Sometimes I feel like you guys live in alternative universe. Nothing about the "bad" interview sounded too atypical. Sure it's annoying, but not uncommon enough to be exceptional.
I don't mean to discount anyone's unpleasantness but you'd be surprised how much worse the rest of the world is.
Software engineers are used to companies fighting over them. Now we're in a market where it's normal to have lots of experience yet be unemployed for months. So it's a shock for many (though not atypical when compared to plenty of other fields of knowledge work, as you note).
Yeah, months between professional jobs has historically been completely normal if you couldn't interleave continue working and job searching. The meme (even if exaggerated) of rage-quitting a software job on Monday, sending out some emails, and having a few higher-paying offers by the end of the week is a complete aberration.
(Oh, and historically in many cases, it might also have involved moving across the country.)
I was talking to multiple people at an event fairly recently and there was general consensus that tech was in a "weird" place right now relative to the past decade or so.
Applying to and taking a new job requires bidirectional approval and sense of fit. The way a company conducts its interview process is a reflection of the corporate culture and sometimes is enough to erode the sense of fit on the applicant's side. If the interview process is a disorganized mess, why should the applicant believe the rest of the company is any different?
Try to get a job in finance, accounting, marketing, law, or other kinds of engineering. 7+ rounds of interviews, weird pop-psych questions, even getting a reply/meeting is a problem ...
This is the toughest market I've ever seen. I easily made it to on-sites at FAANG a few years ago and now I'm getting resume rejected by no-name startups (and FAANG).
The bar has also been raised significantly. I had an interview recently where I solved the algorithm question very quickly, but didn't refactor/clean up my code perfectly and was rejected.
I can’t solve everyone’s problems but I can say that I have 1-2 (depending if an outstanding offer is accepted) open principal engineering roles directly working for me. The process will be talking to the recruiter, then two tech interviews, then an interview with me. This will take you a couple weeks to go through because of our team is tiny and we’re fairly busy. Team is 100% remote and async. All the stuff in the JD applies, the one update that we haven’t gotten out yet is that you must know terraform really well. Comp is scaled for engineers outside the USA.
Weirded how, if you don't mind elaborating slightly?
For example, does it mean: the actual skill level (e.g., smartness) people actually look for and hire hasn't changed, but the activities that hiring teams require candidates to have experience with are (seemingly weirdly) not a great thing to need anyway and therefore lots of great candidates end up twiddling their thumbs?
In that way, the "height" of the bar is the same, but it's a "weird" bar, in that one could have to accept it for what it is, or even stoop to it, or perhaps shift over to it, in order to pass it?
Or more that the overall interview experiences are weird caricatures in and of themselves?
Weird is a great word, but it can be a little non-specific, so I'm left curious about the intended usage/meaning.
Many companies are filtering candidates in favor of mercenaries while pretending they are looking for dependable, committed professionals.
If you don’t have specific experience with some CTOs favorite esoteric API or don’t have experience in the same, specific corner of some insurance or usury industry, your ability to actually engineer solutions is considered irrelevant.
It’s as if the industry has forgotten that building software is about the application of algorithms to data structures to accomplish some user need. Instead, company after company wants to hot glue some service via some API using some framework on some cloud platform. And because the MBA decision-maker can write Excel macros with GPT, we don’t need programmers to build systems anymore. Just wire up foo SaaS to bar SaaS and MVPFailFastLeanAgile our way to success!
> It’s as if the industry has forgotten that building software is about...
This really isn't new. A look at Slashdot will give you similar complaints as far back as at least the 2000s. I'm sure someone older than me will dig up Usenet posts with exactly the same complaints and tell me to get off their lawn ;-)
* extreme focus on leetcode (upto SWE-3) and particular subset of system design (senior and lead roles) where you're expected to cook up a particular style of convoluted mess using mulitple cloud services. That alone wouldn't been a problem if people didn't optimize for this kind of assessment by memorizing interview prep blog posts. People spend more effort here on interview prep than actual skills.
* Diversity hiring: Big US/EU companies are trying to hire more females here because cost is low and they can show great diversity numbers. It hurts when you see posh privileged urban women having much more chance of getting into a good company than a man who worked his way up through sacrifice.
> * Diversity hiring: Big US/EU companies are trying to hire more females here because cost is low and they can show great diversity numbers. It hurts when you see posh privileged urban women having much more chance of getting into a good company than a man who worked his way up through sacrifice.
do you have any examples of this happening? or is this just a boogie man?
my experience has been different: so many mediocre men in this industry. all of the women i've worked with have been brilliant.
I always got the feeling that the distributions were different for men and women. Male professionals seem to be normally distributed, with a lot of mediocrity, some excellence, and some incompetence. In women, the mediocrity part of the population seems to be missing, so the distribution looks more bimodal.
If that's actually the case and not just a warped perception on my part, it could easily happen that, depending on your own skill-level and environment, you'll be more likely to work with one of the two groups in the bimodal distribution.
> It hurts when you see posh privileged urban women having much more chance of getting into a good company than a man who worked his way up through sacrifice.
It's not a gender issue. I would be looking to hire someone competent who works hard, not someone who makes "sacrifices" and then expects a job/promotion.
The latter never works. That's not the work culture in most places. I've seen it many times, people who make "sacrifices", allowing themselves to be exploited, expecting some promotion from it, and are then passed over for someone who actually has demonstrated they are good at the job and ready for more responsibility, and not being a doormat. Then they become resentful.
It's not a one-dimensional scale of being "better". From my experience there are relatively few women who really get in the trenches. Call me conservative or reactionary or whatever but in my experience this is how it is in reality. Many women in tech are more into "softer" topics like agile coach. Staring at logs in a terminal and sifting through endless YAML not so much. There seems to be a little bit of denial that guys like us still have their value.
This has not been my experience. The women I've worked with in software engineering teams have all been, well, engineers. One of them worked on some kind of real-time printer operating system before becoming a Java dev, another one is currently team lead on the cluster team on a distributed software product, another one has the most in-depth knowledge of CSS of anyone in a 50+ people frontend department.
I see a lot of people online complaining about the job market and blaming all kinds of things for their inability to find a job, but I think what has changed is that there are no more defensive hires, where companies like Google hire as many people as possible just to deny their competitors those people. Lots of relatively unqualified people found very high-paying jobs that way and are now surprised that they can't land those jobs anymore.
If you're competent and personable and know your own strengths, you can still find a job relatively easily.
Coincidentally, I was fired during the tech downturn two years ago, and within a few weeks, had three job offers out of three applications. I have a good CV, I applied at local companies that matched my specific expertise, I asked how the interview would go and what was expected, and prepared specifically for each company.
Complaining about women because you can't find a job isn't just misguided, it's harmful to yourself, because it prevents you from understanding what the actual issue is, and working on it.
The words you're looking for aren't conservative or reactionary they are bigoted and asshole. Best software engineer I've ever worked with is a woman, the rest had exactly the same range of ability as the men. Overall though a much lower level of entitled ignorance than "guys like us".
It's so peculiar that the man who thinks few women are willing to "get in the trenches" never sees women really getting into the trenches. It must definitely be because that's just how all women are. And definitely not because most women choose not to work with you or a company that perpetuates that idea.
> i did not know that one gender could be better at this work. that seems like huge news if true.
There is research that has shown that men are, on average, better at single-focus tasks. And, indeed, it was huge news at the time the research was published – at least as huge as being reported in major news publications is.
It wouldn't be huge news now. We quickly grow bored and tired of widely reported things from the past. Humans, of all genders it seems, tend to seek novelty.
Right, but certain careers have figured out that women are, on average, better at the socialization game and thus, broadly speaking, a better fit for the job. Ain't nobody "diversity" hiring on the oil rigs or other jobs where the physical act is more important than interpersonal interaction.
However, it is difficult to measure those positive traits for what they are, so employers are selecting based on gender hoping for positive correlation. But that's illegal, so "diversity" hiring was created as a scapegoat to help avoid legal fire.
The bar has been lowered in many respects. 14 years experience, 5 of them at a FAANG. Successful startup exit for a small company I founded, and and endless array of India-based recruiters that, for example, want me to mention “Ruby 3.2” in my resume when the resume says I have 14 years of Ruby experience including using it daily in my present job. I could literally say “I invented Ruby and have worked with it daily for 20 years,” and they’d say, “but you don’t have 3.2 listed.”
I play the game then they pass me off to another Indian who is less understandable than the first guy and then they offer $45/hour. I say yeah sure, submit me to the potential client. Then I never hear anything back.
The Indian 3rd party recruiting industry is absolutely horrible. Another anecdote was spending 10 minutes explaining how Java and JavaScript aren’t the same thing. I am convinced there is rampant discrimination happening as well against non-Indians, and especially those who aren’t H1Bs. (H1B is a trap that makes it easy to hire people at lower wages and then also makes it harder for them to switch employers.)
I’m not well articulating the problem, but anyone who has done this dance knows exactly what I’m talking about.
By the way, I used to contract at $95/hour and now I can’t get calls back for $45/hour.
The outsourcing offshoring business needs to be significantly reformed. I had a gig at Best Buy ($70/hour) and I got to spend 3 months training some Accenture H1Bs to replace me. I thought H1B was to fill “critical shortages of highly skilled workers?” Best Buy didn’t have a shortage — they fired my entire team and replaced it with Accenture. Best Buy should be heavily taxed for that and Accenture et al should have their offshore labor tariffed into oblivion. (They typically have onshore H1Bs directing offshore teams.) The Best Buy CEO talks all sorts of DEI crap, while firing people to cut costs. Not very inclusive if you ask me.
You're describing the effects of normalising remote work. Employees now are able to work from anywhere in the world, so companies get employees from all over the world. Since we're already looking at employing anywhere, why not also contract from anywhere?
anecdata - I am Indian and on h1b. Intel hired Accenture folks, they just put more people with no experience, it took more time to train them than doing stuff ourselves.
Another instance, Intel gave tens of millions to do something that few employees could have done in couple of months. Its basically creating two conda environments, one with intel optimized software stack & one with default and compare the results for 20 use cases.
Not sure its the case with all the contract companies, but this was my experience.
Indians,Brazilians,Portuguese,Ukrainians,Russians are possibly the worst clique of discriminative nationalities. You can be 100% assured that you will be driven out of a company/job if more of them take a hold and get into higher up positions. This is not racism. This is a pure fact based on statistical evidence.
You will be sold a dream of infinite scalability by hiring "talent" in those countries for cheap and what you will get is usually disfunctional teams riddled with incompetence and nepotism.
Even if a job/team is meant to be multicultural,diverse they will find a way how to hire more and more of their countrymen until knowing the language is basically a requirement for the job.
I am not even an american and i've seen this happen in Europe as well so I imagine in the US it must be 1000 times worse.
I think a lot of this comes down to AI. In a recent hiring round we experienced multiple candidates using AI tooling to assist them in the technical interviews (remote only company). I expect relationship hires to become more common over the next few years as even more open-discussion focused interview rounds like architecture become lower signal.
If you're giving remote interviews, your loop should assume candidates can use AI. it's like giving a take home math test that assumes people won't use calculators at this point
A cheap multi camera system + software, that can be quickly installed at candidates location to watch interviewing candidate. This can be sent by employer before interviews. its cheap enough that it can be thrown away.
traditional way - A company that provides interviewing centers across major cities for software interview, the location will have cameras that will make sure candidates are not cheating.
I disagree. We pretty explicitly ask candidates to not use AI.
While it's fine when doing the job the purpose of the interview is to gauge your ability to understand and solve problems, while AI can help you with that you understanding how to do it yourself signals that you'll be able to solve other more complex wider-spanning problems.
Just like with a calculator - it's important for candidates to know _why_ something works and be able to demonstrate that as much as them knowing the solution.
> Just like with a calculator - it's important for candidates to know _why_ something works and be able to demonstrate that as much as them knowing the solution.
And this is why I never give coding-puzzle interviews. I just have a chat about your past projects (based on resume). We'll go deep into the technical details and it is easy in such a conversation to get a feel for whether you actually contributed significantly to the things the resume says you did.
There is an interesting dichotomy in your interview process. You say you want someone who can solve problems, but then go on to say (perhaps unintentionally; communication is hard) that you only want someone who has already rote-memorized how to solve the particular problems you throw at them, not someone who can figure things out as the problems arise.
> but then go on to say (perhaps unintentionally; communication is hard) that you only want someone who has already rote-memorized how to solve the particular problems you throw at them
They said the opposite of that. Unless you think it's not possible to figure out problems and you can only do them by rote memorization?
> you only want someone who has already rote-memorized how to solve the particular problems you throw at them, not someone who can figure things out as the problems arise
This is literally what AI is, and why they don't want it used in the interview.
Literally someone (or, at least, some thing) that can figure things out as problems arise? That seems quite generous. Unless you're solving a "problem" that has already been solved a million times before, it won't have a clue. These so-called AIs are predictive text generators, not thinking machines. But there is no need to solve a problem that is already solved in the first place, so...
It is really good at being a "college professor" that you can bounce ideas off of, though. It is not going to give you the solution (it fundamentally can't), but it can serve to help guide you. Stuff like "A similar problem was solved with <insert esoteric research paper you've never heard of>, perhaps there is an adaptation there for you to consider?"
We're long past a world where one can solve problems in a vacuum. You haven't been able to do that for thousands, if not millions, of years. All new problems are solved by standing on the shoulders of problems that were solved previously. One needs resources to understand those older problems and their solutions to pave the way to solving the present problems. So... If you can't use the tools we have for that during the interview, all you can lean on is what you were able to memorize beforehand.
But that doesn't end up measuring problem solving ability, just your ability to memorize and your foresight in memorizing the right thing.
Prob everyone is usually AI at this point, only a few bother to make the solution mor human-made-like.
Personally, there is not way I am writing boilerplate again unless you are paying me hourly for the test.
As someone with a couple of open (not engineering) recs, I can agree this is the toughest market I’ve ever seen. For both recs, we received many highly qualified candidates with relevant skills,
often in a relevant domain.
I’ve never seen this before. It’s always been very hard to find a single highly-qualified candidate.
The media seems to think the great resignation has ended, but really it’s just that jobs have dried up. Professionals, especially good ones, are eager to leave their current jobs, but the pool is so small, there’s just nowhere to go.
And with so many people looking for new positions, if you’re not highly keyword targeted, you won’t go anywhere.
Though FAANG offers are usually more attractive than startups (considering pay level and stability), some startups could be more selective since they couldn't afford to hire the wrong candidate.
It’s more about calibration. If you interview 100 people at a FAANG, you get an idea of where the bar is. This idea gets calibrated with a panel of interviewers, along with shadow interviewers.
At a startup… who knows? I had an interviewer burn up 25 minutes on a 45 minute coding question trying to “hint me” towards the solution I mentioned in the first 2 minutes.
> The bar has also been raised significantly. I had an interview recently where I solved the algorithm question very quickly, but didn't refactor/clean up my code perfectly and was rejected.
Bearing in mind the implicit comparison to "a few years ago", a few years ago I interviewed with Google, at which point the recruiter told me I'd passed the interview, wished me congratulations (!), told me to expect a job offer, and finally, ~6 weeks later, informed me that while I'd "passed" the interviews, my scores were too low for them to make an offer.
It remains a mystery what it might mean to "pass" without actually advancing beyond the threshold you passed.
For context -
I’ve made 4 personal projects that currently have over 1000+ daily active users (numbers are ~1500, ~6000, ~14,000, and ~430,000) all created within the span of the last year. I’ve also sold software.
On top of all that, I have an Engineering degree, 4 years experience, no breaks in employment, study on my afternoons and weekends (C, Go, C#) and take extra university courses, and have some other high level achievements/recognition.
I apply for Intermediate and Senior positions.
So far I have 3 interviews lined up out of ~30-40 applications. About 10 rejections so far. 1 of those jobs is actually decent, the other 2 are desperation applications.
It’s brutal. I’m trying my absolute best, I don’t see how people that have been coasting have any chance.
You should be able to coast a bit in life.
I’m sad at the state of things, and sad for people trying to stay in the industry or break into the industry.
Just trying to play devils advocate here but have you considered that your lack of “coasting” could be part of the problem? If your resume looks anything like this post then that is something to consider.
Your side projects could give the impression that you are more dedicated to those than to your primary employer.
For the roles I review resumes for and interview I want a well rounded individual who seems like they would stay in the position for many years. Someone who is studying on weekends and taking extra university courses on coding does not necessarily give me that impression. Again, just a devil’s advocate position.
FYI, the personal projects might be a detriment rather than a help as it may come across as "this person will have split priorities or might leave to pursue individual interests"
For better or worse, I might not showcase those that much.
Likely because it is not a good time to be a gardener (professionally) right now either. The tech job market and agriculture prosperity seem to track each other.
There are just piles and piles of companies out there trying to hire but are absolutely obsessed with having people work in their terrible SF offices.
I don't get it. If these companies really believed that working in an office was so beneficial they would invest in them. But they all come across like "I need an office to appear like a real company but I don't want to spend a lot of money". They're these millennial gray warehouses rocking the sad-bachelor aesthetic.
At this point, I view the job search process as stochastic rather than deterministic. I model my job search using the binomial distribution. All that you need to know is what how frequently you get interviews and offers to then explore the probabilities involved.
To me at least, that removes a lot of the uncertainty, since I now know that if I apply to X jobs, I will have a Y percent chance of getting at least one offer, etc. Or maybe all of this is just an indictment of current hiring practices that I no longer think in terms of individual positions but in terms of aggregates of them.
Admissions to selective colleges are the same way. For most students it's rather foolish and wasteful to target any one specific college because luck plays a huge factor (or the actual selection criteria are unknown and unknowable, which from the applicant's perspective is indistinguishable from luck).
People cannot discriminate. They must spray and pray because the algorithm demands it of them. Thus, both sides (employer and employee) lose, because every applicant and every institution becomes flattened, generalized.
It used to be, applying to places took time and effort. So students (and job applicants likewise) would discriminate. This allowed employers and institutions to actually build culture. An institution could be different from another institution in large ways, all cultural, all "soft" -- unpronounceable by the machine.
This enriched us all, because it allowed pockets of brilliance to form. Actual, real, human variation.
Now, every job has 2,000 applicants. Every HR person is trained at a school whose curriculum is undifferentiated from Harvard or Yale, because every school has the incentive to emulate Harvard or Yale. Every HR person's classmates all, similarly, could not afford to care which institution they applied to, because their application process was -- again, spray and pray. And thus, every HR person at every company creates the exact same institution.
This flattening, this algorithmization, is like an invasive species which has choked out all of the variable, beautiful, at times brilliant flora and fauna which existed, protected, in its isolated institutional ecology. All of that cultural diversity has been destroyed so that we could click "easy apply."
What's the result? Every job application looks the same. Every interview looks the same. Every internal culture looks the same. Every job is the same, so much so that you could switch jobs every 2 years and nobody would even notice or care. Every 2 years! How much does a 2 year old know!? Every company apes Google in their interview process because Google is the Kudzu that choked out their local flora and fauna.
We're all poorer for it, this mass extinction event. Like you say, it's happening all over, not just in companies and schools.
I've been unemployed for 4 months. While I have received a job offer, it would require me to move and either sell my house, rent it out, or just continue to pay the mortgage on top of rent. I'm torn as to what to do as I do need a job, but I don't want to leave my friends and family. My thoughts go out to everybody else out there looking for a job at this time.
One piece of advice I usually give is to avoid applying to jobs through company’s career websites or LinkedIn. Instead, tap your social network: see if there is someone you know/have worked with who either works at the company you’re interested in or is connected to it someone (as an advisor, investor, personal friend of someone in a leadership position) and ask them for a warm intro. Social proof gives you an advantage over the legion of anonymous online applicants.
Internal referrals won’t necessarily give you an edge, but they definitely nearly guarantee at least getting into the door.
At our company the (unwritten) policy is anyone who is referred internally will always get at least 1 shot at an interview even if the resume would been have otherwise been rejected. The bar isn’t lowered on merit, though.
Yep. Several months ago I leaned on a friend for a referral. This person is relatively well known in his industry. He’s written books and has spoke at a lot of conferences, and been interviewed by a lot of outlets. I got a personal referral from him, and I didn’t even get a phone call with a recruiter. Crazy.
Do you have experience with doing this in a way that doesn't come across as desperate or too forward? How close do you need to be with this network? Is Linkedin connection enough, or would you only do this approach with people you've worked with?
If I get such a request from someone I don't know, I will direct them to the public job board.
I'm very happy to refer and vouch for someone that I've actually worked with (and look forward to working with again), but I'm not vouching for some random stranger...
I like to think of it more as being intentional, and less as desperate/too forward. You want to know what you're looking for and, just as important, what you're not looking for.
In terms of reaching out, here are some things I did when I was job hunting:
1. The classic referral
Find the job post and work backwards from there (e.g., is there somebody I know (1st connection) or somebody who knows somebody I know (2nd connection) on LinkedIn who works at the company?).
If I knew the 1st connection, I'd reach out and ask if they were comfortable referring me.
I made time to catch up with good friends. It felt energizing to get the moral support, with the added bonus that sometimes they knew people working at companies looking to hire. For example I would eventually get a job offer from Figma and that was because a good friend's partner worked there and was glad to refer me. I hadn't even heard of the opportunity before we talked.
4. The weak ties
I also made time to catch up with people I didn't know that well. There's some research on "weak ties" that suggest that people who you don't know well probably are exposed to a very different network to you, and will come across very different opportunities. The convo would be an opportunity for us to catch up and I'd talk about being open to job opportunities.
I'll review resumes of any referrals from my network. Usually provide tips or areas they need to show more substance in. I won't submit any network referral to my company's internal recruiter unless they stand out and fit a need.
The proximity to my network doesn't need to be strong, but your resume does.
Ideally people you've worked with or at least know of you and your work so they can give a positive internal recommendation. "He follows me on X" isn't much of an endorsement if that's all the person can say about you.
Ah yes, in the grand tradition of meritocracy, competition, and capitalism: “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”.
To be clear, I’m not saying you’re wrong: in a distorted market it’s absolutely about who you know and get on with. So it’s nothing personal that your (astute) observation irks me.
I just can’t see advice like this without feeling a little tick: I’ve been in this business for more than twenty years, and there have been downturns certainly in that time, but I’ve never seen it so firmly in the iron grip of monopoly and nepotism with such predictably grim results for the software outcomes.
And don’t get me started on the party line that “the economy is doing great”.
> " the salary listed in the description had dropped by $30,000 ... But the role still sounded interesting, and the task itself looked like a fun challenge, "
If you still went for a job that had dropped by that much, but it was still a meaningful amount of money and an interesting sounding job, well ... Good luck and all, but I kind of wish I had your problems.
all of these posts make me feel grateful that i've been able to pick up work. it also makes me wonder what i'm doing right and what all of these bloggers are doing wrong. bloggers are clearly good at marketing and communicating what they can do for a company, which is what a lot of software developers struggle with.
I guess Europe isn't nearly as bad as the US. My portfolio (and probably my actual skills) are nowhere close to what some of those in the comments that can't find a job are offering, but I was able to secure a job in Trondheim, Norway (where I'm about to move in January) with a single application and interview. I assume there weren't too many people in the Trondheim area who were willing to work at an office and who already know Vue.js pretty well.
Europe is probably easier to get hired, but if you are a senior making some medium+ salary, it's also easier to get skipped in favor of cheaper candidates.
I’m going through a similar experience after being laid off back in July for the first time in my career. The jobs advertised are quite often less-than-inspiring, the hiring processes are weird and opaque, and the hiring team is frequently disorganized and unprofessional.
An interviewer last week was straight out of a Silicon Valley storyline, asking a “if you were on an elevator with Marc Andreessen” question and explaining his devotion to Malcolm Gladwell’s 10000 hour “rule”. The week before I got ghosted twice by a company who’s leadership team apparently pays no attention to the Calendly invites they forced me to set up “for my convenience”.
I know I’m capable and do good work, so I’m not having any sort of crisis of confidence. At least not yet. But the process is definitely frustrating.
In my case, the process became so awful, humiliating, and hostile, I just gave up, and retired, ten years before I had planned. I’m very fortunate, that I could afford it. I now develop software for free, for outfits that can’t afford people like me.
It’s tough, but looking for work after 50, especially when pivoting from management, back to IC, is unbearable. My heart goes out to those without the means to walk away. I think some companies missed out, but I am under no illusion that I’m missed. I doubt they had any regrets in passing me up.
In my case, it was probably the best thing that ever happened to me. I left a lot of money on the table, but I have been happier than I ever dreamed, while working twice as hard as I ever did, when I was getting paid for it.
Devs in there 40's and 50's are probably the most valuable devs on earth. We grew up with computers and had to adapt to our rapidly changing industry.
I suspect we will see startup founders trending older if it isn't already happening. Companies stuck in the old way of thinking that older is slower will probably be disrupted in the next recession.
It's interesting how much stereotyping is happening in these replies.
The fact is that there's nothing unique about any age group, and the only difference between them is their birth dates. Intragenerational differences are always larger than intergenerational differences. In any age group, there are varying degrees of competence, varying degrees of attitude, varying degrees of personal circumstances (e.g., home, family).
Ageism is treating a person solely as member of a group rather than as an individual. You simply can't accurately generalize based on a job candidate's age. Anyone who claims, "In my experience [members of age group] are mostly like this..." is putting forth weak anecdotal data that is practically useless and totally unscientific.
I think the OP was referring to experience not age. Older devs have seen the landscape change so much and if it makes full circle again that experience will pay off.
Experience can be valuable, but it's not automatically valuable. Plenty of people completely fail to learn from their long experience. Others learn very quickly from their limited experience.
The paragon is talent plus experience plus willingness to learn from experience. Admittedly, more older devs than younger devs will have this combination, but "social promotion" is no guarantee of success.
> Devs in there 40's and 50's are probably the most valuable devs on earth.
Over 50 seeker here (25+ years experience, first IC then mgmt). All of hiring managers I've dealt with this time around are at least 10 years my junior, and they disagree with you. They view me as a risk (higher compensation, less "hungry", higher "flight risk") and prefer people their age or younger. Don't call it ageism though, that's just how the world works :(
They want people to be passionate about whatever but in my experience the younger guys/gals are so preoccupied with themselves or some process that they spend endless hours discussing it instead of just getting some shit done.
As someone similar age, if I was job-seeking like you, then if a younger potential boss gave these vibes, I'd be up-front. Seems to me salary can't increase for ever. Sure, more experience may lead to better design decisions which save employers a fortune. However, it's kind of opaque. "Best devs on earth" may be true, but doesn't mean its obvious to management. Maybe they won't pay a higher salary immediately than to a 30-yr-old, but they'll give you a reward later if they can see how much you helped them. Flight risk? Ask 'em about it, how can you ease that fear - generally that comes down to career history - if you look like a job-hopper that can be a problem but its not specifically age-related, right? Less hungry? Well again not sure that's age-related. If they're a sweatshop I suppose they might feel they can push younger ones around more, but who wants to work there anyway? Good luck :)
From what I can see, kids out of college, are being paid more than I ever made, at the peak of my career (and they seem to have less to show for it).
Speaking only for myself, I would have been fine, taking a lower salary, if the work (and work environment) were interesting to me.
I also would not have been interested in flitting around, looking for pay bumps. I was already set.
In fact, I suspect that someone like me (and I am sure there are many others, much like me, and likely, far more qualified), could be an absolute Godsend to a startup.
> I suspect we will see startup founders trending older if it isn't already happening
Anecdotally, I think it already is. Part of it is simply because the younger you are, the less risk you can take with the cost of housing the way that it is. Older people/Millenials often have housing security and can take more risks this way, plus the other factors you raised.
Can't speak to whether that's universally true, but it's something I've been seeing: including people in their late 30s to mid 40s leaving cushy well paying corporate jobs to try founder life: they have big nest eggs from said previous jobs, so why not!
We older people have less mobility and less willing to take risk because if the bet doesn't pay off there's not much time to make up for it (younger folks can go back to be an FTE or start another thing). Also, people have kids later in life and you have to pay their insane college bills when you're in your 50s or even 60s.
If you see more older people starting companies it's because we can't find employment and have to find a way to be productive somehow...
> Devs in there 40's and 50's are probably the most valuable devs on earth.
My experience says no. They just have huge egos because they think that age and seniority makes them smart, so they push hard for bad solutions, and nobody can argue with them because younger folks just don't care that much about winning an argument at work. From their point of view, they think they're saving the company from the incompetent ones.
I had such a guy at my first job, thankfully not directly in my team. In my current job I also have such a guy, unfortunately he works directly with me. I just make sure that there's papertrail to say that I showed my arguments why the old man's solution is wrong, so that when things fail, I'm not the one to blame.
In my experience, its more the older ones that "just don't care that much about winning an argument at work", because we've learned over time to choose our battles, and "the healthy art of not giving a s**" . Maybe come back in 10 yrs time and see if you still think this? ;)
In my case, I’m a longtime member of a worldwide nonprofit organization, and that gives me a good platform to work in.
I would be happy to chat about it, offline, but I don’t usually discuss it in detail, hereabouts, as I deliberately avoid putting my work in the limelight.
I could never land anything... Those cushy AF PM jobs at Uber and the ilk right out of college really irk me. Although, those perks are getting culled left and right. Putting my time in to be a lowkey package driver at UPS and cultivating my passion project to a SMB lol
It's going to get tougher and tougher in this job market.
1. Layoffs happening regularly.
2. Less Senior positions and virtually no junior jobs.
2. AI accelerating and reducing the number of software engineers.
3. Job postings being reposted with less salary and equity in US, EU and especially the UK.
You might as well take yourself off the job market / stay in current job, build a paying SMB company or side project on the side and make that your third income.
If it gets better and reaches sustainability you can choose to leave your job and live off it, or choose to get funding if need be.
After applying for over 60+ jobs after graduation and getting rejected over and over, I took myself off the market and started a pest control SaaS 4 years ago now it's bringing in over $2.2M+ ARR.
While the jobs I was applying for have now either shut down or not even bringing in anything over $100K ARR.
Congrats on the business, I hope this inspires others to pursue their dreams.
Since you mentioned a specific number of applications (60+), I just wanted to share my job hunt story. When I was last looking for a role (8 months ago), I started out thinking 5 applications a day was good, but then I spoke with an industry mentor, and he laughed me off saying that wasn't close to enough. Turns out he was right.
On his recommendation I started aiming for 50 a day. At first it's very slow, but you build up a corpus of cover letters and other material to submit applications.
This would have been easier if I was employed at the time, since so many places auto-reject if you aren't currently employed. This was also looking for fully-remote in APAC, which has far fewer opportunities than other regions/timezones.
And you might say "but I don't want to work for all these companies" and I would agree. But provided you are applying for a role that you are at least curious about, those ones that are not great fits can provide good interview practice.
On the other side of this you have people like me who've tried and failed, and now 15 years later I have 30 days to pay my mortgage or my life starts unfolding. Hoping to make some portfolio pieces in that time to impress some hiring managers, building fun tools for myself again without profit in mind. Not everyone can build a hyper successful SaaS.
There are SaaS products for managing sales/compliance/billing for just about every licensed profession that deals directly with customers. I regularly get emails that are "from" my HVAC contractor or optometrist, but are obviously sent by a SaaS.
Congratulations! This is my dream. But the SaaS thing is so challenging. Couple of questions if you don't mind. Any tips for someone starting out? Did you have any experience in the pest control business? How did you decide pest control industry? How did you market the product?
Now, imagine this situation taken to the extreme: searching for a job with relocation opportunities while residing in a country that many avoid for ethical reasons. :(
Sometimes I feel like you guys live in alternative universe. Nothing about the "bad" interview sounded too atypical. Sure it's annoying, but not uncommon enough to be exceptional.
I don't mean to discount anyone's unpleasantness but you'd be surprised how much worse the rest of the world is.
Software engineers are used to companies fighting over them. Now we're in a market where it's normal to have lots of experience yet be unemployed for months. So it's a shock for many (though not atypical when compared to plenty of other fields of knowledge work, as you note).
How about ghost jobs? This is a newish phenomena and wonder if it affects other sectors than IT.
Yeah, months between professional jobs has historically been completely normal if you couldn't interleave continue working and job searching. The meme (even if exaggerated) of rage-quitting a software job on Monday, sending out some emails, and having a few higher-paying offers by the end of the week is a complete aberration.
(Oh, and historically in many cases, it might also have involved moving across the country.)
I was talking to multiple people at an event fairly recently and there was general consensus that tech was in a "weird" place right now relative to the past decade or so.
Applying to and taking a new job requires bidirectional approval and sense of fit. The way a company conducts its interview process is a reflection of the corporate culture and sometimes is enough to erode the sense of fit on the applicant's side. If the interview process is a disorganized mess, why should the applicant believe the rest of the company is any different?
Generally I agree but but when the bills keep stacking up and savings getting depleted it gets harder to be picky.
That's kind of the point, the "typical" experience is actually pretty bad for job hunters
Try to get a job in finance, accounting, marketing, law, or other kinds of engineering. 7+ rounds of interviews, weird pop-psych questions, even getting a reply/meeting is a problem ...
"It's bad everywhere" or "it's worse elsewhere" does not mean it's not bad
"Other people have it worse" is not a compelling reason to make people believe their own shitty situation is good
Maybe we could improve the interviewing in all industries?
But we could start with Software since that's where most of the people on this board work
I don't think SWE interviews are bad. And I have no idea who's the "we" that's supposed to fix it globally.
This is the toughest market I've ever seen. I easily made it to on-sites at FAANG a few years ago and now I'm getting resume rejected by no-name startups (and FAANG).
The bar has also been raised significantly. I had an interview recently where I solved the algorithm question very quickly, but didn't refactor/clean up my code perfectly and was rejected.
I can’t solve everyone’s problems but I can say that I have 1-2 (depending if an outstanding offer is accepted) open principal engineering roles directly working for me. The process will be talking to the recruiter, then two tech interviews, then an interview with me. This will take you a couple weeks to go through because of our team is tiny and we’re fairly busy. Team is 100% remote and async. All the stuff in the JD applies, the one update that we haven’t gotten out yet is that you must know terraform really well. Comp is scaled for engineers outside the USA.
Apply at https://moduscreate.com/careers/5984037003/?gh_jid=598403700... and feel free to mention that you saw Boris (me) post this on HN.
This looks fantastic. Applied!
I’m not sure the bar has been raised. It’s been weirded, but not raised.
Weirded how, if you don't mind elaborating slightly?
For example, does it mean: the actual skill level (e.g., smartness) people actually look for and hire hasn't changed, but the activities that hiring teams require candidates to have experience with are (seemingly weirdly) not a great thing to need anyway and therefore lots of great candidates end up twiddling their thumbs?
In that way, the "height" of the bar is the same, but it's a "weird" bar, in that one could have to accept it for what it is, or even stoop to it, or perhaps shift over to it, in order to pass it?
Or more that the overall interview experiences are weird caricatures in and of themselves?
Weird is a great word, but it can be a little non-specific, so I'm left curious about the intended usage/meaning.
Many companies are filtering candidates in favor of mercenaries while pretending they are looking for dependable, committed professionals.
If you don’t have specific experience with some CTOs favorite esoteric API or don’t have experience in the same, specific corner of some insurance or usury industry, your ability to actually engineer solutions is considered irrelevant.
It’s as if the industry has forgotten that building software is about the application of algorithms to data structures to accomplish some user need. Instead, company after company wants to hot glue some service via some API using some framework on some cloud platform. And because the MBA decision-maker can write Excel macros with GPT, we don’t need programmers to build systems anymore. Just wire up foo SaaS to bar SaaS and MVPFailFastLeanAgile our way to success!
Sorry for the rant…
> It’s as if the industry has forgotten that building software is about...
This really isn't new. A look at Slashdot will give you similar complaints as far back as at least the 2000s. I'm sure someone older than me will dig up Usenet posts with exactly the same complaints and tell me to get off their lawn ;-)
Yeah well what do recruiters know about software development?
They just know the keywords the EMs and C suite sent them in the headcount request.
That EMs and the C-suite think solving their engineering needs is to add "headcount" is the bigger problem.
That’s what they thought in 2021.
Now that money isn’t free, they think the problem is too many engineers.
Thanks, much appreciated
In my country:
* extreme focus on leetcode (upto SWE-3) and particular subset of system design (senior and lead roles) where you're expected to cook up a particular style of convoluted mess using mulitple cloud services. That alone wouldn't been a problem if people didn't optimize for this kind of assessment by memorizing interview prep blog posts. People spend more effort here on interview prep than actual skills.
* Diversity hiring: Big US/EU companies are trying to hire more females here because cost is low and they can show great diversity numbers. It hurts when you see posh privileged urban women having much more chance of getting into a good company than a man who worked his way up through sacrifice.
> * Diversity hiring: Big US/EU companies are trying to hire more females here because cost is low and they can show great diversity numbers. It hurts when you see posh privileged urban women having much more chance of getting into a good company than a man who worked his way up through sacrifice.
do you have any examples of this happening? or is this just a boogie man?
my experience has been different: so many mediocre men in this industry. all of the women i've worked with have been brilliant.
I always got the feeling that the distributions were different for men and women. Male professionals seem to be normally distributed, with a lot of mediocrity, some excellence, and some incompetence. In women, the mediocrity part of the population seems to be missing, so the distribution looks more bimodal.
If that's actually the case and not just a warped perception on my part, it could easily happen that, depending on your own skill-level and environment, you'll be more likely to work with one of the two groups in the bimodal distribution.
> It hurts when you see posh privileged urban women having much more chance of getting into a good company than a man who worked his way up through sacrifice.
It's not a gender issue. I would be looking to hire someone competent who works hard, not someone who makes "sacrifices" and then expects a job/promotion.
The latter never works. That's not the work culture in most places. I've seen it many times, people who make "sacrifices", allowing themselves to be exploited, expecting some promotion from it, and are then passed over for someone who actually has demonstrated they are good at the job and ready for more responsibility, and not being a doormat. Then they become resentful.
Don't be bitter. Be better.
It's not a one-dimensional scale of being "better". From my experience there are relatively few women who really get in the trenches. Call me conservative or reactionary or whatever but in my experience this is how it is in reality. Many women in tech are more into "softer" topics like agile coach. Staring at logs in a terminal and sifting through endless YAML not so much. There seems to be a little bit of denial that guys like us still have their value.
This has not been my experience. The women I've worked with in software engineering teams have all been, well, engineers. One of them worked on some kind of real-time printer operating system before becoming a Java dev, another one is currently team lead on the cluster team on a distributed software product, another one has the most in-depth knowledge of CSS of anyone in a 50+ people frontend department.
I see a lot of people online complaining about the job market and blaming all kinds of things for their inability to find a job, but I think what has changed is that there are no more defensive hires, where companies like Google hire as many people as possible just to deny their competitors those people. Lots of relatively unqualified people found very high-paying jobs that way and are now surprised that they can't land those jobs anymore.
If you're competent and personable and know your own strengths, you can still find a job relatively easily.
Coincidentally, I was fired during the tech downturn two years ago, and within a few weeks, had three job offers out of three applications. I have a good CV, I applied at local companies that matched my specific expertise, I asked how the interview would go and what was expected, and prepared specifically for each company.
Complaining about women because you can't find a job isn't just misguided, it's harmful to yourself, because it prevents you from understanding what the actual issue is, and working on it.
The words you're looking for aren't conservative or reactionary they are bigoted and asshole. Best software engineer I've ever worked with is a woman, the rest had exactly the same range of ability as the men. Overall though a much lower level of entitled ignorance than "guys like us".
It's so peculiar that the man who thinks few women are willing to "get in the trenches" never sees women really getting into the trenches. It must definitely be because that's just how all women are. And definitely not because most women choose not to work with you or a company that perpetuates that idea.
> From my experience there are relatively few women who really get in the trenches.
have you ever heard of the word "bias"?
> Staring at logs in a terminal and sifting through endless YAML not so much.
i did not know that one gender could be better at this work. that seems like huge news if true.
and yes, you sound like a reactionary. coward ass throwaway account.
> i did not know that one gender could be better at this work. that seems like huge news if true.
There is research that has shown that men are, on average, better at single-focus tasks. And, indeed, it was huge news at the time the research was published – at least as huge as being reported in major news publications is.
It wouldn't be huge news now. We quickly grow bored and tired of widely reported things from the past. Humans, of all genders it seems, tend to seek novelty.
please share this, i'm dying to read this.
But they are better, that's his point lolwut
That is not the poster's point.
The poster contends women are being prejudicially hired as "diversity" rather men who have "sacrificed" and worked hard.
"lolwut" indeed.
Right, but certain careers have figured out that women are, on average, better at the socialization game and thus, broadly speaking, a better fit for the job. Ain't nobody "diversity" hiring on the oil rigs or other jobs where the physical act is more important than interpersonal interaction.
However, it is difficult to measure those positive traits for what they are, so employers are selecting based on gender hoping for positive correlation. But that's illegal, so "diversity" hiring was created as a scapegoat to help avoid legal fire.
The bar has been lowered in many respects. 14 years experience, 5 of them at a FAANG. Successful startup exit for a small company I founded, and and endless array of India-based recruiters that, for example, want me to mention “Ruby 3.2” in my resume when the resume says I have 14 years of Ruby experience including using it daily in my present job. I could literally say “I invented Ruby and have worked with it daily for 20 years,” and they’d say, “but you don’t have 3.2 listed.”
I play the game then they pass me off to another Indian who is less understandable than the first guy and then they offer $45/hour. I say yeah sure, submit me to the potential client. Then I never hear anything back.
The Indian 3rd party recruiting industry is absolutely horrible. Another anecdote was spending 10 minutes explaining how Java and JavaScript aren’t the same thing. I am convinced there is rampant discrimination happening as well against non-Indians, and especially those who aren’t H1Bs. (H1B is a trap that makes it easy to hire people at lower wages and then also makes it harder for them to switch employers.)
I’m not well articulating the problem, but anyone who has done this dance knows exactly what I’m talking about.
By the way, I used to contract at $95/hour and now I can’t get calls back for $45/hour.
The outsourcing offshoring business needs to be significantly reformed. I had a gig at Best Buy ($70/hour) and I got to spend 3 months training some Accenture H1Bs to replace me. I thought H1B was to fill “critical shortages of highly skilled workers?” Best Buy didn’t have a shortage — they fired my entire team and replaced it with Accenture. Best Buy should be heavily taxed for that and Accenture et al should have their offshore labor tariffed into oblivion. (They typically have onshore H1Bs directing offshore teams.) The Best Buy CEO talks all sorts of DEI crap, while firing people to cut costs. Not very inclusive if you ask me.
You're describing the effects of normalising remote work. Employees now are able to work from anywhere in the world, so companies get employees from all over the world. Since we're already looking at employing anywhere, why not also contract from anywhere?
anecdata - I am Indian and on h1b. Intel hired Accenture folks, they just put more people with no experience, it took more time to train them than doing stuff ourselves.
Another instance, Intel gave tens of millions to do something that few employees could have done in couple of months. Its basically creating two conda environments, one with intel optimized software stack & one with default and compare the results for 20 use cases.
Not sure its the case with all the contract companies, but this was my experience.
Indians,Brazilians,Portuguese,Ukrainians,Russians are possibly the worst clique of discriminative nationalities. You can be 100% assured that you will be driven out of a company/job if more of them take a hold and get into higher up positions. This is not racism. This is a pure fact based on statistical evidence.
You will be sold a dream of infinite scalability by hiring "talent" in those countries for cheap and what you will get is usually disfunctional teams riddled with incompetence and nepotism.
Even if a job/team is meant to be multicultural,diverse they will find a way how to hire more and more of their countrymen until knowing the language is basically a requirement for the job.
I am not even an american and i've seen this happen in Europe as well so I imagine in the US it must be 1000 times worse.
I think a lot of this comes down to AI. In a recent hiring round we experienced multiple candidates using AI tooling to assist them in the technical interviews (remote only company). I expect relationship hires to become more common over the next few years as even more open-discussion focused interview rounds like architecture become lower signal.
So with that in mind I'll see you all at ReInvent
If you're giving remote interviews, your loop should assume candidates can use AI. it's like giving a take home math test that assumes people won't use calculators at this point
I wonder how cheating problem could be solved?
A cheap multi camera system + software, that can be quickly installed at candidates location to watch interviewing candidate. This can be sent by employer before interviews. its cheap enough that it can be thrown away.
traditional way - A company that provides interviewing centers across major cities for software interview, the location will have cameras that will make sure candidates are not cheating.
I disagree. We pretty explicitly ask candidates to not use AI.
While it's fine when doing the job the purpose of the interview is to gauge your ability to understand and solve problems, while AI can help you with that you understanding how to do it yourself signals that you'll be able to solve other more complex wider-spanning problems.
Just like with a calculator - it's important for candidates to know _why_ something works and be able to demonstrate that as much as them knowing the solution.
> Just like with a calculator - it's important for candidates to know _why_ something works and be able to demonstrate that as much as them knowing the solution.
And this is why I never give coding-puzzle interviews. I just have a chat about your past projects (based on resume). We'll go deep into the technical details and it is easy in such a conversation to get a feel for whether you actually contributed significantly to the things the resume says you did.
There is an interesting dichotomy in your interview process. You say you want someone who can solve problems, but then go on to say (perhaps unintentionally; communication is hard) that you only want someone who has already rote-memorized how to solve the particular problems you throw at them, not someone who can figure things out as the problems arise.
> but then go on to say (perhaps unintentionally; communication is hard) that you only want someone who has already rote-memorized how to solve the particular problems you throw at them
They said the opposite of that. Unless you think it's not possible to figure out problems and you can only do them by rote memorization?
> you only want someone who has already rote-memorized how to solve the particular problems you throw at them, not someone who can figure things out as the problems arise
This is literally what AI is, and why they don't want it used in the interview.
Literally someone (or, at least, some thing) that can figure things out as problems arise? That seems quite generous. Unless you're solving a "problem" that has already been solved a million times before, it won't have a clue. These so-called AIs are predictive text generators, not thinking machines. But there is no need to solve a problem that is already solved in the first place, so...
It is really good at being a "college professor" that you can bounce ideas off of, though. It is not going to give you the solution (it fundamentally can't), but it can serve to help guide you. Stuff like "A similar problem was solved with <insert esoteric research paper you've never heard of>, perhaps there is an adaptation there for you to consider?"
We're long past a world where one can solve problems in a vacuum. You haven't been able to do that for thousands, if not millions, of years. All new problems are solved by standing on the shoulders of problems that were solved previously. One needs resources to understand those older problems and their solutions to pave the way to solving the present problems. So... If you can't use the tools we have for that during the interview, all you can lean on is what you were able to memorize beforehand.
But that doesn't end up measuring problem solving ability, just your ability to memorize and your foresight in memorizing the right thing.
Prob everyone is usually AI at this point, only a few bother to make the solution mor human-made-like. Personally, there is not way I am writing boilerplate again unless you are paying me hourly for the test.
Oh, if you give it the old "pretty please" then of course no one is going to use AI.
As someone with a couple of open (not engineering) recs, I can agree this is the toughest market I’ve ever seen. For both recs, we received many highly qualified candidates with relevant skills, often in a relevant domain.
I’ve never seen this before. It’s always been very hard to find a single highly-qualified candidate.
The media seems to think the great resignation has ended, but really it’s just that jobs have dried up. Professionals, especially good ones, are eager to leave their current jobs, but the pool is so small, there’s just nowhere to go.
And with so many people looking for new positions, if you’re not highly keyword targeted, you won’t go anywhere.
Though FAANG offers are usually more attractive than startups (considering pay level and stability), some startups could be more selective since they couldn't afford to hire the wrong candidate.
It’s more about calibration. If you interview 100 people at a FAANG, you get an idea of where the bar is. This idea gets calibrated with a panel of interviewers, along with shadow interviewers.
At a startup… who knows? I had an interviewer burn up 25 minutes on a 45 minute coding question trying to “hint me” towards the solution I mentioned in the first 2 minutes.
It's also a numbers thing. Startups generally hire a couple people, while FAANGs hire in the tens of thousands. (Used to, at least.)
> The bar has also been raised significantly. I had an interview recently where I solved the algorithm question very quickly, but didn't refactor/clean up my code perfectly and was rejected.
Bearing in mind the implicit comparison to "a few years ago", a few years ago I interviewed with Google, at which point the recruiter told me I'd passed the interview, wished me congratulations (!), told me to expect a job offer, and finally, ~6 weeks later, informed me that while I'd "passed" the interviews, my scores were too low for them to make an offer.
It remains a mystery what it might mean to "pass" without actually advancing beyond the threshold you passed.
It’s insanely tough. I’m currently searching.
For context - I’ve made 4 personal projects that currently have over 1000+ daily active users (numbers are ~1500, ~6000, ~14,000, and ~430,000) all created within the span of the last year. I’ve also sold software.
On top of all that, I have an Engineering degree, 4 years experience, no breaks in employment, study on my afternoons and weekends (C, Go, C#) and take extra university courses, and have some other high level achievements/recognition.
I apply for Intermediate and Senior positions.
So far I have 3 interviews lined up out of ~30-40 applications. About 10 rejections so far. 1 of those jobs is actually decent, the other 2 are desperation applications.
It’s brutal. I’m trying my absolute best, I don’t see how people that have been coasting have any chance.
You should be able to coast a bit in life.
I’m sad at the state of things, and sad for people trying to stay in the industry or break into the industry.
Makes me want to become a gardener
Just trying to play devils advocate here but have you considered that your lack of “coasting” could be part of the problem? If your resume looks anything like this post then that is something to consider.
Your side projects could give the impression that you are more dedicated to those than to your primary employer.
For the roles I review resumes for and interview I want a well rounded individual who seems like they would stay in the position for many years. Someone who is studying on weekends and taking extra university courses on coding does not necessarily give me that impression. Again, just a devil’s advocate position.
FYI, the personal projects might be a detriment rather than a help as it may come across as "this person will have split priorities or might leave to pursue individual interests"
For better or worse, I might not showcase those that much.
> Makes me want to become a gardener
Why not?
Likely because it is not a good time to be a gardener (professionally) right now either. The tech job market and agriculture prosperity seem to track each other.
Plus - assuming that purple-leafy lives in the northern hemisphere - it's not even a good time to be a gardener recreationally.
There are just piles and piles of companies out there trying to hire but are absolutely obsessed with having people work in their terrible SF offices.
I don't get it. If these companies really believed that working in an office was so beneficial they would invest in them. But they all come across like "I need an office to appear like a real company but I don't want to spend a lot of money". They're these millennial gray warehouses rocking the sad-bachelor aesthetic.
They're not obsessed. There are tons of qualified people looking for such jobs, so they can afford to make demands like this
At this point, I view the job search process as stochastic rather than deterministic. I model my job search using the binomial distribution. All that you need to know is what how frequently you get interviews and offers to then explore the probabilities involved.
To me at least, that removes a lot of the uncertainty, since I now know that if I apply to X jobs, I will have a Y percent chance of getting at least one offer, etc. Or maybe all of this is just an indictment of current hiring practices that I no longer think in terms of individual positions but in terms of aggregates of them.
> At this point, I view the job search process as stochastic rather than deterministic.
Yes, it is sales. You are doing sales. Leads -> chats -> due dilligence -> offers -> negotiation -> conversions.
This is also how the hiring side looks at it. “How many leads do we need to get a conversion to this role?”. It helps when both sides understand this.
Admissions to selective colleges are the same way. For most students it's rather foolish and wasteful to target any one specific college because luck plays a huge factor (or the actual selection criteria are unknown and unknowable, which from the applicant's perspective is indistinguishable from luck).
People cannot discriminate. They must spray and pray because the algorithm demands it of them. Thus, both sides (employer and employee) lose, because every applicant and every institution becomes flattened, generalized.
It used to be, applying to places took time and effort. So students (and job applicants likewise) would discriminate. This allowed employers and institutions to actually build culture. An institution could be different from another institution in large ways, all cultural, all "soft" -- unpronounceable by the machine.
This enriched us all, because it allowed pockets of brilliance to form. Actual, real, human variation.
Now, every job has 2,000 applicants. Every HR person is trained at a school whose curriculum is undifferentiated from Harvard or Yale, because every school has the incentive to emulate Harvard or Yale. Every HR person's classmates all, similarly, could not afford to care which institution they applied to, because their application process was -- again, spray and pray. And thus, every HR person at every company creates the exact same institution.
This flattening, this algorithmization, is like an invasive species which has choked out all of the variable, beautiful, at times brilliant flora and fauna which existed, protected, in its isolated institutional ecology. All of that cultural diversity has been destroyed so that we could click "easy apply."
What's the result? Every job application looks the same. Every interview looks the same. Every internal culture looks the same. Every job is the same, so much so that you could switch jobs every 2 years and nobody would even notice or care. Every 2 years! How much does a 2 year old know!? Every company apes Google in their interview process because Google is the Kudzu that choked out their local flora and fauna.
We're all poorer for it, this mass extinction event. Like you say, it's happening all over, not just in companies and schools.
I've been unemployed for 4 months. While I have received a job offer, it would require me to move and either sell my house, rent it out, or just continue to pay the mortgage on top of rent. I'm torn as to what to do as I do need a job, but I don't want to leave my friends and family. My thoughts go out to everybody else out there looking for a job at this time.
Is it in a position where, if remote work would be possible, regardless of corporate policy?
Unfortunately I've been told in no uncertain terms that it's in office only.
One piece of advice I usually give is to avoid applying to jobs through company’s career websites or LinkedIn. Instead, tap your social network: see if there is someone you know/have worked with who either works at the company you’re interested in or is connected to it someone (as an advisor, investor, personal friend of someone in a leadership position) and ask them for a warm intro. Social proof gives you an advantage over the legion of anonymous online applicants.
In my experience, even internal referrals barely give you an edge these days unless the referrer is quite high in the company org.
Of course things can change rapidly; perhaps the influx of ai-produced applications may bring this practice back.
Internal referrals won’t necessarily give you an edge, but they definitely nearly guarantee at least getting into the door.
At our company the (unwritten) policy is anyone who is referred internally will always get at least 1 shot at an interview even if the resume would been have otherwise been rejected. The bar isn’t lowered on merit, though.
Yep. Several months ago I leaned on a friend for a referral. This person is relatively well known in his industry. He’s written books and has spoke at a lot of conferences, and been interviewed by a lot of outlets. I got a personal referral from him, and I didn’t even get a phone call with a recruiter. Crazy.
> Instead, tap your social network
social network might not be great for someone who just broke out of their underclass social network to try make it big.
This advice assumes you have such a network anyway.
Unfortunately, it’s not really advice so much as reality. The truth of it is, if you know someone, you have a much better chance.
> Instead, tap your social network
Do you have experience with doing this in a way that doesn't come across as desperate or too forward? How close do you need to be with this network? Is Linkedin connection enough, or would you only do this approach with people you've worked with?
If I get such a request from someone I don't know, I will direct them to the public job board.
I'm very happy to refer and vouch for someone that I've actually worked with (and look forward to working with again), but I'm not vouching for some random stranger...
I like to think of it more as being intentional, and less as desperate/too forward. You want to know what you're looking for and, just as important, what you're not looking for.
In terms of reaching out, here are some things I did when I was job hunting:
1. The classic referral
Find the job post and work backwards from there (e.g., is there somebody I know (1st connection) or somebody who knows somebody I know (2nd connection) on LinkedIn who works at the company?).
If I knew the 1st connection, I'd reach out and ask if they were comfortable referring me.
2. The forwardable email
If it was a 2nd connection, I'd reach out with a forwardable email (https://also.roybahat.com/introductions-and-the-forward-intr...) and ask if they'd be able to forward an email and make an intro if they received a positive response.
3. Job hunting as an occasion
I made time to catch up with good friends. It felt energizing to get the moral support, with the added bonus that sometimes they knew people working at companies looking to hire. For example I would eventually get a job offer from Figma and that was because a good friend's partner worked there and was glad to refer me. I hadn't even heard of the opportunity before we talked.
4. The weak ties
I also made time to catch up with people I didn't know that well. There's some research on "weak ties" that suggest that people who you don't know well probably are exposed to a very different network to you, and will come across very different opportunities. The convo would be an opportunity for us to catch up and I'd talk about being open to job opportunities.
I hope this helps!
I'll review resumes of any referrals from my network. Usually provide tips or areas they need to show more substance in. I won't submit any network referral to my company's internal recruiter unless they stand out and fit a need.
The proximity to my network doesn't need to be strong, but your resume does.
Ideally people you've worked with or at least know of you and your work so they can give a positive internal recommendation. "He follows me on X" isn't much of an endorsement if that's all the person can say about you.
"Hey, $FRIEND! I hope you've been well; long time, no talk. I see you're at $COMPANY now. I'd like to join. Can you intro me to the hiring manager?"
is how I've done it.
Worst case, you get ghosted. Best case, you get an interview.
Ah yes, in the grand tradition of meritocracy, competition, and capitalism: “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”.
To be clear, I’m not saying you’re wrong: in a distorted market it’s absolutely about who you know and get on with. So it’s nothing personal that your (astute) observation irks me.
I just can’t see advice like this without feeling a little tick: I’ve been in this business for more than twenty years, and there have been downturns certainly in that time, but I’ve never seen it so firmly in the iron grip of monopoly and nepotism with such predictably grim results for the software outcomes.
And don’t get me started on the party line that “the economy is doing great”.
> " the salary listed in the description had dropped by $30,000 ... But the role still sounded interesting, and the task itself looked like a fun challenge, "
If you still went for a job that had dropped by that much, but it was still a meaningful amount of money and an interesting sounding job, well ... Good luck and all, but I kind of wish I had your problems.
Are you judging them with an assumption that they earn so much that a 30k drop in salary still results in a large salary?
Seems like it.
But what if that wasn't the case at all and they desperately needed an income and were willing to take an unfairly small salary?
I can't figure out what your point is?
I know someone who has a UX background and is technical, who just landed a job... at a car dealership.
Times are tough
I hope that person is continuing their job search, because from what I can tell, car dealerships aren't doing too hot right now.
all of these posts make me feel grateful that i've been able to pick up work. it also makes me wonder what i'm doing right and what all of these bloggers are doing wrong. bloggers are clearly good at marketing and communicating what they can do for a company, which is what a lot of software developers struggle with.
I guess Europe isn't nearly as bad as the US. My portfolio (and probably my actual skills) are nowhere close to what some of those in the comments that can't find a job are offering, but I was able to secure a job in Trondheim, Norway (where I'm about to move in January) with a single application and interview. I assume there weren't too many people in the Trondheim area who were willing to work at an office and who already know Vue.js pretty well.
Europe is probably easier to get hired, but if you are a senior making some medium+ salary, it's also easier to get skipped in favor of cheaper candidates.
The salaries and perks in the US are much higher and candidates are more mobile than us in Europe.
I’m going through a similar experience after being laid off back in July for the first time in my career. The jobs advertised are quite often less-than-inspiring, the hiring processes are weird and opaque, and the hiring team is frequently disorganized and unprofessional.
An interviewer last week was straight out of a Silicon Valley storyline, asking a “if you were on an elevator with Marc Andreessen” question and explaining his devotion to Malcolm Gladwell’s 10000 hour “rule”. The week before I got ghosted twice by a company who’s leadership team apparently pays no attention to the Calendly invites they forced me to set up “for my convenience”.
I know I’m capable and do good work, so I’m not having any sort of crisis of confidence. At least not yet. But the process is definitely frustrating.
whose
Yep. That frequently trips me up.
Good luck, Sergey.
In my case, the process became so awful, humiliating, and hostile, I just gave up, and retired, ten years before I had planned. I’m very fortunate, that I could afford it. I now develop software for free, for outfits that can’t afford people like me.
It’s tough, but looking for work after 50, especially when pivoting from management, back to IC, is unbearable. My heart goes out to those without the means to walk away. I think some companies missed out, but I am under no illusion that I’m missed. I doubt they had any regrets in passing me up.
In my case, it was probably the best thing that ever happened to me. I left a lot of money on the table, but I have been happier than I ever dreamed, while working twice as hard as I ever did, when I was getting paid for it.
Devs in there 40's and 50's are probably the most valuable devs on earth. We grew up with computers and had to adapt to our rapidly changing industry.
I suspect we will see startup founders trending older if it isn't already happening. Companies stuck in the old way of thinking that older is slower will probably be disrupted in the next recession.
It's interesting how much stereotyping is happening in these replies.
The fact is that there's nothing unique about any age group, and the only difference between them is their birth dates. Intragenerational differences are always larger than intergenerational differences. In any age group, there are varying degrees of competence, varying degrees of attitude, varying degrees of personal circumstances (e.g., home, family).
Ageism is treating a person solely as member of a group rather than as an individual. You simply can't accurately generalize based on a job candidate's age. Anyone who claims, "In my experience [members of age group] are mostly like this..." is putting forth weak anecdotal data that is practically useless and totally unscientific.
I think the OP was referring to experience not age. Older devs have seen the landscape change so much and if it makes full circle again that experience will pay off.
Experience can be valuable, but it's not automatically valuable. Plenty of people completely fail to learn from their long experience. Others learn very quickly from their limited experience.
The paragon is talent plus experience plus willingness to learn from experience. Admittedly, more older devs than younger devs will have this combination, but "social promotion" is no guarantee of success.
> Devs in there 40's and 50's are probably the most valuable devs on earth.
Over 50 seeker here (25+ years experience, first IC then mgmt). All of hiring managers I've dealt with this time around are at least 10 years my junior, and they disagree with you. They view me as a risk (higher compensation, less "hungry", higher "flight risk") and prefer people their age or younger. Don't call it ageism though, that's just how the world works :(
They want people to be passionate about whatever but in my experience the younger guys/gals are so preoccupied with themselves or some process that they spend endless hours discussing it instead of just getting some shit done.
As someone similar age, if I was job-seeking like you, then if a younger potential boss gave these vibes, I'd be up-front. Seems to me salary can't increase for ever. Sure, more experience may lead to better design decisions which save employers a fortune. However, it's kind of opaque. "Best devs on earth" may be true, but doesn't mean its obvious to management. Maybe they won't pay a higher salary immediately than to a 30-yr-old, but they'll give you a reward later if they can see how much you helped them. Flight risk? Ask 'em about it, how can you ease that fear - generally that comes down to career history - if you look like a job-hopper that can be a problem but its not specifically age-related, right? Less hungry? Well again not sure that's age-related. If they're a sweatshop I suppose they might feel they can push younger ones around more, but who wants to work there anyway? Good luck :)
From what I can see, kids out of college, are being paid more than I ever made, at the peak of my career (and they seem to have less to show for it).
Speaking only for myself, I would have been fine, taking a lower salary, if the work (and work environment) were interesting to me.
I also would not have been interested in flitting around, looking for pay bumps. I was already set.
In fact, I suspect that someone like me (and I am sure there are many others, much like me, and likely, far more qualified), could be an absolute Godsend to a startup.
> Maybe they won't pay a higher salary immediately than to a 30-yr-old, but they'll give you a reward later if they can see how much you helped them
I don't think most companies behave this way. Maybe at one point they did, but I find the reward for doing great work is "That's why we hired you"
Yeah maybe you get a yearly raise and a bonus but it never is big enough to make up for taking a lower salary
> I suspect we will see startup founders trending older if it isn't already happening
Anecdotally, I think it already is. Part of it is simply because the younger you are, the less risk you can take with the cost of housing the way that it is. Older people/Millenials often have housing security and can take more risks this way, plus the other factors you raised.
Can't speak to whether that's universally true, but it's something I've been seeing: including people in their late 30s to mid 40s leaving cushy well paying corporate jobs to try founder life: they have big nest eggs from said previous jobs, so why not!
We older people have less mobility and less willing to take risk because if the bet doesn't pay off there's not much time to make up for it (younger folks can go back to be an FTE or start another thing). Also, people have kids later in life and you have to pay their insane college bills when you're in your 50s or even 60s.
If you see more older people starting companies it's because we can't find employment and have to find a way to be productive somehow...
> Devs in there 40's and 50's are probably the most valuable devs on earth.
My experience says no. They just have huge egos because they think that age and seniority makes them smart, so they push hard for bad solutions, and nobody can argue with them because younger folks just don't care that much about winning an argument at work. From their point of view, they think they're saving the company from the incompetent ones.
I had such a guy at my first job, thankfully not directly in my team. In my current job I also have such a guy, unfortunately he works directly with me. I just make sure that there's papertrail to say that I showed my arguments why the old man's solution is wrong, so that when things fail, I'm not the one to blame.
In my experience, its more the older ones that "just don't care that much about winning an argument at work", because we've learned over time to choose our battles, and "the healthy art of not giving a s**" . Maybe come back in 10 yrs time and see if you still think this? ;)
> Maybe come back in 10 yrs time and see if you still think this? ;)
No, I don't care about proving things to you
No fool like an old fool.
> outfits that can’t afford people like me
What kind of outfits? Might be interested myself.
In my case, I’m a longtime member of a worldwide nonprofit organization, and that gives me a good platform to work in.
I would be happy to chat about it, offline, but I don’t usually discuss it in detail, hereabouts, as I deliberately avoid putting my work in the limelight.
I could never land anything... Those cushy AF PM jobs at Uber and the ilk right out of college really irk me. Although, those perks are getting culled left and right. Putting my time in to be a lowkey package driver at UPS and cultivating my passion project to a SMB lol
That’s why I gave up
It's going to get tougher and tougher in this job market.
1. Layoffs happening regularly.
2. Less Senior positions and virtually no junior jobs.
2. AI accelerating and reducing the number of software engineers.
3. Job postings being reposted with less salary and equity in US, EU and especially the UK.
You might as well take yourself off the job market / stay in current job, build a paying SMB company or side project on the side and make that your third income.
If it gets better and reaches sustainability you can choose to leave your job and live off it, or choose to get funding if need be.
After applying for over 60+ jobs after graduation and getting rejected over and over, I took myself off the market and started a pest control SaaS 4 years ago now it's bringing in over $2.2M+ ARR.
While the jobs I was applying for have now either shut down or not even bringing in anything over $100K ARR.
Congrats on the business, I hope this inspires others to pursue their dreams.
Since you mentioned a specific number of applications (60+), I just wanted to share my job hunt story. When I was last looking for a role (8 months ago), I started out thinking 5 applications a day was good, but then I spoke with an industry mentor, and he laughed me off saying that wasn't close to enough. Turns out he was right.
On his recommendation I started aiming for 50 a day. At first it's very slow, but you build up a corpus of cover letters and other material to submit applications.
This would have been easier if I was employed at the time, since so many places auto-reject if you aren't currently employed. This was also looking for fully-remote in APAC, which has far fewer opportunities than other regions/timezones.
And you might say "but I don't want to work for all these companies" and I would agree. But provided you are applying for a role that you are at least curious about, those ones that are not great fits can provide good interview practice.
> since so many places auto-reject if you aren't currently employed.
That really happens? How do you know they do that? I'm not doubting you, but I've never heard of that before.
You can see a similar thing in dating. People tend to be more attracted to people who already have relationships, because they're "prescreened"
On the other side of this you have people like me who've tried and failed, and now 15 years later I have 30 days to pay my mortgage or my life starts unfolding. Hoping to make some portfolio pieces in that time to impress some hiring managers, building fun tools for myself again without profit in mind. Not everyone can build a hyper successful SaaS.
> pest control SaaS
How does this work? Are we talking computer bugs?
There are SaaS products for managing sales/compliance/billing for just about every licensed profession that deals directly with customers. I regularly get emails that are "from" my HVAC contractor or optometrist, but are obviously sent by a SaaS.
Congratulations! This is my dream. But the SaaS thing is so challenging. Couple of questions if you don't mind. Any tips for someone starting out? Did you have any experience in the pest control business? How did you decide pest control industry? How did you market the product?
Now, imagine this situation taken to the extreme: searching for a job with relocation opportunities while residing in a country that many avoid for ethical reasons. :(
server is extremely slow
https://archive.ph/Pmw9c
Redacted; insensitive.