due to snow storms on the east coast and got fired from Accenture as a result.

It takes less than one week to travel across the country by road. There's a whole system of Greyhound buses that serve exactly this purpose. How is it possible to get stuck for three weeks?

https://www.greyhound.com/bus-routes/san-francisco-ca-new-yo... notes that it takes 76 hours and costs $300.

You probably don't know it's going take more than a week right away. You hope you can fly the next day, then the next, etc...

As someone who had this happen to them but in London: yeah, this is how it goes.

Once flights resume it’s a thundering herd problem of annoying proportions too.

Hope they got the Google job then??

He did not.

So what, five hours?

Add in the 6-hour take home (which companies delusionally believe will take 2 hours, despite being often inadequately scoped or otherwise poorly presented; while quite often expecting a nitpick-proof solution); and all the random delays, and other hoops - and the none-too-occasional ghosting (even at the very end of the process) -

Yup, it adds up.

which companies delusionally believe will take 2 hours, despite being often inadequately scoped or otherwise poorly presented; while quite often expecting a nitpick-proof solution

I have to go on a rant about this one cause it happened to me recently.

I applied for a Sr. Frontend position, and they have me do a takehome where I recreate some small component with some time-travelling functionality. It was actually quite fun to do and I enjoyed building it, but the feedback afterwards was maddening.

One of the points of feedback they gave me was that what I implemented wasn't 1:1 aligned with the design they gave me... The design they gave me was a blurry JPG with compression artifacts that was maybe 300x300 embedded into a random Notion document they sent me with an extremely vague list of requirements. I even explicitly asked them if they could give me a higher quality version of it so I could match it more closely, but they said that was the only document they could give me.

When I tried to somewhat align the picture to the actual design I was implementing, the border-radii of the elements was so blurry from the compression that it was literally impossible to know whether I got it exactly right or not. They also gave me no notes on specific fonts used (the one on their marketing site was a licensed font that cost money), specific brand colors (I had to go to their marketing website and hope the green I saw on the buttons there was the one they were expecting) or anything else of the sort.

It was obvious they expected me to spend at least 6 hours on it considering the feedback, but they explicitly said 2 hours and didn't give nearly enough reference for me to go off of to know what they truly expected from me. Absolutely ridiculous process

It is crazy because it dilutes the interview experience and you never know when it's going to end and when they're going to decide (and actually tell you).

And why should you talk to all those people? Talk to the tech folks, then to the CTO, then the founder, then what, the VC investors, the whole board? Can the CTO not describe the company vision and how IT fits in that picture? It does smell of a lack of vision or an inability to delegate.

It's largely a way to dilute responsibility and spread blame. If a new hire turns out to be a failure then it's tough to point the finger at any one interviewer since they were all fooled. This type of diffused decision making process is typically instituted by the careerists at large organizations where being held accountable for any major failure will derail your chances of promotion.

I'm kind of an old guy but I remember having interviews, just shooting the shit with the hiring manager and maybe a team lead present. Whole thing would last about 30 minutes and end with a handshake and an offer in 24-48 hours or a call to let me know I wasn't chosen. Between 1999 and 2019 I worked for 5 different companies and the interview process was basically the same. These were not small companies either. If someone told me today I'd have 6 interviews with homework, I'd tell them to fuck off. Thank goodness I retired......

last time I interviewed for a job (and I am a sr developer with lengthy resume and all the 'right' skills for the job I was applying), after initial interview with recruiter and then hiring manager the recruiter said I had to take a coding test like I was some entry level programmer - I said no way, and thanks for your time - they made me an offer a few days later anyway.

Sometimes you just need to push back - won't always work - but at least you can have some control over the process.

Most interview loops aren't just 4-6 hours, though. A lot of times the virtual on-sites are 5+ hours alone, and then you still usually have 2-4 stages of scattered interviews before you even get there. It's also not an efficient way to figure out if both sides are a "good fit" because you're basically doing a whirlwind tour of video chats with people you most likely won't work with. Even worse, the entire interview process itself can take over a month or two depending on the company, making it hard to stay engaged the entire period, especially if you're interviewing for more than one place (which I assume most job-seekers are).

5-6 hours is about right on the low end, but on the high end you double the hours interviewing and add up to 30-40 hours of work for the take homework. It varies a lot. The average seem to be around the 12-20 hours with homework or 5-10 without.

Personally I still prefer the version with a take home project, even if longer, as I don't like performative programming.

Now think about being the people doing the recruiting, offering to 1% of the candidates they interview and still failing 30% of them during their trial period.

Hiring is a huge time sink for all people involved. The best people are hard to find and the best jobs are hard to get.

Sure but do you actually need the absolute best people around? An average company probably doesn't need exceptional developers. If you're not a tech company and you don't have an extremely challenging setup, your survival as a company doesn't rely on exceptional IT skills. You can do a lot with less than 10 virtual machines, any decent web app framework (Spring? Laravel?), and a version control system. Even apparently insane requirements are entirely reasonable: 100 thousands transactions per day is... 1 TPS. Make that 10 TPS to adjust for peaks. Unless you're doing extremely complex queries, you can definitely handle 10 TPS with reasonably limited resources.

Meanwhile, cargo culting and FOMO leads companies to adopt tech stacks, interview styles,... that make sense for FAANGs and other unicorns, but not for your average setup.

Sure but do you actually need the absolute best people around?

No. You need a great _combination_ of people. Over my career I have seen teams assembled with “the best” folks to great fanfare an expense. Then, over and over they are schooled by a team that works great together. If there is one lesson for companies to learn in hiring/staffing/team building it’s this - focus on the team and the team’s results.

Yes, there are exceptions.

How do you hire for team fit when people leave, or change teams voluntarily or through reorgs?

I would put a slightly different twist on that. A team with diverse skills and a lot of mutual trust and respect will work wonders. My current group is what you might call "debug fire jumpers" (not 100% of the role, but a significant fraction of it). Knowing I can call in an expert in an area that I am fuzzy, and there is no judgement, and we can collaboratively solve the problem, is what enables the team to deliver. So I fully agree, building a team with mutual trust and respect is the first order of business.

A business only makes sense if they're aiming to be better than others at a specific angle.

They need to get the very best for their particular thing that makes them different.

Other roles obviously don't matter as much.

Indeed. For tech companies and a few non-tech companies but with a strong tech environment (think HFT), IT is where you gain an edge on your competitors. Everywhere else, you win customers because of better prices, negotiating nice deals with suppliers, great salespeople and a good SEO presence, and so on, not because you use the latest Kubernetes version that finally introduces support for that sweet annotation you were looking for, or because you use Quarkus instead of Spring (or whatever).

This being HackerNews, I would have expected most people here work for a company that is aiming to disrupt the status quo through technology.

All I can think of is the recruiters who cannot have the courtesy to tell the other 99% they are no longer under consideration.

Recruiters aren't paid to not recruit. Courtesy doesn't enter into it.

We have lost candidates at my company which we had pretty much already decided were a fit after 1-2 interviews but we're still forced to go through the rigmarole of these extra interviews over several weeks. It's not just crazy it's also a waste of time and resources.

I was interviewing with a company a year back. I had gone through 3 interviews and there were 2 more left of various song and dance required. The process was going well and I liked the company, but I was getting burnt out with the process across all my other interviews and I had received 2 other job offers that were good, so I just sent an email to the company that I was going to withdraw myself from consideration.

I ended up getting an email from the team within minutes asking for a zoom where they literally begged me to keep going because they liked me the best of all the other candidates but are forced to have me go through the other interviews. They tried to get an exception for not doing the other interviews. They ended up being allowed to have only one more interview and they said that they could have an offer letter together within 24 hours of that interview. So I knew they were serious, but I was too tired and didnt love the bureaucracy of that place, so I just moved on.

Ouch.

I'm sure leadership and HR think they're dodging bullets too...

(P.S. I think they're likely shooting themselves in the foot.)

I've lost out on numerous jobs after the 5 interview mark, often only receiving an automated "thanks for your interest". In one case it was multiple consecutive shorter interviews with random people on the team, after a take home assignment, etc.. it's incredibly defeating.

And how many of these company's core source of value is "we have a web page". I hope that having a bunch of unemployed developers out there will disrupt things. I suppose either way wages are going down though.

In my experience they could reliably cut out the recruiter and hiring manager interviews.

How has that worked out for you not knowing anything about the manager you'll report to?

The hiring manager is for you, not them. It’s to make sure you actually want to work for that person.

And usually HR is the one who is getting your comp and other requirements so again mostly for you.

You don't want to interview your hiring manager??

It's a long day for sure, but honestly I don't really mind it as a candidate, and that boils down to a few reasons

(1) The time cost isn't as high as it seems. If I get as far as a phone screen I'm getting an offer, nearly guaranteed. The flow chart then looks like (a) if I don't get a phone screen, that awful process is no worse than the status quo, (b) if I do, I just find out in the phone screen if the battery of interviews has high latency (an 8hr day is fine, 8hrs over 2 months greatly complicates a job search) and drop out early the 20% of the time that happens, and (c) from there I have an 8hr day to a guaranteed job. Each offer then costs roughly 0.95/0.8~1.2 full interview processes, or 1.2x 4-8 hours.

(2) That time cost is a bit annoying when it comes to competing offers (a single solid day isn't crazily expensive when you're about to get a 40% pay boost, but 5 solid days for a job search is ... 5x as expensive ... fine, but not ideal, and hard when you have finite vacation days). Somewhere around 1/2 of employers don't actually seem to care about producing proof of competing offers though. If they make an offer, you counter that you're worth some fixed XYZ instead (ideally doing enough research to choose the levers they're most likely to accommodate) and will sign immediately if they can make that happen, they'll go above and beyond to agree to your counter-offer. It's a waste of time for the whole industry to require counter-offers in the cases where everyone knows what you're worth (admittedly, when that's not the case, counter-offers are an unfortunate necessity to prove your worth).

(3) The average tech interview is 10-20min solving the techno-babble and 30-50 probing what they know about the company and the team. New companies are very risky, and they work fairly hard to keep damning evidence out of the face of the public. You can mitigate a lot of risk by background-checking the executive team, but a present-day boots-on-the-ground view of things, ideally with the several overlapping/competing views you get from multiple team members, allows you to bounce out of problem situations early.

Fwiw our hiring pipeline has 30%-70% of candidates make it to the next stage once past the phone screen (it has varied somewhat as we re-ordered or changed process). Assuming 3 stages until offer (e.g. HM interview, tech screen, full-day interviews), and offer-acceptance, with 50% success rate at each stage, 1/8 get an offer and 1/16 accept it. At 60% it's 1/4.6 and 1/7.8, so the exact rate makes a huge difference.

The corollary to this sensitivity is that if you are just slightly better or worse at interviewing, you can see a huge difference in the number of companies you need to pass screening at to get a job. In practice, companies get more people into the pipeline than necessary to reduce the chance that it dries up without making the hires, so as a candidate, you will also have to take that into account.

You can play around with the variables on this graph to see number of phone-screen-passes: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=y%3D1%2F%28x%5E4%29+whe...

If I get as far as a phone screen I'm getting an offer

Wow, I didn't observe this myself even back when the market was "hot". I had a _lot_ of phone screens that didn't lead to offers.

Seems like a very personal and fortunate take depending on what you do or when in time that experience is based on, not that it's irrelevant, just far from generalizable, especially right now.

Companies are looking for almost any reason to turn someone away, so a guaranteed offer coming from a phone screen, or for that matter even getting a phone screen, is either exaggerated, you're consistently incredible, or/and you're consistently incredible and in a niche with very little competition and big names on the CV.

Even the author of the article admits they got quite lucky with the low numbers they experienced before getting an offer. I don't mean to be dismissive, but the markets are quite varying and intensely either saturated, competitive, or/and sparse right now, depnding on which market you're in and what your CV or skills look like, to the point where as a frontend dev I'm considering just switching to knitting or something more lucrative

At this point he might as well have an interview with the Janitor the too

i could learn more about a person by how they interact with the janitor than in hours of interviews and tests.

Indeed. This nauseating arrogance of software devs being not getting their due for value they deliver despite high 6 figure salaries is infuriating. As per them MBAs are chump, finance are bean counters, CEO moron, managers useless and janitor's job is to be done by robots anyway.

Key Elements for Job Search Microsite

* Have a professional profile picture

I don't do this, for two reasons:

1. Being a photographer taught me that I'm much better on the buttons side of the camera, not the lens side.

2. Photos really don't belong in hiring in the US. Due to the long history of unfair prejudices, which are still ongoing in some ways. Even better would be if we could remove names, for being cues as to gender, racial/ethnic background, caste, and other socioeconomic status. But photos are easy to eliminate from hiring processes, and in fact we were rid of them in the US, until "social media"-like sites like LinkedIn reintroduced photos to resumes.

2. Photos really don't belong in hiring in the US.

The author of the post is in Sweden, not the US.

As weird as it sounds, profile photos are prominent features of resumes in many European countries. It shocked me when I first started hiring in our EU offices, but that's just the way it is. I was surprised because we've often been told so many different ways that Europe is ahead of the US in matters of discrimination, but then I got there and resumes were full of profile pictures and even discussion about their marital status. I had our recruiter over there start erasing these things from resumes and they thought I was crazy.

The discrimination in Europe works slightly differently than in the US, as having a native sounding name is just as, or even more, important than having a "right" skin color.

So to be certain you'll avoid discrimination, you'd need to omit both the photo and the name from the CV, and that's not common at all.

Should we also hide the names of the universities we went to and the names of former employers we worked at?

Confused, what are you implying?

There's bias towards certain big name institutions. Perhaps we should prevent discrimination on this basis by omitting those references.

Also, because those big name institutions have bias towards certain types of students - and train them to think/act in certain ways.

It often works, which is why they do it.

You do for the UK Civil Service

Please ensure you remove references to your: ... educational institutions

https://www.civil-service-careers.gov.uk/ipo-recruitment-sup...

how is that discrimination other than signaling you know the language, have a job permit and so on.

Because you’re assuming just from the name or photo thay someone knows the language and have job permit.

This means children from immigrant families growing up in Europe would be discriminated against simply because of how they look and what their last name is.

That’s classic discrimination.

Because then employers will treat the absence of that signal as a potential concern?

I was surprised because we've often been told so many different ways that Europe is ahead of the US in matters of discrimination

Maybe it's possible to have profile photos in resumes and to be "ahead of the US in matters of discrimination"

Maybe it's possible to have profile photos in resumes and to be "ahead of the US in matters of discrimination"

Nope, discrimination is immense here. In US, people at least acknowledge that there is discrimination and something has to be done. Here in EU, we simply deny its existence and accuse the victim of malice and dividing the nation. I actually had this realisation of the issue/difference after a medium stay at US and coming back.

‘Culture fit’ interviews in Europe don’t beat around the bush - they mean right down to the frat/sorority/school, hobbies, and if you like the right beer everyone else does.

In the Netherlands, the hiring managers would even ask the women exactly when they were planning on having kids - and the men what their plans were for wife/kids. Down to the year.

Once you were in, you were golden though.

Reminds me of the story of someone with the first name "Kim" who had to put "Mr." in front of it on his résumé to get any interviews. Depressing.

Yeah I was shocked by this as well moving from Australia to Germany, it's a euro thing.

Some will even put "single" or "married" on their cv, though I'm told that's dying out

From germany here. I removed the photo from my CV a few years ago. Never got asked about it during hiring. Obviously I don't have any numbers whether/how often I got sorted out due to that.

But I hope the expectation to have a photo on your CV also dies out here.

I also hope that this dies out. While I used to put my photo as usual for years because this is how we do Lebenslauf, then one of my immigrant friend got severely discriminated(with clear evidence, guess the HR lady was new hire), so I started leaving my photo out in protest.

While I got some issues for a while about “better knowing our colleague and avoid hiring scam(?)”, eventually this stopped after I got some experience.

Now, if someone asks me for a photo or is concerned(one of my parents is immigrant background so I have a slightly hybrid name), I just tell them to know me better in person when I am in Office and they can take a photo with me when I meet them.

That all being said, the photo was more of a cultural thing in the past, it was useful for identification and filing purposes as well. However, in modern times the practice stuck and gave ways to discrimination.

HR being openly discriminatory is only an issue if someone actually penalizes them for it. The DOL is openly requiring companies to discriminate (affirmative action), and ignoring 'desirable' discrimination claims (which is required for affirmative action to work in a down economy), so why should they care?

And to be frank - did you sue them? Or try to sue them? Seems to be working no?

What about LinkedIn? That substitutes resumes for a lot of people. It has photos and it's not a euro thing.

Yeah this is always something that has bothered me. Profile image bias is 100% a thing. But if you don't have an image on LinkedIn or put a generic image (of your dog or something) then it hurts you in job searches.

People will deny that it hurts you, but I guarantee it does. I've been in many meetings where people make comments about weird photos like that which portray you negatively.

So I have accepted it as a necessary evil. If you have to have a profile image and its going to represent you, then make it as professional as possible. Don't go for goofy or silly, just be professional and boring and its the best look.

it's a euro thing

Yep. The Europass CV standard still uses photos on the CV.

Examples: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=europass+cv+example&t=lm&iax=image...

I don't think tech people add photos though. (I don't.)

It used to be common to put in occupation of the parents as well.

I went through interview training and one of the reasons why they’re so adamant that résumés go into an automated parser was to strip photos and other info like that.

Yeah, on my end reviewing resume or when we did take-homes things like names and photos were always erased to prevent 'bias'

We did interview and hire a lot more women and PoC than other firms I've worked with so I guess it works to some degree

Should you conduct the interview without camera and with a voicechanger?

Some US employers no longer conduct interviews at all for some positions.

That sounds entertaining for the hiring managers.

I imagine firing someone incompetent must be super fun too in that situation.

We can't eliminate all unfair biases, but if we can reduce unfair biases preventing people from even getting to the interview, that's a win.

This starts to sound a little kooky - if there's that much bias going around that we need to play games with hiding info from the interviewers, then how can they work effectively with this person if they can't be trusted?

You can’t.

Photos really don't belong in hiring in the US.

Sounds like someone needs to reread Don Burleson's professional dress code tips: https://www.dba-oracle.com/dress_code.htm

Presenting a polished, professional appearance makes a real difference to employers. They can and will legally fire you (or choose not to hire you) for failure to do so.

I think it's more a problem of visible disabilities or just not looking attractive, than of a dress code.

You're thinking of it from the 'should' (aka I wish) and employee perspective, not the competitive 'what do employers actually want' perspective.

If employers want their numbers to match some stat, then of course they're going to optimize for that. Which if your picture doesn't match, that's a problem. For you.

If employers have some pre-baked idea of what type of worker works for them, and getting things actually done matters to them (as compared to some diversity stat), then of course they're going to optimize for that. If your picture doesn't match, that's a problem. For you.

And maybe them if they can't actually find what they want because of their own pre-conceptions, but I guarantee they'll be the last ones they blame. It takes a very open minded individual to look past their own preconceptions. Sometimes too open minded. In times of stress, people default to what they are most comfortable with.

Now, if workers want that or not is up to them - most of the labor code is all about forcing employers to do things they don't want to do to protect themselves.

Most of contract and penal code is employers/owners trying to protect themselves from things they don't want others to do to them.

Photos really don't belong in hiring in the US.

They don't legally or consciously belong in hiring in the US. Doesn't mean it may not be to your advantage to have one.

Yes it is a fair take to say they shouldn’t have a role. It is a naive one to suggest they don’t.

Unless you want to make hiring harder on yourself, put up a professional photo. You’re not going to change the world by not doing so, you’re only going to waste your own time.

I am puzzled. I read the article and I don't see that. Did the article get updated, maybe?

My mistake; I was quoting a different document, "An Engineering Leader’s Job Search Algorithm", linked from an HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39338314

At this point, having a realistic picture is more about weeding out the fake AI/ML generated users. It's crazy how many fake profiles and applicants there are out there, but luckily most use the same type of professional headshots made by some generative model.

I'm a ML Engineer at FAANG and I have been passively looking for the last half year. Common wisdom might make you think that I should be having companies throwing wads of cash at me, but my experience has been very different.

* It's true that my profile attracts many messages from recruiters. However ghosting is the name of the game. More than half of recruiters have ghosted me at different stages of the process. Overall I'd say that attention from recruiters is a great vanity metric for your ego, but it means shit unless you can convert that into job offers.

* Although there is a lot of demand, the bar for hiring is also very high. Specifically companies are looking for someone with experience in their exact tech stack. Given there are a few major ML frameworks and I'm only familiar with one of them, that rules out a lot of jobs. In one case a company screened me out because I only had 6 years of experience in a particular tech instead of their required minimum of 8.

* So far my only outcomes have been 1 rejection and 2 downlevels to senior (I'm targeting Staff+ positions). Although I haven't been dedicated to job hunting, I haven't been successful either at receiving an offer.

* In terms of salaries, most companies tend to top out around half of my current comp. I have only spoken with less than a handful of companies that could offer more. I guess that has always been the case with FAANG, but seems more pronounced now.

Overall I think that currently the job market for ML Engineers is still better than for Software Engineers, but it's nothing like the fever dream market of 2020-2022.

Obviously, learning all popular tech stacks is not entirely realistic, but IMO when a SE or any engineer is looking for work, at least 1-2 months of researching and getting proficient with the full breadth of what's out there for your interest is going to pay off.

Unless you are moving jobs to just do the exact same thing somewhere else (who wants that) you kind of have to take it on yourself to show up the the interview appearing like an expert in skills you hope to get to really grow comfortable with on the job. You may even need to exaggerate your experience.

Ultimately, specialization should be more about how you think than what facts you know, but the hiring market won't see it that way, meaning you need to just get really good at faking it and not be afraid to back it up later after some late-night study sessions.

The other half of this is that 'levels' don't always translate across environments. Just find work that resonates with you, and you will move up. Obsessing over the level (or even the pay) is probably limiting.

You may even need to exaggerate your experience. [...] meaning you need to just get really good at faking it and not be afraid to back it up later after some late-night study sessions.

Please don't do this, and don't normalize other people doing it.

Dishonesty isn't something I want to have to be understanding about in colleagues. Like, maybe they just see it as a little while lie, and some job-hunting Web pages told them is ordinary to do, and you'd be at a disadvantage if you didn't do it, and you're even to be commended for your scrappy can-do resourcefulness in fudging. I'm ready to be understanding about many situations, but I want dishonesty to be something we can summarily nuke from orbit.

Also, when I'm in an interview to possibly join a company, I don't want there to be more rationalization for crappy interview process. ("I see from your resume that you have decades of experience, including sole author of open source packages, but you could be lying about all of that, you dirtbag, so let's derail this meeting by focusing all our energy on some BS test that's been gamed to heck.")

Please don't do this, and don't normalize other people doing it

Unfortunately, that's how the competitive market works.

People shouldn't be penalized for the tech stack that their company used vs. what companies are looking for. Skills from one platform to another are very fungible (eg - Java/.NET, AWS/Azure), so "beefing up" a resume is what's required if you plan on getting any calls back.

Dishonesty isn't something I want to have to be understanding about in colleagues.

I have some bad news for you...

.. I don't want there to be more rationalization for crappy interview process.

No one is forcing you to participate in interviews which require doing a coding test or system design review. You are more than capable of withdrawing your candidacy.

I would bet that a lot of equally-skilled people are lining up behind you and ready to do that extra work in order to stand out and get a job. Don't place yourself on too-high of a pedestal, my friend.

Unfortunately, that's how the competitive market works.

That's how some people think the competitive market works. It's not universal.

Which is why I just contradicted that, and called to not encourage those beliefs.

Put loosely, half the job of an engineer is to tell the truth.

What I think you're characterizing is a corporate bullshit shoveler who just wants to go through the bullshit motions to get a paycheck.

I really don't want some impressionable junior engineers to see multiple people on HN encouraging lying.

I do not want to wade through that, to separate the merely misled junior engineers, from the hopeless anti-engineers.

You are more than capable of withdrawing your candidacy.

And I do. But I'd prefer that the situation improve.

I am pretty tolerant when it comes to not knowing things or time for learning new skills. With this fast changing industry i can not help it but tolerating.

But when i catch someone lying at least twice about something technical, i do my part to make sure the person is not hired or next to leave. There is no trust.

An engineer who can’t admit they don’t know something when it matters is actively harmful to the work of engineering.

This. I am genuinely excited when I am faced with a problem set where I don’t know something (e.g. need to research, explore, gain a skill, or otherwise educate myself) — seriously, it’s the best. The only thing better is learning (or being told) that I was wrong about something and then re-evaluating my belief/understanding stack in order to find and correct the error. I have such little patience for folks fronting or faking knowledge/expertise - it’s such a fucking waste of time for everyone else.

An engineer who can’t admit they don’t know something when it matters is...

a bad engineer.

I was really amazed about how many people lie on the resumes. E.g. a recent study [0] said 70%, but there are many of these with similar numbers. There is a difference between putting your best foot forward and just straight lying for financial gain, which is fraud, and can (very rarely) send you to jail.

Personally, if I suspect dishonesty, it's a strong no-hire. If I even get a whiff of dishonesty, I'll at least flag to recruiters, hiring managers, and interviewers, and we've actually compared notes and realized a pattern of behavior before.

It is hard though since a lot of the stuff they would lie about are things you can't verify.

0: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrobinson/2023/11/05/70-of-...

While I agree with you on the principle, I would not blame anyone who lies in such a BS market to be honest.

If for a person, the choice is between not being able to pay rent because they had 6 years of experience in a given stack instead of 8, vs. exaggerating in their cv, I dont think it is reasonable to expect complete honesty.

Also we all know most of the companies are often very dishonest, so why should we expect complete honesty from the workers?

FAANG reputations are no longer evenly distributed.

Even though most people's opinions of the company have changed, Google engineers are still widely considered to be high quality. Apple engineers also have a great reputation but it's very rare to see them on the market. Facebook/meta engineers tend to be above average but have a reputation for being aggressive corporate ladder climbers.

But if I hazard a guess, if you're struggling to find work, you're at Amazon. Amazon's aggressive hire->pip pipeline has, at least in my experience, destroyed their reputation. I've worked with plenty of ex-Amazon engineers in the past few years and they were all notably below average in skill. This is not to say that you are (if you even work for Amazon), but Amazon is no longer the resume bump it once was, if anything quite the opposite.

Talking about "FAANG" is not really relevant anymore since there is a pretty big range of expectation for engineers coming out of each of those letters in the acronym. Additionally none of those companies command quite the attention they did a few years ago, as they've all shifted from demanding engineering skill to demanding the ability to survive in a large mega-corp.

I'm not sure what part of my comment made you think that my current employer is an obstacle in job hunting. Actually it's quite the opposite, as I mention I get a lot of attention from recruiters even though I'm not actively looking. The issue I'm observing is that this attention doesn't clearly translate to more job opportunities.

If my current employer was the problem, wouldn't recruiters and hiring managers not bother reaching out, or reject my applications (I haven't applied to any job directly recently so I can't say).

I'm speaking to your point about:

Common wisdom might make you think that I should be having companies throwing wads of cash at me

My point is just that you're misunderstanding "common wisdom". In 2016, yes a job at any FAANG would mean that you have no trouble getting a new gig. In 2024 Amazon employees do not have a great reputation, so there's no reason to think of yourself as part of a group that "common wisdom" would show preference towards. Nobody with "wads of cash" sees Amazon on a resume and thinks it's something special and worth reaching out for. FAANG in general is not as appealing as it once was, and Amazon in particular is not a strong signal at all. Someone working at OpenAI today would likely have the response you're imagining is reserved for FAANG.

Recruiters are also playing a numbers game, especially in this tech job market. My inbox has ample recruiter message for roles that are not even relevant to my skills, I wouldn't mistake that for signal.

Amazon, like any other big company, is a 1000 different small companies in a trenchcoat.

Same for the other FAANGs. Each has just as least as many meh engineers as it has great ones.

I think they were saying that because they're an experienced ML engineer more than because of what companies they've worked at.

As someone who has sometimes hired people from FAANG into startups I've worked in, I'd say it's 50/50 if the person will actually be a net positive to the organization. A lot of times the people coming from FAANG seem to be under the impression that what their previous company was doing is 100% the best, in all cases, and they try to cargo-cult their previous culture into the new company.

Sometimes they're able to adapt though and have a really positive impact overall. But the sour experiences really woke me up regarding seeing it as a mostly positive signal that someone worked at FAANG. So I wouldn't see FAANG as a guarantee about anything, no matter which company was their previous one.

The culture around FAANGs has always been a bit strange. People associate making a lot of money with being good at building tech at both a personal and a company level and unfortunately that isn't necessarily valid in either case.

New hires who have been living inside the Big Tech bubble for a while can come with issues that others here have already described. Consequently startups should probably downlevel many people coming from FAANG roles for exactly the same reason that FAANGs downlevel many people who haven't been worshipping at the altar of scalability in their previous roles. The skills and methods are different and some of them aren't very transferrable.

Of course that's not to say good people who have been working at large scales can't or won't adapt. But on day one nobody cares that you've been a Staff/Principal leading projects with 25 developers and a mature development environment if you're joining a startup that needs to raise a Series A before the end of its runway this summer. The abilities you need in that environment are things like identifying the most essential supporting work that can't wait while still spending most of your time on getting the main job done and hitting the deadline. If you can't roll up your sleeves and get the job done then you don't need to worry about a PIP. There are only 10 of you anyway and you're all out of a job in six months if any of you doesn't pull their weight.

It would be absurd to downlevel these folks. Probably the mismatch is an investment and both org and employee will need adjustments that are mutually beneficial.

It would be absurd to downlevel these folks.

In which direction? Both make sense to me. A good employee might adapt to their new environment quickly and in that case obviously they should then be levelled up appropriately. But there is nothing about being Staff/Principal at a BigCo that says you're going to be anything special as a senior in a startup - in fact the opposite can be the case for reasons others have mentioned - and there is nothing about being an excellent contributor at a startup that says you're going to navigate the scale and the politics of a BigCo effectively. It seems reasonable to start a new hire at a level where you would expect they do have the required skills (including soft skills) and then look to make more effective use of them if and when they've settled into the new environment.

I kinda agree that Amazon is no longer a resume bump. But otoh, if a company holds a lower expectation on an ex-Amazon candidate (compared with average - "quite the opposite" as you said) just because the pip thing exists, I'd say that's very short-sighted and irrational, and would probably think again if I really want to work for them. Similarly, if they automatically think that an ex-Googler is worth hiring without proper evaluation.

"Reputations" of companies you worked for should have the absolute minimum influence on any hiring decisions. Don't blame others if you don't have a proper hiring process that works for you.

As a FAANG employee, working with ML, what do you want to get from other companies, besides more money?

It's hard to have more chips, for example. You run less experiments, you have less throughput in an already computationally tight environment.

Fully remote would be a pretty nice perk, ever since our companies forced us back to the office. I believe this alone might be one of the easiest ways for smaller companies to poach talent these days.

Other than that, I enjoy working in hard and impactful problems. I'm privileged that I was able to do that in FAANG, but it's unclear how long this will last. I know that is very trite to say that your company has changed, but I truly feel it. Our company missed the LLM train and we are scrambling to play catch up now. Also we mostly pivoted from bold and inspiring initiatives to efficiency and cost cutting. Most of the initiatives in our pipeline for this year are pretty dull "let's save some dollars here and there". Nothing wrong with that, but given the choice, the chance of working on a moonshot vs helping a trillion $ company save pennies might convince one to change jobs.

There is also the very trite but very true aspect of "small cog in a huge machine". I might engineer a new system that brings in tens of millions of dollars to the company, and I'd be lucky if 3 layers of management above me knows about it. Those kind of initiatives might influence the entire company in a smaller organization.

All in I recognize I'm quite privileged and doing pretty well in my current job, and that's why I'm passively looking. TBH one of the aspects is that I got FOMO from all the talk about ML engineers being in high demand. However my experience so far has been very underwhelming.

Where have you heard that ML engineers are in high demand? I don’t think they are immune from the tech slowdown that’s affecting the industry. Of course, LLMs and AI are all the rage, but the demand for that is in the services/APIs not necessarily the demand for ML engineers

I suspect we'll see a broad slow down in classic ML approaches. If I just need a basic classifier -> GPT-4 can do an OK job. Spending an afternoon prompt tuning is vastly cheaper than a dedicated team of scientists and engineers curating datasets and running experiments. For many SMBs, this effectively eliminates the ML function.

It sounds like a Staff title may be in play, although it wasn't made clear whether this would be a promotion.

The traditional answer is stability. I think that's still true despite the sense of looming layoffs. Everyone always knew the layoffs would come one day anyway...

To note, staff position requirements are very high. One because they cost a lot, and two because they're looking for proven people.

Going from senior to staff or principal is a huge leap.

Personally I have no idea how people expect to get staff at 6 years of experience. I'd expect a minimum of 8-10. You just need experience there. Below that you better be a genius.

I think if you want a "staff" level role, you have to have been doing this since before there was such a thing as a "staff" level role.

Some perspective from the other side of this situation: I was a hiring manager at a company that paid well but not FAANG level. We had an office near a couple FAANG offices. We had a lot of applications from people who wanted out of FAANG.

Some problems we encountered when working with FAANG applicants and a few ex-FAANG hires:

* Non-transferable knowledge: Many of them had a lot of experience working within the abstractions and structures of their FAANG company, but struggled to work with foundational concepts once removed from their FAANG infrastructure. Some of them spent years trying to rebuild copies of the FAANG tooling they were familiar with just to accomplish jobs that didn't really need it.

* Experience mismatch with the current team. An extension of the above point: Some candidates were high level at FAANG but less experienced with day-to-day operations than our in-house Senior/Staff devs. This put us in an awkward spot where we'd have to pay them more than our current high level engineers to bring them in, but they'd be operating at a level below them at least to start. We opted to promote from within in these cases.

* Compensation cold feet. Many would tell us they just wanted out of their FAANG co at any cost and knew it would come with a compensation cut. But when it came down to offer time, they'd get cold feet about leaving money on the table. Even in cases where we paid within ~$50K of their FAANG comp, some of them just couldn't let it go when it came time to put in their 2 weeks' notice.

* Boomerang FAANG employees. Some people would join us, then miss the structure of blending into a big, highly structured FAANG company. They'd bounce back to the same FAANG or another FAANG within 6-18 months.

* Higher rate of candidate ghosting us than with any other cohort. It was rare for an average candidate to ghost us once the interview pipeline had started, but for whatever reason the FAANG applicants had a very high rate of getting half way through the pipeline and then disappearing without a word. Many times they'd appear again a few months later asking for a second chance, only to repeat the process.

I'm not suggesting these apply to you. Only trying to provide some perspective. Anything you can do to alleviate these concerns early might help an application process.

Of course, if your goal is to secure FAANG level compensation and Staff+ titles, you might just have to accept the reality that continuing in FAANG is far and away the easiest way to get there.

Thank your for sharing, it's great to hear different perspectives on the topic.

Non-transferable skills is actually one of my biggest concerns about working at the same company long term. These tools are often so far from the industry standard that it can hurt your employability long term as you mention.

It's no secret that devs often interview with companies they don't intend to join just as a warm up exercise. I confess I've been guilty of this.

The boomerang is quite interesting. Up until very recently this was a very well known career move. People would leave the company for one year just to come back at a higher level and higher salary. As a "loyal" employee I find this furious, but alas I guess it's my fault for working for such a lousy company and not pulling the same move. If it is any consolation, at least our company change the rules so that it's harder to pull this off, so you should see this much less often these days.

Regarding your last comment I'm not particular about leaving FAANG, as I aren't about working for FAANG. Considering my priorities it's very likely I'd only take a competing offer from another top tech company. For now I'm comfortable enough staying in my current company and passively looking for a better opportunity. At the same time I want to avoid becoming too complacent, and I'm aware the rug might get pulled from under my feet at any moment (hello layoffs?).

In terms of salaries, most companies tend to top out around half of my current comp.

While, I am not in ML or ever worker in FAANG, here in EU my experience is also the same recently. Infact, I’d say I am fairly underpaid given my experience & responsibilities but the latest openings are disaster in terms of comps and benefits. Also, unlike what my EU brethren will parrot, most opening cite “hybrid” & “flexible” but then they reluctantly share much late in the interview that yeah need to be in office at least 3-4 days a week, and we prefer in-person meeting because “collaboration”! Sadly, watching the wages going down(despite all the touting of inflation adjustment), EU is slowly catching up to US fever without catching up to the wage levels.

Whats your recommendation for backend engineers that want to transition to ml engineers? If you contribute to open source (tensorflow, pytorch) does that help? What is your day to day like? What minimum skill set do you need to function as MLE? Does taking ML courses in coursera help?

Best of luck to your job search, god speed

I think the assumption would be more that FAANG would throw wads of cash at non-FAANG candidates than the reverse. There's a few "common knowledge" things (assumptions, but often accurate) about recruiting from FAANG that would certainly explain the lack of "wads of cash":

* Golden handcuffs are real and deliberate and in many ways rational: very few other companies have similar-sized wads of cash to throw OR similarly-scaled problems where FAANG-level salaries are likely to produce significant ROI

* FAANG stacks tend to have a lot of amazing in-house niceties that can't be found elsewhere, so there's a certain "are they an expert or are they just an expert at using Google's internal stack"? Would they be productive out of the gate or would they need to rebuild all that stuff first?

Everybody wants the prestige of telling their CEO or their investors that they poached people from FAANG but few have the wallet or the precise scenarios to get into a bidding war about it.

I had these issues as a HM in 2020 trying to hire ML engineers. (At mid-size places there's also often a "WTF do we do with a ML engineer" problem where if you aren't a data scientist or a general SW engineer, it's hard to carve out a role in between. Especially if the org has data scientists who aren't particular "engineer savvy" in terms of workflow and tooling. And then the ML engineer makes things shiny and version-controlled and all... and the data team mostly just ignores it since moving over to that stuff isn't one of their KPIs...)

People are no longer looking for ML , they’re looking for LLM.

I don't question that is takes hard work, even for more senior devs like the author, but 30 apps leading to 3 offers is a dream. Most early-career people are probably at >100 app with maybe a few interviews and hopefully one offer.

I guess I got lucky in when I started out as a career switcher in 2017. Iirc I applied 6 places, had 4 interviews, got 2 offers. Mind you this was as an effectively junior person applying to mid-level positions. I like to think that having so few interviews allowed me to concentrate my enthusiasm and highest mental energy into the interviews I had, but maybe it's just survivors bias.

Since then I've taken 3 interviews and gotten two great offers in the 50+% percentile for US based software engineering roles. I'm a not-that-bright grug-brained developer, so I'm sure it wasn't because I was blowing people out of the water with my brain power.

I'm not sure I have the energy to do a numbers-game applicant strategy. I hate interviewing generally, and live coding causes my brain to lock-up. So I only apply places I am genuinely excited to work for, and places that I reason would be generally excited to have a good team player who is nonetheless a grug-brained developer.

I can get genuinely excited about pretty run-of-the-mill work though, and have strong opinions very loosely held. I think maybe those two qualities are my secret sauce.

Energy itself is a winning strategy. It translates to an initiative in an employers eyes, which is something that cannot be taught.

Can confirm. Energy is about the only way I could rely on myself to crack open a totally foreign job market with less than a year of experience under my belt when I was starting out. I set myself the goal of 10 applications a day, every day, anywhere in Finland was acceptable -and within 3 months I had my first offer.

Applying to Finland from where?

Technically still from Finland, I was already physically there. But legally, from the US.

2017 was a very, very different job market for us engineers

2017 through to around 2020/21 was insane worldwide .. All the big co's soaked up the talent, then that sucked the air out of the market worldwide. We were getting people outside of the US headhunted from the US, which had constant ripple effects. Now it seems the rebalancing is definitely taking hold and times are a lot tougher for devs world wide.

Trying to hire in 2020-21 was impossible. You would get people between interviews get massive offers (days/week apart). 50/50 whether even after accepting the offer they'd actually turn up... If you saw someone that had a decent shot at coding you needed to hire right then and there. Reddit/HN was absolutely filled with devs making hay while the sun was shining job hopping and say things like 'if you're not getting a 30% payrise...'

Now the credit crunch has just switched the tap off. I'm about to contract out a small bit of work via one of the freelancer sites and I'm going to be very interested to see what it's like getting freelancers now....

I’m not sure I’ve applied 30 total times across… like eight employers.

I also make middle-of-the-trimodal-graph comp, though, not FAANG/finance tier.

I'm not sure I have the energy to do a numbers-game applicant strategy.

Neither did I until it became a neccessity. Did 4 job interviews in 7 years and got them all in one go. Then I quit, and there was a long drought of people just not wanting to hire me for 6 months. The first rejection I took personally, but after 10 interviews with crazier and crazier questions you can’t do anything other than see it as a numbers game. Anything else destroys any sense of self worth you have.

The author has 30+ years of experience and was applying to jobs paying less than 6 figures a year (USD). His expectation were modest, compared to the average US developer.

This is so sad. If I ever had to get paid 5 figures after 30 years I worked literally switch careers.

> This is so sad. If I ever had to get paid 5 figures after 30 years I worked literally switch careers.

It's Sweden / Stockholm, not Silicon Valley / San Francisco.

I've looked up real estate there just to point out how ridiculously inflated prices are here. A nice looking 67 square meters apartment, 15 minutes from city center, was selling for some €190,000. By comparison a 50 square meters rather communist-looking apartment here (Romania) sells for €160,000 - €180,000.

A 5-figure salary in the €80,000 - €90,000 range is fairly outlier both there and here. €7,500 gross translates to about €4,400 net both in Sweden and here. To buy an €190,000 apartment here, the mortgage is in the €1,200 per month. In Sweden as far as I know, a rent is in the €600 - €1500 (depending how far from Stockholm city center). So a 5 figure salary goes a long way: you can buy, rent and live, on a single salary. If your wife is also getting top 5 figures, you're settled.

This is pretty accurate. Price/salary ranges are much more stable than the US. His salary ask for 30 years is not as far fetched as the Americans here think. Source: live in Norway.

This is also not realistic (if other people in his position aim for much more). Wouldn’t you wonder “why is this person with 30 years of experience applying for this role? Maybe got confused? Maybe they’re troubled in some way? Maybe they’ll stay for 2 months and get bored and leave?”.

What is not realistic? We're talking about Sweden here.

exactly my thoughts

I guess I got really lucky - I just talked to friends and found three different jobs through their recommendations. Never had a proper job application or interview in my life - I reckon this will bite me in the ass sometime

I mean this is objectively the “best” way to get jobs. If it’s worked for you so far, I also imagine it’s probably gonna keep working.

Good to have a perspective that yeah, this is definitely very far on one end of the “fortunate/lucky” spectrum.

For the sake of comparison, I applied for jobs mid-2022. I applied for 12 positions and got 5 offers, and explicitly rejected by 2 - the remaining 5 I either rejected myself or didn't have time to complete the process. This was also in Stockholm, same as the OP.

This market is far worse to be looking for a job in.

I agree. Even as a senior dev, I couldn't help but think, "this story isn't as difficult as I was expecting from the headline". To each his own. ;-)

Most early-career people are probably at >100 app with maybe a few interviews and hopefully one offer.

This has not been my experience at all. I've been at 6 positions in my time and applied to maybe 15

Bit of a rant but I also have been job hunting after a layoff and their experience sounds like a dream. I have only gotten email rejections thus far and only 1 phone screen. It feels like most of my rejections are just automatic emails. Some of them come same day. The most demoralizing thing happens when you get rejected for a job and then see a new listing for that same job go up just moments later. You were rejected not because they picked someone else but because they decided even talking to you wasn't worth their time and they would rather go back to the pool.

I'm not sure why you think companies have an obligation to talk to every candidate that applies.

It's pretty common to get hundreds of applications for any open role now, and the most visible companies get thousands of applications. A majority of those applications can be disqualified from the resume alone.

It would be a massive waste of everyone's time to talk to every applicant.

OP is obviously ranting because they are frustrated and dejected. Have a little empathy.

Thanks for the understanding :)

Never did I say companies should talk to everyone that applies but I do think everyone should at least get a response. Half of my applications are dead air.

Yes, everyone should respond. From the hiring manager side, it's sometimes hard (especially when people argue with you) but I still think it's worth doing.

I'm sorry you're having a hard time. I'm sure it's very demoralizing to feel like you're applying into a void.

Try running it through chatgpt. Give your resume and give job discretion. Ask if your resume is a match for this job. You will be surprised.

What’s your learning about this? I just tried it and it’s very interesting how specific the analysis is.

I've used ChatGPT to improve my resume but have never just outright asked for suitability based on the job description. I'll give it a shot.

Rejections are great info, especially quick ones. It's the companies that never respond or start the process then ghost that are the real problem. There you learn absolutely nothing.

You learn nothing regardless. There is never any information about why you get rejected or why you were passed over. The only difference between getting rejected and not getting rejected is that you at least have closure on that application.

I think quick rejections are a good indication to work on your materials and/or position selection, possibly delaying your send rate. Ghosting leaves all the variables hidden on quality vs volume and even leaves it unclear on whether your volume of sends is sufficient (maybe the industry is just slow at coming back and will answer all your past applications.)

I have the same experience. I've been unemployed for 5 months as a Senior Software Engineer and I hit most of the job requirements. The only skill I don't directly match is React development for full stack jobs, but I am building an LLM app in React so that I can fix that hole. Speaking of LLM, I'm surprised I'm not seeing any job skill requirements for LLM related topics or even vector database experience. Are the bigger companies so far behind the curve here?

If you're not applying specifically to AI type jobs, would you expect to see LLM or vector database experience alongside React? Seems like that would be a silly set of requirements to look for in anything but a low-interest rate environment, especially at comoanies that have a real product or have been around for longer than a year.

One company used an IQ test

This is interesting. I haven't had that one yet, but last week I had an application with a "personality" test that asked whether I tend to vote for left-leaning candidates or right-leaning candidates. This company was in the healthcare space.

GitHub asking for approval for AI to review my resume was a bit of a beat too. I did not give permission, and it definitely left me feeling at a disadvantage to other candidates.

I thought IQ tests were illegal?

It has to technically be an aptitude test, but they really toe the line. Vista Equity, for instance, requires all their companies to use the CCAT in hiring: https://www.criteriacorp.com/candidates/ccat-prep

I mean, they could probably get sued for that. The test itself says it measures general intelligence.

This is the test I was given:

https://github.com/rubynor/bigfive-web

https://ipip.ori.org/AlphabeticalItemList.htm

Search for politics, sex, god, religion to see some of the questions.

last week I had an application with a "personality" test that asked whether I tend to vote for left-leaning candidates or right-leaning candidates.

That should be all kinds of illegal already.

And "personality tests" in general should be made illegal too.

Asking which kind of politicians you vote for is pretty obviously about discriminating. But I'm not surprised that this is happening in health care because that space is highly politicized in the US and strong right wingers are likely to have moral objections to several medical procedures. Strong left wingers are likely to have moral objections to the American medical system's notoriously ruthless business practices. In other words, they probably want people who don't have particularly strong political views.

Sadly, political affiliation and political belief are not protected classes under US civil rights law so employers can legally discriminate on this basis. This is actually a big part of why the American political system is so dominated by corporate interests because many people are terrified of hurting their career prospects if they participate in the political process.

Sadly, political affiliation and political belief are not protected classes under US civil rights law so employers can legally discriminate on this basis.

Really? This blows my mind! So a company could say "We're not hiring democrats or republicans" or something openly?

I don't know where I found it, but I saw a job ad for a dev role that asked for an MBTI test first (it's about personality types thing like INFJ INFP etc).

Asking for this in a job for coding was... something else. And I thought leetcode was all I had to study

At that point they may as well ask for your horoscope chart and a scan of your palm.

I feel like coding exercises are nearly already IQ tests and it’d be simpler to just IQ test than have to try to come up with unique coding problems.

I believe the current hiring woes in the US are more nefarious than just being picky.

First, I believe US companies are figuring out how to hire foreign teams at lower cost. I get multiple emails per week from companies offering us their team at low rates. South America and India are common places. I personally witnessed this at my last company where they drastically cut US/North America staff in favor of Indian teams with a pure cost motive. Literally dozens of jobs including SE and supporting roles shipped overseas.

Second, I believe US companies are asserting back control over the labor market. Employees took a lot of control in the Covid era so companies have to be looking to fix that.

I hope something changes soon. I’m in the early stages of a job search and it’s a tad frustrating. I’ve experienced many of things reported by other commenters including ghosting, no response at all or my favorite which is “lack of years of experience for a requirement” (Example must have 3 years experience with .NET 6)

I agree. My employer disproportionately lays off US citizens and preferentially hires in Latin America. I spent part of today looking at my employer’s main competitors. One has a bunch of programming jobs available in Mexico. Another is hiring primarily in India.

It isn’t ChatGPT that will take US engineering jobs. It is cheaper devs in other countries. And plenty of them have reasonable English and programming skills, as much as I wish it were otherwise. I know because I have worked with them.

As a Vietnamese developer currently interested in remote opportunities, I am a little concerned. I hope people like us won't face any discrimination at work due to being thought of as "stealing an American's job".

My company employs some VN engineers and they’re great. I’m glad your country is building up such an industry instead of relying on only agriculture and tourism for example.

If you do, it's because they feel threatened - because it's working.

Cost of success.

We are all just trying to make a buck.

For what it’s worth, I hold no ill will toward the new hires. I quite like some of them. But it’s obvious what is going, and I know I’m not alone in considering a career change.

I've been saying for years that NA software devs should fight to RTO. If you can do do your job remotely, so can people across the world who will do it for 5x less.

RTO doesn't change anything about that. It'll still be cheaper to hire in low cost areas.

This is not a conspiracy anymore. Just open top 100 companies, compare 3 years back locations with this years. You will see a rise of non-US locations.

what's the database timeout answer? i would say something along the lines of 5 seconds max.

Yeah, that's a pretty interesting question. For long-lived connections on networks I don't trust, I arbitrarily set the timeout at 10s. On networks I trust, I set it to one second. Looking at 99.99%-ile connection times on my production network, it's bimodal with peaks at 1ms and 28ms. (Guess which connections are from one physical machine to itself, and guess which connections are to a different machine.)

I have no idea what the correct answer to an interview question that asks this is, though. Like, I never connect to my database inside the request flow, I have a connection pool and wait for a connection to become free in the pool. So "connection time" is really a function of how utilized the pool is, and has only a passing resemblance to the health of the database. Maybe 10 connections are running "begin; lock table foo; select * from foo where expensive_condition". All 10 connections in the pool are blocked on a lock, and that doesn't mean the database is unhealthy and you want to shed load. So do you want to show the 11th person "sorry, our site is down, come back later", or do you want to wait for the random expensive queries to complete? I'd wait. (I suppose I wouldn't take an exclusive lock on a table to serve a web page either, but who knows what the interviewer is doing.)

The correct answer is to talk through how you'd evaluate making the decision based on the requirements and measured usage patterns, talk about what you've used in the past and why, if you haven't really been in a position to decide this or think about it, don't lie or randomly pick a number but just get out whatever you do know about it. So kind of like just talking through your second paragraph and maybe creating a hypothetical situation and answering based off of it.

Yeah, that makes sense. I feel like I can talk my way out of anything, but if there's a correct answer that exists without thinking, I'd love to know it. Not for interviews, but for In Real Life performance ;)

I lot of times questions like these are to see how someone thinks about problems. What questions do they ask to clarify the problem. I'm not saying this is good question for that, but I wouldn't assume questions have a "right" answer.

Exactly, this is a pretty bad sign for a senior dev, to just blurb out a number. What is the connection used for? End users, a backoffice tool, or a batch process? then he should have asked: what is our SLA? What's in the DB, how big are the objects, the queries? How frequent are they?

Even so, I wouldn't venture any number if you don't do some profiling or at least some tests with the most common data, and with edge cases. It can be anywhere between milliseconds and full seconds, maybe more?.

Reminds me of an interview once, I asked: the website is slow, you're in charge of it, what do you do? He just said "buy more servers"...slow down there, Rockefeller.

My guess is, very low: it's a shared resource for multiple clients, hit multiple times per request, and should probably be on a sub 100ms basis tops with a few retries.

Or it's a trick question: you should use shared connection pools to minimize the overhead of new connections, and should simply be part of the app startup.

It's unclear from the question, but they were apparently looking for a very small number.

But is that connection timeout, or query timeout, or something else? If you have long-running complex data processing or ingestion jobs, query timeouts could well be measured in minutes or hours. So a small number doesn't make sense there, and the connection technically doesn't timeout.

For connection timeouts, if you run a connection pool then timeouts of a few seconds or more could be fine and be the difference between the system being completely down vs just slow in case the load / contention unexpectedly increases. Not great of course and it won't hold for long, but might help in some very specific bursty scenarios. If you are able to safely re-use the connections in the pool most of the time the timeout matters even less. Reusing connections is usually possible, but it depends on the database and what errors require establishing a new DB connection.

And of course with a pool you actually have 2 'connection timeouts': one for establishing a new connection to the DB and a second one for acquiring a connection from the pool. The second one is usually most relevant for an application, but both matter.

But even without a pool a higher number (say a few minutes) could possibly make sense given a specific scenario. A database with a connection limit is equivalent to decrementing a semaphore (acquiring a lock), and there are cases where you'd want to wait for just a bit longer to acquire that lock instead of just timing out. A slightly longer timeout won't hurt if e.g. you implement a retry mechanism anyways instead of aborting.

Not saying long timeouts are a sign of great engineering, but context matters a lot for these sorts of questions.

I am a bit surprised, after reading the article I thought the author would be a junior with 5 years or less experience. With 30+ years of experience the job hunting should be easier, just call some people you know...

This is what I thought early last year when people were saying they couldn't find jobs, but after having some experience with the job market earlier this year it was absolutely brutal. I have 15 years professional experience, which for this field is quite a lot.

I don't think people here with jobs even understand how bad it is. My whole career I've always been in high demand. I've always got multiple offers when looking for work. I rarely ever get ghosted. Looking for a job has just always been extremely easy. However, right now I'd probably need to apply for 20+ roles just get a single call back. I might need to apply for 50 roles to to get an interview.

To your point on "just call someone" this has been happening. People are texting me and sending me LinkedIn messages constantly at the moment. I don't really know what people expect... Most people you know are probably not in a position where they can convince their company to just hire someone on recommendation and few companies are hiring anyway. At best they can say, "yeah, my company is hiring", but you're still going to be put into a pile of 300+ other people applying for the same role.

Similar experience.

Really bad timing for some other life events that took me out of and brought me back to the market now.

I’ve stretched my network. All the companies in it are laying off or have frozen hiring. Connections themselves are unmotivated and/or trying to find more secure jobs, too (are they out there?).

All my close recruiting buddies that have landed me lots of interviews and roles in the past have nothing.

I have significant experience. Doesn’t seem to be helping. I’ve never experienced anything like this. Even in 2008, when I only had a handful of years under my belt, I found a new gig pretty easily.

I’m trying to figure out how to adapt to… whatever this is, so I can figure out the meta game and escape it. So far, no dice.

I wish you the best, along with everyone else in this boat.

Yet somehow companies still “need” to bring in thousands of H1B workers. Weird…

just call some people you know...

Probably all unemployed too

If you are job searching, it's dangerous to go it alone.

Take this: "An Engineering Leader’s Job Search Algorithm" https://docs.google.com/document/d/19fr_36WOzKlq_zyGP2RdxMEs...

At 83 current visitors, I think this is the most actively viewed Google Doc I've seen!

I’ve seen some shared on Reddit with thousands of visitors

I like the little algorithm. As an aside, it reminded me how repetitive some languages can be. You scan the code, seeing lines like "Resume resume Resume", "Website site Website", etc. Takes me back to my college/first gig Java days.

Why isn't applyWithEmployeeReferral() an overload of apply() with a parameter for the linkedin referral(s)?

Started looking late November and started tracking my applications in January.

I have applied to a total of 46 positions within a month. This has led to six interviews, several of which I received no response, 13 formal rejections, and one job offer which I declined (The decline was due to the position being advertised as a developer role, yet the recruiter mentioned that about 50% of the duties would involve support tasks)

Seeing this thread gives me some relief. At least it's not just me but a broader trend across the whole industry

Junior engineer. Hundreds of applications across 3 months. Nothing but silence and automated rejections. It's got me feeling so down that I'm just going to leave the private sector for military. Get some training, have some job security, benefits, and hopefully wait out the horrible market.

Are you only looking regionally or across your whole country? (Presumably the US)

US, yes, and I'm in a particularly bad region for tech, so I'm searching across multiple states and also across the country. I'm currently employed as a remote worker and it's killing me. It gives me very few opportunities to network. I did high school online and graduated college online due to the pandemic, so my network is already super suffering as it is.

a broader trend

That's pretty scary too, though. If it was just you (or me, or a specific person), you (or me, etc.) could strive to improve. If there's nothing out there, there's nothing you can do.

> The second problem is that it is not possible to get only the latest ads (in LinkedIn) for example ads that are less than a week old. So I ended up having to page through a lot of ads I had already seen

This is by far the worst thing about searching for jobs in LinkedIn. It is horribly inconvenient to simply find the most recent jobs posted in the past 24 hours because all of the old promoted jobs are taking up 90% of the search results

There is a filter to only show jobs posted in the last 24 hours. But even when I had searches saves with the 24 filter applied, I still had to manually enable it when going back into the results page.

Probably because that way they can sell companies the idea "look your job post was viewed over 9000 times" even if it's noise for people briwsing these ads.

For me, even when filtering by 24 hours almost the entire page is filled with promoted ads, most of which were “reposted” in the past 24 hrs

For me it is the second worst thing. I'm trying to look for jobs that can be done from NZ. I don't care where the company is based.

Searching for remote jobs brings up jobs that can only be done by people living in [UK, US, NL, DE, etc]. There just doesn't seem to be a way to filter jobs by "will they employ people in my location".

Infuriating!

Yeah, I’ve noticed the same thing too. It’s like all the jobs I see are paid promotions and the good jobs are buried in the back. I even have LinkedIn premium. It seems that LinkedIn forgot I’m a paying customer

Did I misread or did you end up taking a remote job (specializing in crypto, company based in Zug, CH) and you’re based in Stockholm?

The fact that the job they finally took is at a crypto company suddenly had me reevaluate everything they wrote. :)

yep. He sounds so positive about it. Delusional even. But good for him for finding someone to give him money. Hope they don't pay in DOGE...

That's one of those questions I simply could not answer on the spot. My brain would immediately go into needing to know how long it takes on average to connect, why it takes so long, if the user's connection is bad, if we could load the content from the connection async, and so on...

All recruiters I was in contact with asked for my CV, even though it is mostly the same information that is already on my LinkedIn profile. It is almost as if it is a sign that you are serious.

I think it's a token that they can forward to an employer, establishing some degree of your consent to them representing you.

(Like in a story of visiting some foreign culture, when someone offers you tea they made in some foreign cup, you take a sip from it, and then someone else tells you that you just got married.)

Most likely, a CV file upload is a required field in their HR system.

Yes, this is why it's good to ask the recruiter whether they actually have any direct contact with a hiring manager, or whether they work at the company (tons of them have also been laid off in the last year). Recruiters are usually third-parties who's only job it is to accept CVs from applicants and pass them on, just one more stupid layer that gets you no further than cold applying. Often, those jobs a recruiter comes up with are reposted by other third-party companies on the same site without any text changed in the JD. Some recruiters will ask for MS word documents so it's easier to remove your contact information and add their logo.

Folks who were around during the tech bubble and during 2007/08, how bad the current market is compared to those two periods?

Graduated in 2008 right in the middle of the mortgage crisis.

It was really bad, but I was fresh out of college and had no experience.

Took me about 10 months to find a job in that market.

The market is definitely rough, but I wouldn’t say it’s that bad yet.

I graduated college in 2007/2008.

Things were worse back then. Nowadays, you could apply to 30 jobs in a day. Back then, there weren't even 30 jobs, maybe like 2 new ones every month.

I am going to sounds like a grumpy old timer, but I don't care...

I see far too many young people on social media complaining about how hard it is to find a job now, but at least you can post a tik Tok about it and potentially go viral and maybe even score a brand deal [1]. I remember applying to Target and Starbucks, and then never hearing back, so I have been there, done that. I did not get a job with health insurance until I was 25, which was also when I was finally able to move out of my parents' house.

This happens every 8-10 years. Nothing really new, expect this time was not as bad as 2007/2008. Back then, almost all companies had mass layoffs all at once. Today, they come in coordinated waves.

[1] https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/gen-z-tiktoker-goes-viral-21...

I later found another good way of finding companies to check to see if they have any open roles: google “competitor to” or “alternative to” and a company name, to find similar companies.

This cannot be understated. Having inside info on a competitor you already worked at is definitely eye catching to a recruiter. It may not get you the job, but will get you noticed, and is definitely an asset your non-tech interviews if you are discreet about how you discuss it.

Unfortunately, as per my experience, this is mostly illegal to do. Every contract I've ever had prohibits me to work for competitors for X amount of years.

thats if you are like CEO. if you got fired from google then of course you can apply for a job at bing

I was asked what timeout I would set on a database connection. I was more thinking about how long an individual user could be prepared to wait for a page to render, so blurted out too high of a number.

Interesting, I would have put those in the same ballpark. Anyone who can shed light on this?

I would have had to ask if it was load balanced. If it is, i would have said half the time for the requesting service minus 10 percent. Gives the query time to retry with some margin. This would be my opinion, not something I've read up on.

I agree. This is a weird reason to discontinue interviewing someone. This is the type of factoid that can easily be learned by someone on the job. If you want to reset db connections after 500ms instead of 15 seconds, then fine. But its the type of thing your company can just say they want to do and you do it, its not really something worth hiring around.

Not to mention, you really should be connecting to a DB Pooler anyway, which handles your DB connections, rather than designing the individual implementation within the application or micro-service and try to keep all your services aligned.

I've been looking for a job for the past 6 months or so.

Last time I looked for a job 4 years ago, I would get so many calls and I had to drop many of them.

Now that I'm even more experienced and I have a stellar resume, I'm struggling to get first interviews.

I ace every interview I get BTW; both technical and communication. I'm just not given the chance to prove myself. There's something weird going on.

Its the new "normal". Just have to wait for hiring to pick up again.

I wouldn't be surprised if some of those are ghost job descriptions, ones made to gather stats on the job market, add applicants to the pool and use as a reason to pull in foreign, cheaper talent

One thing I have heard from people is multiple reputable companies have been looking to see if the salary desired is not only inline with the range expected; but they are also calibrating things against what comparable levels/individuals in the team/org make.

The norm, in the last few years, has generally been in most cases a new hire makes more than a long tenured individual in the team.

Makes sense. Why spend once maintaining talent when you can spend twice acquiring it?

I think it makes complete sense, but for years, it's been the norm to over pay to acquire.

Recruiter here on Switzerland's market. All I can say is: Don't apply for jobs online. We get spammend like there is no tomorrow.

Instead, find the hiring manager on Linkedin and their email on hunter.io and directly reach out.

There are a couple of reasons I think online job applications are so spammy: 1. Sometimes the companies don't adhere to the requirements they posted. For example the job post might list skills A, B, and C with a minimum of 3+ years, but some of my friends recommended that I apply anyway. I don't track such cases but I think I got a couple of responses when I did that. 2. Some companies leave job posts up after they've been filled, or ghost candidates during the interview process, so candidates tend to spam to ensure that even if a small fraction replied, they'd get at least one offer.

I'd assume that contacting hiring managers directly might lead to better chances, but aren't 200 other people doing the same?

It seems everyone spams in recruitment; one of the reasons why it's such as shitshow.

In my experience, the most effective way to minimize the odds of a company never responding is to identify someone who works at that company who either you know personally (best) or they know someone you know and you ask for an intro. This allows you to skip the online application black hole. As a corollary, invest in your network and keep good relationships with former coworkers.

Yeah, I really can’t imagine cold applying for a place at this point in my career. I got my first job via a recruiter, every job since has been working with people I worked with previously.

This person sounds like they have been in the field for quite a while (since the dotcom bubble, at least), but still mostly did cold interviews? I have been in the field for a bit less time (a little more than 15 years), but I have dozens of former coworkers I would go through before going to cold interviewing. I wonder why they didn’t rely on their network more.

Anecdotally, I've been through ~10 employers in my ~30 years and about half were "cold applies" and the other half I was recruited in by former contacts. By far, the better experiences have been with the cold apply companies than the "already had a foot in the door" companies.

Anecdotally I've noticed that while the job market isn't good for software engineers, its seems to be much much worse for all the supportive roles like eng managers/product managers/designers/dev rel/ etc.

In my circle these seem to be the people who have been really struggling to find work, whereas the devs do seem to be finding work (just at a slower pace and with worse benefits than before.)

Is this just my bubble or have other people been seeing this too?

Also my experience at both employers and anecdotally.

A lot of this is the pervasive management trend that there is too much management, like how Instagram just eliminated the entire role of Technical Program Manager.

So at Job 1, the layoffs were about 50% “management.” My team no longer has a product manager and we have been told not to bother fussing over design except for big things. Both roles were essentially folded into team lead. He has to make mockups and product decisions now.

At Job 2, the layoffs were 70% management. My team had a manager who went from leading one team of 5 to four teams totaling 25. We also lost our designer and a product owner (we had several), and those decisions are now on the other product owners or the technical team lead (not management at this role).

Job market seems healthy for anyone with sufficient experience.

My company is hiring, my inbox is slammed with companies hiring. And this is for product engineering and leadership.

The market is cold for juniors, and unclear when/how that’s changing.

Edit for context, but this is in silicon valley. Never relocated during the pandemic - always suspected this might end up being the case.

Remember: Finding a job is a sales process. You are selling a $1,000,000+ product (yourself over N years of anticipated tenure). How would you approach making a million dollar sale if it wasn’t called a job?

Do that.

Your CV or resume is sales collateral. Focus on warm and hot leads over cold calling. Vet your leads with conversation, make sure you really can solve their problems, then give them your sales material. Preferably optimized for the lead in question.

If possible make the sale before interviews even begin. That way they’re just a rubber stamp and smoke test for red flags.

This is also a great time for local tech meetups to make a comeback. Others I know, as well as myself, have found great jobs through connections found through meetups. Corona obliterated a lot of these meetups, but anyone can start one and start networking practically for free.

How would you approach making a million dollar sale if it wasn’t called a job?

I’d be like, “This sounds like a job a professional salesperson should be doing. I’m gonna go get a job as an engineer, I’m much better at that.”

Is the author in the EU? I'd say outside of maybe recruiters on LinkedIn, none of these options work in this shitty market conditions in the US at this point in time.

Sweden

This sounds awful. An IQ test (and needing to prep for one)? Failing an interview based on a bad DB timeout answer? shudder

Yeah the DB timeout answer really stuck out.

Being a software developer today feels like constantly dealing with a bunch of bullcrap. Honestly, how are you folks doing? Are you alright? Frankly, I feel so exhausted. Job searching is such a soul-crushing activity. Sending applications is time-consuming, needlessly cumbersome, utterly Sisyphean, and essentially feels like a complete waste of your life. You don't learn anything useful, you're not building anything practical, it doesn't improve any aspect of your life, and there seems to be no good, proven way of automating it.

I never understood why being a developer has to be so wearisome. Why is it expected that any software dev has to have encyclopedic knowledge of Java, Javascript, Python, Go, different dialects of SQL, along with scripting stuff like bash and awk; ansible, chef and terraform; has to know 50 different AWS services; tons of different database types and their implementations; need to know common vulnerability types and understand how DNS, TCP-IP, http, websockets, and other protocols work; must know how to invert a binary tree in zero-gravity; their GitHub activity graph should look like an aerial view of the Amazon forest; they must maintain a blog; speak at conferences, and once in a while write a dissertation paper. And all that still is not enough because they have to excel at interviews. At several different types of them - algorithms and data structures, language-specific, framework-specific, pair programming interview, design systems interview, product interview, company and industry-specific, take-home project interview, tech talk, and personality interview.

Why is it that even when it feels like "you've made it," and you finally have a job at some big company, you still can't feel safe? Why do you constantly have to be in "finding a job mode" instead of building stuff and fixing problems? Sigh...

I'd be very curious to hear from other highly paid/desirable careers like doctors and lawyers (and even "real" engineers) about how their hiring pipeline works - is this unique to software developers?

Only six of thirty companies didn't reply... Maybe that's a European thing, but in the USA I find the vast majority of companies never reply.

Right. I stopped tracking my applications. I only put a note when I get a rejection or invitation for the next step. Most applications get sent into a void. You may get an automated "we got your application, thank you...", and still won't ever hear from them again.

Why on earth is the standard notice 3 months but the company can let you go instantly?

How did Sweden get like that?

Sweden is not like that, there's no at-will employment.

There's a probationary period, usually a really long one (like 6mo), but after that period is over it's basically impossible to fire people.

3mo is the standard notice period for you to give your employer when leaving, if you are made redundant then severance depends on tenure but it begins at 3 months and goes up to 1yr of salary (that I've seen.)

In the first one I failed, I had to write a limited chess program, that only supported two kinds of pieces. It needed a project structure, a data model, valid movements for the pieces, and tests. I started from nothing, and had to be send the solution in within two hours.

I've written programs to play chess and I doubt I could do this in 2 hours. If I did do it, it would be horrible buggy code.

If strategy requirements are low, I think this task is very solvable under 2h, it sounds like very mechanical and straightforward implementation.

The author has a lot of experience. Imagine what is happening to those with less than 15yrs exp. Ghost town

The jobs did not dissapear, they are being done remotely in far cheaper countries. Corps know that consumers are locked in, after all the pay politicians to ensure this. They also pay a specific color to ensure they can continue writing the rules of the game.

It would be a shame if they were unable to get their way next election and the rules be changed to promote in country innovation, hiring and manufacturing. It is the most ethical thing to do considering how much u.s. companies abuse workers overseas that have few to no laws.

Don't forget that supply and demand also apply. There have been times in the recent past where we had a shortage of good candidates in the hiring pipeline. Right now, largely because a couple major players in our area have cut back, there are a lot of great candidates in play. From the hiring side, we are interviewing so many people that we are all starting to get a bit burned out on it, but we know it is a buyers market right now, so we are not wasting any time, and also keeping a high bar. I don't know what any us can do about it when it is our turn to be a job seeker in a buyers market -- except to adjust expectations and sharpen focus on jobs that are a best fit for demonstrated experience. Hiring companies don't need to take risks on "people that could do it" in that kind of market, because they can hire someone "that has done it recently."

I switched jobs very recently. I landed my current one through a friend who was pushing me hard to join his company for well over a year. This needs a bit of a background story: I landed my old job the regular way and with a bit of deception on the company's part(I'll get to that). I applied the regular way, then got a call from the HR. The HR - awesome guy, very friendly and kind, the experience with him couldn't have been any better-solid 10/10. Even though I quit and in a somewhat stormy way, I did tell him that beyond him, I can't say I really connected with anyone in the company. Back to the point - the rest of the process - regular tech interview or two and I was in. The problems however started really early on - as early as the "meet the team" call before joining. As much as I liked the HR and the manager of my team, there were a few people on the team that I was very skeptical about from the moment they opened their mouths. But you know, benefit of a doubt and all that. 2 months in, it was becoming pretty clear that my skepticism had a solid foundation - arrogance, talking behind people's backs on daily basis, doing whatever they though was "right", all while my manager, as much as I liked him as a person, turned a blind eye and completely ignored it. Each time a concern was raised about something and someone said "I don't understand how this is a problem" it was met by "alright, let's not take time from everyone and we'll discuss it later" from the manager, which was his way of sweeping potential conflicts under the rug - those concerns/issues were never addressed. Ultimately it became clear that many people in the company are aware of this but it's easier to kick the can down the road and hope things get resolved on their own, than to address them immediately, even if there is a price to pay. The second big issue is that I was dragged in as a rust developer. And on day one, a handful of golang projects were thrown at me and somehow the rust part was never mentioned again. Go would never be my first choice, and I've said horrible things about it in the past(and I still stand by them) but I'd be fine with it if people are upfront about it. It's really disappointing to do a technical challenge in rust and a cool challenge at that and then be thrown into stuff that you can't help but hate with a passion(this is the deception part I was talking about).

To my current job-as I said, a friend recommended me and the only question I had was "are the people cool?". His response said everything I needed to hear: "Mate, I'm older than you - I'm approaching 40. On top of that my fuse is much shorter than yours. I'm here and I'm happy to be here - isn't that clear enough for you"? I really can't argue with any of that. And he is right. For the first time in more than a year I'm happy to be going to work every day. People are cool, the work and domain are interesting and insanely cool. And I can already tell that I'll have friends for life here once they find out some things about me.

My point is that, sure, finding new jobs these days is harder than it used to be 3-4 years ago, where you'd apply to 5 jobs and your phone would catch fire in the next 40 minutes. At this point you should be prepared to wait it out for a month or two, which, if you played it safe, shouldn't be a massive problem. The point I'm making with my example is that if you can afford it, you'd be much better off taking a month or two off and be careful about the jobs you apply to, than jump into something head on and end up regretting it soon after-EXACTLY THE WAY I DID. And you could use the time to work on some personal projects which might take you to an entirely different place.

Another thing is the rejection/ghosting: most companies rely heavily on HRs to filter out candidates. And in my experience, HRs have been horrible at it. It has gone as far as an old manager of mine and me having a fight with HR to send us the CVs directly to us as opposed to her going over them because she decided that someone is unfit for the job. Ultimately she sent us all the CVs of the people she was about to reject and out of those we found 2 of the best people I've ever worked with. Currently there's a lot of supply of CV's and with layoffs from big companies+people coming out of the countless online courses, and smaller companies being cautious about the economic state as a whole, and subsequently HRs are doing an even worse job than before. There is still a lot of demand for developers but most HRs are not the people that should be reviewing CVs. Which is a problem - in most cases developers/team leads don't have the time to go through 20 CVs a day. Even at my old job where I had to do tech interviews, doing one or two a week was a massive issue - the interviews take an hour or so but add the time you take to go through someone's CV, look at the tech test they did and prepare questions - that's easily 4-5 hours of your day. Now imagine having to go over 20 CVs. Do 3 of those in a week and you start to see the problem. Hence the reason this is commonly outsourced to HR. These days academic credentials are not taken much into account(ironically this is my first job where they asked me for a copy of my diploma), so what HRs do is scroll through your experience, tick off a few mental boxes like experience in companies they know/don't know and how much and... I don't know... Do you look like someone they'd like perhaps? Beats me. Point is, they get dozens of applications on daily basis and regardless of who you are, chances are they never looked too deep into your CV and just clicked on "reject". Is there a solution to this? No idea honestly.

Funny thing with experience. It might be harder today, but I once started a Wordpress engineer job with zero Wordpress exprience, which I was quite open about. The company said they wanted hardened, very very good PHP engineers and that your average Wordpress developer usually wasn't that good.

We ended up building the biggest WordPress sites in the world, by volume of traffic served. By the end of it WordPress wasn't WordPress anymore with all of the plugins we built that basically replaced whole sections of it.

I've never felt as stuck in a job as I have this past year. I've been searching for about ten months so far. During the great resignation, it felt like there was so much career portability and possibility. Want that dream job in another state and to stay in the home you bought at 3% interest? No problem. Want a 40% pay bump? Sure, you should have asked for 50%.

Today, most roles in my field of expertise would be a pay cut to half of my total compensation if I am lucky. Sure, I can live on just a base salary number, but it's a mental hurdle to accept, especially with all the inflation and price increases everywhere. Also, most roles want you on-site or hybrid, many in HCOL areas. Making a move like that means giving up a 2020-era interest rate and completely uprooting my family for a 50% pay cut.

I'm in an engineering subspecialty at a FAANG. Our service is built on industry-standard tools and technology, so I hope my skills will be portable. But with the poor prospects in the market, I may be more inclined to start my own company vs. trying to get in with another BigCo. Plus, all of the FAANGs are fully succumbing to enshitification and aren't that interesting to work for anymore YMMV.