Ask HN: How do I understand the results of my job search?
- 50 applications submitted
- 21 no response
- 3 no longer hiring
- 11 rejected without interview
- 15 first round interviews
- 9 technical interviews
- 2 rejected after technical interview
- 2 onsite
I feel like the numbers for this job search are not good but I can't figure out what the problem is. A large majority of the companies rejected me without an interview, either sending a form letter or not response at all. There hasn't been any feedback about why they're not interested in me. This has been especially true of larger, more well-known companies. I'm completely qualified on paper but there's no interest.
I've also started to lose confidence for technical interviews. They feel so arbitrary. Some times I do really well. Sometimes not. But in both cases, I don't feel like my skills have been tested or demonstrated. When I do well, the stars lined up and when I don't, they didn't. The whole thing makes me feel increasingly insecure about my ability to build a career, even though I've demonstrated that I can do the work once hired.
Is this the average experience or is there something going on here?
228 comments
[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 307 ms ] threadI suspect that something about your resume is throwing people off. Definitely have someone technical review it.
From your interviews, do you have some sense of what's going wrong? Is there difficulty in getting through the technical challenge? Is the code possibly messy in some way? Or maybe you aren't hitting it off well with the interviewer? If you can't figure it out, then maybe a friend will be willing to mock interview and give some suggestions.
Finally, if you perform well on the job, then interview at a place with a coworker who thinks highly of you. Their reference can help get you through any bumps in the interview process, and they might even be able to pass along more detailed feedback.
In the two technical interviews I failed, one was an algo question that I bombed. I choked and everyone understood it was no-go. The other was a practical coding exercise that I failed but I didn't get any feedback. I can guess why but I'm not sure what was expected. I don't think anyone could have done the exercise perfectly in the time given, so I went with one set of trade-offs. Maybe I'm wrong and I'm just too slow, or maybe I chose the wrong trade-offs.
That said maybe the ratio is because you are aiming high, so it could be a good sign. A 1-1 ratio could show going for too easy jobs.
@patio11 has written a bit about this: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1086379271415713792 @tqbf and Erin Patek https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/
I think this leads to a lot of false negatives when interviewing. but if you are applying you obviously want to increase your chances of succeeding so, you have to know how to 'play the game'.
My recommendation to you would be: 1. spend a lot of time preparing for these tech interviews. Study how they are structured. There is a lot of material online (blog posts) as well as books documenting what it takes to succeed. 2. there are some people that do paid courses on "how to interview at FAANG style companies". they may be worth depending on the upside. Note that not all companies have those types of interviews but if you are aiming for them it makes sense to prepare the best you can.
They seem to be quite easy and after solving some, it feels like I’ve ‘seen them all’.
You cannot be doing anything fancy in a short interview afterall.
If this is really how they filter programmers, it does not seem like a really good way to measure one’s ability to create true value.
dailycodingproblem.com
And I say this as someone who doesn't particularly like the modern tech interview style, I think actually trying to build something is better. However, it does have some merit in measuring a candidate's ability even if it's not necessarily that great.
I never had any problems with passing technical interviews, so that's not what bothers me. My gripe is with the job ads, that are 100% relevant to my experience on paper, and yet somehow my applications seem to go into a black hole.
I'm not comfortable with carpet bombing 100s of companies and hoping that someone will hire me for some _arbitrary_ job. I want this _specific_ job. I have pretty specific professional interests (in an area that I'm quite experienced in) and aiming high, so there is not a lot of vacancies, that I'd be willing to consider. After filtering for remote-friendliness, what I'm left with is just a few positions. And yet, the seeming randomness of the process makes it unlikely, that I'll be even considered to be put into the interview loop.
One friend of mine, who happens to be a head of the HR at a medium-sized company, told me, that for each publicly posted SWE job ad they get several 100s of applications. So they don't even bother to review the submitted applications anymore (!). Instead, they merely wait for the recruitment agencies to pick up the ad and find some reasonable number of "vetted" candidates via their own channels and bring them in to an interview.
Overall, I think that the "market" for jobs depends a bit too much on the middlemen lately. Needless to say, that most of these middlemen are not interested in catering to candidates' aspirations, nor are they going to spend too much time looking for a perfect match. The end result is (a) total mess with regards to matching jobs to people and (b) little hope for proper career progression, because the whole process is pretty much random.
I am conscious of which roles I offer to outside agencies, but once I do, I stop worrying about the cost and focus only on the value I can get from the candidate. Those agency roles are some of the most competitive positions; I don’t expect to be able to hire the best who happen to not realize that $0.75x is smaller than $1.00x for positive values of x.
All of the applicants he brought were better, than the ones that applied via an online job portal. Even tough some ask 20%-40% over our budget, we are still considering them.
One thing you do have to look out for is that recruiters get paid after a period of employment (3-6 months in my experience). So that can create a perverse incentive to fire someone you’re on the fence about. This really shouldn’t happen unless you’re working for an extremely cash-strapped place though.
There's your conundrum. Having specific professional interests in an area you're experienced in is great...assuming that specialization has enough market demand liquidity for you to not be in this situation. If that's no longer the case, perhaps it's worth asking if you'd be willing to negotiate on what you're looking for?
I've done a variety of things so as far as what I have been looking for with my current search, it's really more a high growth company that places a premium on backfilling senior talent, which likely means I'll get (read: have already gotten) a very attractive offer. It's true that this means I am somewhat compromising on picking specific things that I want to do, but the reason I do it is because I'd rather bet on a company than a role, and if I do it this way, I only really have to find one company that has more to lose by not hiring me than hiring me.
I guess that's probably the advice (perhaps unsolicited) I'd give to you -- are you flexible with what you want to do but want to be well compensated and work with a company that has defensible growth? In that case, it might make more sense to take a position that might not be ideal today but is in a growing org where you can make it closer to something that would have the specifics you like. Do you want to do a very specific role? Well, unless it opens your pool of potential companies rather than closes it, you'll have to work within the diminished market demand for it, which leads the the sort of frustration you express.
> One friend of mine, who happens to be a head of the HR at a medium-sized company, told me, that for each publicly posted SWE job ad they get several 100s of applications. So they don't even bother to review the submitted applications anymore (!). Instead, they merely wait for the recruitment agencies to pick up the ad and find some reasonable number of "vetted" candidates via their own channels and bring them in to an interview.
This is kind of a poor analogy, but I think a lot about parallels between talent agencies and the entertainment industry. Prima facie, there shouldn't need to be middlemen involved, right? And yet, there are, and they vary in quality from being horrible to being stars that the talent absolutely prefers to have. Interestingly enough, plenty of companies that try to disintermediate them can end up getting reputations as being talent unfriendly (IE Spotify), to the extent that the disrupting competitor inevitably plays ball.
I guess what I think is fascinating is that your anecdote may reflect this. Frankly, I think the job application is not useful. Creating the equivalent of an effective "spam filter" or ranking for job applications is challenging, so there's no reason to expect it to always be clogged with poor match applications. Having been a hiring manager before, it's really, really time consuming to go through low quality applicant leads. It's time consuming enough that your job is nearly intractable unless you have an in house or contingent recruiter that does a good enough job at separating the wheat from the chaff. I've had to play recruiter and hiring manager at the same time before, and it was more than a full time job. Good recruiters are worth their weight in gold, and then some.
What you want as a hiring manager is a lead, not an "application" and in order to get that, you need some kind of a pre-qualification process. I've had some really awful experiences with recruiters, some of whom will join my LI network, have an intro with me about a position, never respond, and then re-post that same position on LI. Then again, I've had professional recruiters that are extremely well informed, shephard me through the process with very well defined expectations of timeframes, and timely communication at every step up to and including a potential rejection. What I'm trying to get at is that you seem to think that the problem is too many middlemen, but I think the problem is not enough -- that is, the middlemen have an important job to do, but there are too many incompetent ones that are costing both companies and candidates valuable missed opportunities.
Can't agree more. That said, there are so diminishingly few good recruiters, that it seems like we all would have been much better, if there weren't any recruiters at all.
At the past few companies I've been at, I've had the chance to work with some really thoughtful, practical and productive recruiters. Secondly, at companies I've worked at with great recruiters, we overwhelmingly were able to build a great organization of engineers who I genuinely enjoyed collaborating with. I think getting to the root of there being so few good recruiters requires a bit of reframing -- why are there so many shockingly subpar recruiters out there?
If you think about it that way, there's so many shockingly subpar recruiters out there for the same reason there are so many shockingly subpar companies. The internal economics of a company allow it to "remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" -- but just as equally, it could force to company to hire in a savvy manner to arbitrage an edge in the talent market that bigger, more complacent actors are leaving untapped.
There can be a lot of problems with VC funded rocket-ship companies that can end up being pseudo-cult like entities that crash and burn like WeWork. And yet, I've consistently had great luck getting amazing opportunities at growth stage startups that would be very hard to get at established companies that could really care less about losing me (or anyone else) as a candidate -- with a recruitment process that belies that apathy in a very palpable manner. Conversely, these growth stage startups actually fought to hire me, as well as the organization that I saw develop around me. I know that not every such company is like this, but I guess what I'll say is that I've had better luck with them than with the big companies.
Lately? This industry has been full of dudebro "recruiters" since I've became a part of it. These people shouldn't even be needed because they're completely inept at interviewing for technical skills, and they're pretty easy to game if you use the correct lingo. The vast majority of them are a waste of time; I've only ever met 2 that either actually got me a job or at least intended on actually getting me one.
I was applying for jobs last year at around this time and didn't notice the black hole that you're talking about, but I guess it'll be something for me to pay attention for next time.
Then again, I doubt I'm going to rely on traditional job searching techniques the next time. I've realized that bypassing the recruiter and HR, as well as networking at meetups and conferences, are much more effective than shotgunning dozens of online applications.
I’m betting close to 100 with recruiters over two decades. The external recruiter’s purpose is not to access your technical skills. Their purpose is to see if you are the product that their buyers want and to make you look as good to the buyer as possible. You are not “gaming the system” by making yourself an attractive candidate that they can present to their client.
If you are looking for the standard median, commodity job , you have kept your eye on the market, done the correct amount of resume driven development, and you live in a major market, with local recruiters, it usually isn’t hard in my experience to find a job.
I won’t fit that description when I’m looking for my next job - I’m not looking for either the commodity job or to be in the 3rd quintile of pay for my local market. Networking will be required.
(I have no connection to LinkedIn, other than being a free tier member.)
Maybe I can - they're asking for the moon, and a pony?
I see job ads that as for advanced mssql with SSIS/SSRS/SSAS data analysis, good c# and/or python, some web framework, powershell, some visualisation tools, some no-sql db experience[0] and often big data frameworks (hadoop, spark) on top ("and some knowledge of statistics and data analysis would be helpful!"). And OO, and FP. And they often ask for domain knowledge on top.
(edit: and I forgot, they often want data warehousing as well).
I think some of these are just added by clueless HR drones to pad job ads out (some of HR really are clueless).
[0] why ask for SQL & no-sql?
The recruiter I used to get my last job reached out to me about 7 months before I was on the market. I told him that I wasn’t looking for a job until I closed on my house in October, even then I was so busy with life, I wasn’t about to go through all of the hassle of randomly blindly submitting resumes. I told the recruiter that in 6 months, my criteria as far as pay, responsibility, location and technology.
He called me 6 months later with a list of jobs and within two weeks I had a job that met all of my criteria and was the Dev lead of a medium size company with a small software development department.
On the other side, when I needed to ramp up the department fast with contractors, I worked with him to find qualified contractors.
* I want this _specific_ job. I have pretty specific professional interests (in an area that I'm quite experienced in) and aiming high, so there is not a lot of vacancies, that I'd be willing to consider. After filtering for remote-friendliness, what I'm left with is just a few positions. And yet, the seeming randomness of the process makes it unlikely, that I'll be even considered to be put into the interview loop.*
If the job is that specific, carpet bombing resumes isn’t the way to go, you’re right. At this point, my next job in two years, is also very specific. While my external recruiter network has been a godsend for the bog standard generic roles I’ve had in the past, I’ve got to start building a network now to get the job I want.
Of course if I walk up to the office tomorrow and the doors are closed and they go out of business (not likely), I can reach out to my long list of local recruiters and get the “right now” job or contract quickly that will pay more than enough to support us.
any company that is always hiring is equivalently never hiring.
As for the rest of your funnel, these seem like typical numbers. I assume this is over the course of a little more than a month.
The biggest problem with interviewing self-taught programmers, is that their vocabulary is often weak. This makes it very hard to test their practitioner skill from a conversation.
If you are doing post-mortems on each of your interviews, I imagined that you will land a position soon.
Would you mind explaining/elaborating this point?
For example:
- intuitively applying SOLID without knowing that there is a set of principles
- knowing how to play with closures without knowing the dictionary definitions of “closure”
This makes interviewing a bit harder and might lead people to (falsely) assume that the candidate isn’t any good.
[x] closures
[ ] solid
Candidate had 1/2. Rejected. Now back to shitposting on HN.
Very much like bike shedding: zealously insisting on <acronym> for every triviality, never doing so for more complex situations.
(Not to mention they are, in essence, very subjective principles)
Closure don’t seem to be widely discussed outside of certain areas, so be it.
SOLID is rather surprising though. It seems to be quoted and (supposedly) adhered to religiously. Though I suspect it’s akin to people preaching TDD in public while we all know that’s rarely the case.
SOLID sounds nice but I don't think I've ever seen anyone adhere to it religiously. Easy exercise: take any Java program, and imagine the spec changed the width of integers it needs to support, from 32-bit to some other size. How many files would you need to touch to make this change? Clearly, no class in the program has the Single Responsibility of this. The first letter of SOLID is already violated.
It sounds like they're just describing recursive data structures? When most people talk about closures, aren't they referring to this (from Wikipedia)?
"In programming languages, a closure, also lexical closure or function closure, is a technique for implementing lexically scoped name binding in a language with first-class functions. Operationally, a closure is a record storing a function[a] together with an environment."
EDIT: My SICP quote was actually from somebody's notes, not the book itself. But the point remains.
I'm sure the opposite exists too, interviewees who can rattle off the names and principles at interview, but don't actually apply them in their code.
Provided many candidates fall on one side or the other, what does one prefer?
When I talk to a person who studied algorithms in school they know phrases like amortized analysis and big O notation for time and space complexity. For self taught programmers they can often tell me an expected runtime and expected runspace.
For concurrency persons often use words like counting-semaphore, threads, and blocking operations may not be universal
Self taught programmers may know about unit and regression tests and code coverage, may not be thinking about execution paths as a graph problem.
The understanding is usually there. It is often even the case that a self taught programmer have no standard words for a particular pattern they use regularly. It becomes the interviewer responsibility to decide how much of the vocabulary is important for the job.
----
This is a different problem than not knowing how to use a domain. Things like SOLID, I have never been asked in an interview. I have never studied them in school. I would be subject to the same interview challenges as someone who was self taught in these topics despite my degrees
What you should worry about is whether the hiring process continues after the first interview. You moved on to tech interviews in more than half, which is decent. Again, if half of them needed something different than what you are, that is fine. Let it go.
But you only moved to an onsite about a quarter of the time - it sounds like you may have a disconnect in the tech screen. It is difficult to say what isn't working there without more info, but I'd focus your attention on that step of the process.
And one side piece of advice - your blog posts, open source contributions, speaking engagements.... those all are commendable. But mean little when it comes to hiring you. Hiring managers want to know what accomplishments you had in your work. How did you improve the business results of your former employers?
Do you have any suggestions for experienced devs that aren't free to answer that question with any detail?
This may very well be true. But I will say, as someone looking to break into the industry, this is very surprising to me. I guess I should focus on acing the technical interview?
If you can bring this up during the interview I'd greatly appreciate it otherwise don't assume these things (open source contributions, blog posts, talks) will help you get interviews. What they may give you is the ability to network with people who are hiring which gets you an onsite.
It takes luck, skill, and a personal match between you and a set of people at a company. At the end of the day both parties must feel like they have a good match.
Re: Tech interviews, unless you pore time into things like leet code and "cracking the code interview" tech screen will always just be psudo random.
Additionally:
- having a Github project matters, but nobody looks into it the code.( nobody looked into mine, because I was never asked about it.)
- The ethnicity match matters, a interviewer from India will reject you outright if you are a local American.
- about the the luck part, I have one interesting observation. When teams are desperate the bar is much more lower. Give enough interviews and you can be assured that atleast one of them is for a position where they immediately need someone. The downside to this, is that once you get the job, you will notice that desperation for candidates most probably stemmed from a project not meeting it's deadline and the team was hoping to throw in more bodies to salvage it. You will be under tremendous pressure to deliver the undeliverable. Do not let this get to you.
Just because they didn't say anything does not mean they didn't look. I look and take notes about what I see, but in the actual interviews I very rarely talk about their GitHub. I mostly just stick to the script.
Not saying this never happens, but I doubt it happens at any kind of company one would WANT to work for.
Could it be a phenomenon that superficially may look similar: discrimination due to different educational backgrounds? Foreign employees at tech companies often have degrees from quite selective colleges — to some extent it's a prerequisite of the visa process. In contrast, local candidates don't always have college degrees, and if they do, they're not always from top tier colleges (e.g. at some point, the university that the most Apple employees graduated from was San Jose State: https://www.businessinsider.com/best-schools-to-get-a-job-at... ).
That's not to say that this is a good hiring criterion. But it's not quite as deranged as hiring on ethnicity.
https://zety.com/blog/hr-statistics
Your response rate is 3/10. I think you are doing pretty well.Also, as a recently returned American expat. It was really, really hard. Things that were important to me while working in Europe, like GDPR, had no equivalent in the US. I turned to old alumni friends to get me in the door. That proved more effective than spraying resumes.
As people progress in their careers, some have valuable experience and acquired skills to show for it, others only have a few additional gray hairs to show for it. That's why there's always skepticism about people no matter what stage their career is in.
The questions all of us need to ask ourselves is: "What in my resume shows that I'm in the former category rather than the latter?" and "How can I prove it?"
- which country are you based in? (each country's job market is wildly different); are you native of that country?
- do you apply in response to job ads, or find companies you like and apply even if there are no openings?
If I can advise something regarding no responses: finding a recruiter (on LinkedIn etc.) and talking to them directly might yield better responses than applying via a blackbox website (although this is just my gut feeling).
I've been working with a recruiter but they haven't done much for me. Very generic resume feedback (e.g. "Here's an example of a good resume. Just compare yours.") and no feedback from recruiter when companies turn me down.
As for your stats, they look normal. It's a numbers game and the interviews have a large element of luck - some will click well, most will not. In the end, its just a shit job!
Also keep in mind that hiring tends to be seasonal. Companies are generally very aggressive at the top of the year, and by Oct-Dec things do slow down a bit (but this is not always the case, for example if a company raised some $$$ in that period). In the past I've avoided applying to postings which are more than 3 weeks old.
You could also try services like TripleByte, which flip the funnel, and help you go directly go to onsites (there are some caveats though).
For the tech rounds, it's just more practice. Unfortunately the interview process is heavily biased towards people who practice, and has little to do with your actual abilities - and you are competing against such folks. For that I've found Pramp, interviewing.io, leetcode, educative (the grokking algorithms and system design courses), GH system design primer, (our even services like Outco.io) etc. to be very useful. The good thing is that atleast in SV these bits have become fairly standardized now, and if you spend time preparing, it significantly increases your hit-rate with everyone.
1. You actually get feedback from their interview. In an interview at a company, if you're lucky, you'll get which interview you didn't do well at. Triplebyte sends you feedback like "Finally, $QUESTION[3] was probably his worst: good knowledge baseline, but gave the impression that this is an area where he doesn't feel at home. Didn't lead the conversation, and most items were shallow in details, especially when talking about scalability." This is one of many parts of the feedback I got from my interview.
2. They send you Cracking the Coding Interview. And a light jacket. For free. At least, they did when I interviewed. I think it was post-Triplebyte interview, so at that point they were sending my profile out to companies. They might not send it if they don't accept you; I don't know.
But even #1 is a very good use of your time. You get feedback about your interview that isn't just binary. They also send you links to specific references for the parts you could focus on.
Also, you would be given an option to schedule a practice mock test for the final interview.
I happen to work in a bank doing boring banking-like things and did not attend university. My experience has been that even if one passes their resume-blind interview, the companies are not resume-blind and are still looking for the hot-topic skills and experience du jour.
The people with that kind of skills/experience probably don't need Triplebyte anyway. And my guess is that if you are being turned away from hundreds of online applications that you do not either--despite whatever programming chops you actually possess.
First, I got a multiple-choice quiz, which wasn't too bad except there were at least a few of those "spot the problem with this code" questions that actually had multiple problems but you could only pick one. That sucked, but I still passed it.
After that, I got a technical interview over Skype with some stonefaced dude who asked me almost nothing but computer science questions. I applied as a web developer, so it really shouldn't have been surprising that I know the difference between a binary tree and a binary search tree. The interviewer was stone cold and had no sense of humor. The following day, I got a rejection email.
Seems like yet another SV startup run by bros who want to disrupt an industry and have no regard for their "human capital".
Hopefully that was a fluke or they've changed since. Keep in mind that my experience is from 2 years ago.
All in all, I'm glad that I didn't get hired through Triplebyte because I probably wouldn't have gotten my current job, which is an awesome one in terms of the kind of work, the benefits, and the people.
Here is an abridged version the sake of brevity:
Hey [Ravenstine]
Unfortunately, we're not going to move forward with your application right now.
You did well in the Kanban problem. You talked well about HTTP. You write really nice, idiomatic front-end code. You understand how to build the front-end of a web application, and explained it well on our used car API problem. And you were friendly and we enjoyed talking to you.
We didn't see the depth of knowledge that we look for in front end programmers: you didn't show very deep knowledge of security or data structures. On the used car problem, you didn't seem very knowledgeable about backend web systems.
You might benefit from studying some of the following topics: Classic algorithms and data structures. Basics of HTTP. Advanced Javascript things like the ES6 features, async/await.
We recommend you study algorithms more deeply.
We think you're really high potential, and we'd love to talk to you if you're still job searching in four months (we of course hope for your sake that you're happily employed by then), or next time you want a job.
Best,
Triplebyte Team
---
Again, the fact that they provided this kind of feedback is actually pretty good.
My problem is not only that I believe I was interviewed on the wrong things(over half my questions were CS and algorithms but I was applying as a web developer), but the feedback also isn't entirely accurate.
Could I shore up on algorithms? Sure.
But look at this:
> You talked well about HTTP. [...] You might benefit from studying some of the following topics: [...] Basics of HTTP.
What the hell? Not only is that feedback contradictory, but it's horseshit. I wasn't stumped on the HTTP questions, and all my answers about it were accurate. I've written HTTP servers and have done some interesting things cutting together audio and streaming mid-roll through HTTP, so don't tell me I don't know enough about HTTP. HTTP isn't complicated.
> Advanced Javascript things like the ES6 features, async/await.
I'm not sure whether this is related to the question about promises in JS that I was asked, but I don't see how because I explained their function accurately.
> you didn't seem very knowledgeable about backend web systems
This one blows my mind. I had way more experience doing backend than frontend at the time. I don't know what I could have told them that would have suggested that I effectively know nothing about how HTTP and backend programming works.
---
Maybe my diction was poor, idk. If it was, it didn't seem to stop me from getting jobs outside of Triplebyte.
Perhaps I wouldn't have been as miffed about this if they had included algorithm and CS questions in the initial multiple-choice quiz. I shouldn't have gotten to the point of the interview only to find out that I didn't have the knowledge required.
Granted, I can at least get interviews. But with each rejection, even when I make it to on-sites that seem to go well, I just walk away feeling like I suck or should do something else.
It’s really hard to keep going like this at times... painful to see new grads out leetcode me / interview into FAANG right out of school :(
[1] https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/middle-aged-ma...
I feel like it's a numbers game. Technical interviews are a mess all over the board. It's sort of the joke where someone knows something is done wrong, so they do things differently, which is just as bad.
You'll probably have to keep trying your luck, hoping you find a company whose star developer just died or started a startup and they're desperate to fill the spot. Or someone who has this perfect vision of an engineer which fits you exactly.
I tried to optimize my job search the same way, and what worked for me were the things I hadn't optimized for. Like I've fine tuned my script for YC's job listing when I was actively searching, and yet two of them offered an interview when I wasn't searching. Maybe people who fine tune their resumes and cover letters feel 'off' somehow. It seems to work a bit like dating - the more stats you collect, the weirder you seem.
Also these numbers look very reasonable to me. 9 technicals out of 50 is a good rate, esp for coming from an overseas company as you said you did.
Finally, are you using the modern tools like Hired, etc? Do you have LinkedIn gold? Are you actively networking and getting internal referrals? Are you going to meetups, esp those run by companies of interest?
Getting a job is not just about sending resumes into the void and waiting.
Don't underestimate how many firms rely on academic degrees for their initial filter. It makes no sense, since few university programs turn you into a good programmer, but it's true. This differs per geography but I'd say 50 to 80% of companies will skip CVs without a proper degree if they have the luxury to do so (i.e. sufficiently many applications). Quite some even when they don't have the luxury.
This works in your disadvantage, but in the end it'll just skew the numbers and that's it. Don't take this as "get a CS degree first!" kind of advice, more like: here's an explanation for at least 50% of your rejections (probably even some you did multiple interviews with).
In other words: if you have no CS degree but can otherwise code as well as people with a CS degree and similar experience as you, then this affects you like so:
- on the job: not at all
- when searching for a job: you need to apply 2x to 4x more than others
It's not fair, but others might counter that having to spend 4-5 years in college + be in debt for decades (if you're in the US) isn't fair either.
A final observation: I've found it satisfying to recognize that job hunting (or employee hunting for that matter!) is essentially just sales. And the thing about sales is that it's a numbers game. Reach out to 100 leads, get 10 talks, land 1 customer. Job hunting is similar. It's a shit job but you just got to bite through it. Think about the years of college you saved and how much less time the extra job interviewing is costing you than taking a CS degree would.
I found this increasingly an issue when applying for remote jobs.
Locally though, degree's don't matter because there aren't enough good programmers, when there are lots of options it seems people will look for degree's as an indication if you are "good enough".
Aren't programming salaries much lower in the UK than the US? If there's a shortage, why don't companies start paying more?
"Still, even with the declines, Facebook continues to generate by far the most profits per employee among the Big Five tech companies—$141,552 in the third quarter. In second place was Apple, with $99,898 per employee. Facebook’s core advertising business carries significantly higher margins than Apple’s business, which is based primarily on hardware sales."
That's $140k of average annual profit per each and every one of Facebook's ~40k employees, not just engineers.
However Apple still takes the lead when looking at revenue rather than profit:
"On a different metric, revenue per employee, Apple tops the list at $467,445 in the third quarter, higher even than Facebook’s $410,225 in revenue per employee (see chart above). Apple’s headcount for the quarter was 137,000, including workers in its retail stores."
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/after-hiring-binges-...
If you are from around here, you're main options are Nottingham (quite a good city for programming jobs) or move away to a bigger city with more opportunities, that isn't to say it's necessary and I have been forunate to find good jobs where I live.
The success of applying between local vs remote jobs is staggering, and have been told many times by local companies they really struggle to find decent programmers (maybe salary is the factor here as you say!)
Can you define "much much lower" please? Is that by purchasing power (i.e. university, housing, medical coverage)?
None, in my experience, produce universally good programmers. I think all that can be said is that some studies have a higher chance of producing good programmers, but in the end it's up to the student to learn to code while they're there (either using the university's material or not).
> I'd say 50 to 80% of companies will skip CVs without a proper degree
And the companies that claim they look at skills instead of degrees will want a super amazing candidate before they take the perceived risk of hiring someone without a degree. And then you get to HR and they offer you a salary 30% befitting the work you're hired to do and 70% befitting your "social status" (e.g. high school drop-out).
It seems like you went for quantity instead of quality. The opposite seemed to work well for me (personally, not trying to say its the only way).
I'd be happy to chat more, feel free to reach out. my email is my username at gmail.