Tell HN: Employers are not desperate to hire developers
I'm an unemployed mid/senior-level developer in the U.S. with a mediocre but solid portfolio and passable social skills. I've applied for many jobs at normal non-FAANG places, almost all of which were a decent match for my background, and employers don't seem desperate. Lots of no responses or form rejections, several places where I was rejected after either the initial or tech screen. I haven't gotten to the negotiation phase yet anywhere. When I asked, most seemed serious about hiring: they just got a new round of funding, there was a backlog of work, something, but still no hire. Also almost no response from external recruiters, and very little inbound LinkedIn messaging from anyone.
I'm not complaining, it's just how the grind is. I'm getting enough traction that I'm sure it's just a numbers game. But the employers are not desperate.
If you are a candidate without a golden resume or big network and need a job, then definitely don't get complacent because of HNers telling you that $100k-150k jobs are falling off trees. Put together a decent portfolio and then get those applications numbers up from day one. My personal goal is at least 100 applications before seriously considering pivoting to something else.
384 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 203 ms ] threadThere can be legit reasons to not practice what you preach, eg. to gain an advantage with fewer competitors :D
Are you sure the tech screens are going well?
I'm choosing to trust OP here - after all this is HN and we assume best intentions.
Well, perhaps not so much "lack of demand" as much as "supply exceeding demand."If you have e.g. 50 applicants who've passed the tech screen you might only seriously pursue 5-10 of them.
On the hiring side, the condition for extending an offer is not "didn't bomb the interview", but rather, being the best applicant that passes the hiring bar (the bar may or may not be reasonable).
Perhaps other candidates were indeed better in some of the cases. Perhaps the interviewers thought they saw some red flags. Or even some other stupid reason. For all I know about hiring processes essentially the planets have to align and maybe a company would make an offer to some random candidate that they believe is the most suitable.
Also, I'm not sure I agree even in principle that an interviewer could obviously see from a portfolio that a candidate could write high quality code in reasonably complex projects. Unless the code available to inspect on github, claims about past work on a CV (or during interviews) don't really mean much. It's not so much about "lying" but rather that it's hard to get an accurate picture from a couple brief descriptions. I've had similar misunderstandings from colleagues reporting their work progress during stand ups (eg. Bob says he completed tasks X and Y. Turns out they didn't work for the difficult case of interacting with Z, which he wasn't aware of and would take another two weeks to complete). The other thing is that when people talk about past work, I get no information about how much support their team or company gave them, how much credit should be given to their colleagues, and how robust the project would be upon stresses, etc.
There's also the well-known Dunning–Kruger effect.
As for github, nobody actually spends significant time reading a candidate's code in github, that's what the interview is for.
I agree that tech interviews are first about meeting a minimum standard and second about being one of the best choices among other applicants who also met that standard. I originally said I was "rejected after the tech screen" which matches your take, it's other posters who responded with "not passing" or "bombing." So you are disagreeing with them, not me.
As for "obvious," you implied that public code on GitHub or elsewhere would make it obvious. The fact that no one bothers to look doesn't change that, it just proves my point that employers aren't desperate to hire, otherwise they would make that effort.
It's also interesting to consider how much of a boost a candidate gets from having FAANG or other high-status items on their resume. Simply saying "JavaScript developer at Google" is demonstrably a stronger signal than "JavaScript developer at No-Name Corp" even though all your points about brief descriptions and team support theoretically hold true in both cases. Or, if the candidate went to a famous school, that would extend a halo effect even to the No-Name Corp entry. Quality is apparently more obvious in these cases, so your explanation isn't the whole story.
I think your claim that employers are "not desperate" is probably true to some extent, but if you're screening for say 30 candidates, the cost-benefit analysis of spending an hour each looking at their github profiles might not work out unless in the "most desperate" of cases (and if they're desperate to the point where if they can't hire a superstar they'd go out of business, then you wouldn't want to work there anyway).
TBH my belief is that some FAANG or famous school is a better signal than self-reported experience on a CV. You might disagree (and there are reasonable arguments on that side), but at least whether one worked at a particular company or went to a particular school is an objective fact, while things like "built a well-received service with millions of users" can mean very different things. The supposedly rigorous hiring/admission process of FAANG and famous schools can be a useful thing to know because the hiring process could be quite similar, and thus a useful predictor whether a candidate is likely to do well on the hiring game at hand (not necessarily a good employee, that's another question).
I don't think work quality is obvious for those halo effects you mentioned. There's just some fuzzy correlation (about being in FAANG and interviewing performance) that lazy interviewers/managers tend to mistakenly conflate with employment suitability. There are many reasons why hiring tends to be broken, which I'm not going into because it would be a book length thesis in itself, I'm just saying there's no way code quality of your past work would be "obvious" unless somebody actually spent a couple hours reviewing your code. Nobody would do that unless there's some other signal indicating that that might be the case (and in 99% of the cases they wouldn't do it even if the signals are there).
So my point is that if you proceeded with the assumption that it should be obvious to employers that you're employable... maybe that's not a great assumption. I definitely agree that most of the time companies aren't "desperate" to hire -- and TBH you don't want your future employers to be so desperate. If you're not getting offers (and you want to), maybe you'd have to spend a bit more effort advertising yourself instead of relying on potential employers' desperation.
Just like the old "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" adage, hiring the MIT or FAANG candidate is going to be pretty safe in the eyes of your manager.
Are you saying that OP isn't trying hard enough to sell/present themselves?Or are you saying that engineers without fancy schools or FAANG-level experience just aren't very hireable?
It seemed from their wording "various parts of my portfolio it should be obvious I can deliver high-quality code and complete reasonably complex projects" that they might be assuming his positive qualities are obvious to interviewers. That's all I was trying to say.
"Desperate" is a funny word. In another comment I compared this to buying milk when you need it. Maybe some people wouldn't call that desperate.
This all highlights the differences between being able to do the job, signaling that you can do the job, and being able to get hired to do the job.
I'm SR in my current role, 7+ years experience, tech lead for 7+ people...
I can't get an offer to save my life. I've gone through final round about 10 times now and always get either ghosted or "we decided on another person over you" then the role stays open for months. Had Disney offer to create a new role for me and then rescind when I agreed. Or my personal favorite, hiring freeze right after final interview and "we're frozen, can't do anything."
My latest ended with "we hired someone else for the role, but we just opened this role. Do you like it? We'd only need 1 interview from you since you aced the other ones." 3 weeks later and I can't get a reply from them to even schedule that interview...
I don't know if I'm just missing the mark somewhere or what, as all feedback I can get is "you're great we just like someone better." Well, except for the one who rejected me because "we didn't get a strong feeling of how you work with design at your current role." When I explained step by step our cycle for dev/design team ups, user testing and the feedback loop between dev/design.
I've just been ignoring anything from an Indian sounding name as they seemed to me to be scams.
Even primary vendors have outsourced their recruiting to India.
(Seattle-area, if it matters, and it does.)
$60/hr as a contractor is the equivalent of $30/hr or less salaried. At $60/hr, it's probably even less than $30/hr because you are not eligible for ACA tax breaks and must pay full price for health insurance. The health insurance plans available on the individual market have large premiums and deductibles compared to plans that employers subsidize. You also have a larger tax burden, including the need to file quarterly.
The rule of thumb for contracting is to take your salaried rate and double it at minimum.
If you can bill 40 hours/week for 50 weeks per year, that's about 2K hours so $120K/year. But you can't. You'll probably do well to bill half that because contracts probably don't fill basically the entire year neatly like that. You probably also want to budget time anyway for vacations/illness/etc., selling, billing, learning, and all the other off-the-clock things you need to do.
So now you're closer to $60K per year and that's with self-employment tax and no benefits including health (unless you're on a partner's plan).
So at $60/hr, even with a fairly full calendar, you're pretty much scraping by in the US.
From there reach out and ask them for help and provide your skillset, goals (X length contract work with mobile focus), and see if they will help connect you further. Hopefully your resume and past experience with that connection help you get your foot in the door more easily.
Hiring is faster, yes, but onboarding is often still a dreadful mess. At least if it's at a company that expects you to use their equipment and their closed system.
Smaller companies generally have less red tape to getting contractors, more need (as they are either scaling quickly OR just need something done and don't want to incur high cost of a perm eng). You will need to figure out the appropriate rate (keeping in mind this doesn't come with benefits), but that exercise is left to the reader.
All I see is full time jobs, no remote, and certainly no contract jobs. Germany.
There's been an insanely strong push to eliminate QA and put that work on developers (in addition to all the other specializations they now generalize in) in the past decade.
If you're the kind of developer who would usually end up at the second tier companies, those companies are going to be hiring the people Facebook and Twitter just laid off before they hire you. That's perfectly rational because the laid off FAANG developers are, on average, better developers than everybody else on the job market. This isn't good for anybody but is what happens when the market is suddenly flooded with tons of highly desirable developers.
Nothing this last year has led me to believe you'll have any trouble getting a engineering job provided you're not looking for an entry-level position.
I tried to hire a known, trusted, high performing engineer at Google. He was rejected. After reading his packet I could not figure out why. I had to call the recruiter and ask her if he’d said something so unmentionable they couldn’t even write it down.
They decided to pass on him because he was so good his promotion path at the role would be inadequate. I could have told them that before they wasted his time flying him out and sitting him through 8 hours of tech screen.
I literally had to fly him back out and do it all again, because “that’s the process”
I hate to break it to you but the process is broken.
For e.g. I’ve interviewed backend devs with 5+ years of Django experience who haven’t been able to tell me the general methods of how they might go about tackling a poor performing ORM query. I’m not asking them to even be able to write the code here, I’m just asking them to tell me roughly what their approach would be. If people aren’t able to talk me through that in general terms, they’re not going to help much.
I had one this week where a guy took user input on an API and then used “eval” to run it as code. Where do you even start with that? On CV terms, this person had 10 years of decent looking experience.
48% of people who lied claimed to be Native American
3/4 of people who faked being a racial minority on their applications were accepted by the colleges to which they lied
https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/education/57...
Intel pays managers bonuses for hiring people that are "underrepresented minorities".
It's apparently totally legal.
I mean... isn't that the actual justification for DEI policies in the first place?
This is taken from CNBC interview with Lybra Clemons(Chief Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging Officer at Twilio Inc.)
"This success, as well as Clemons’ acclaim for the company, is owed to Twilio’s commitment to becoming “anti-racist.” According to Clemons, part of the difference between DE&I and anti-racism is self-awareness.
“Right before I joined, Twilio said, we’re on this journey to become anti-racist. And I think we were all like, what does that even mean,” she tells CNBC Make It.
“I think a lot of people thought it was just a more elevated term for diversity, equity inclusion. But as we’ve started to go through the process, we’re learning that anti-racism is different. DE&I are still very foundational and fundamental to work, but anti-racism is an active term where you are personally responsible. This is about self-awareness and taking full accountability of who you are. We are actively promoting equity and racial justice through consistent, deliberate decisions that we make.”"
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/11/the-difference-between-dei-a...
Same page archived
https://archive.ph/u92e4#selection-737.0-745.506
I said nothing about racism in hiring practices. I was addressing the statement that was made.
What do you mean by baiting? I read that as you trying to shame people for even discussing the possibility that racism or sexism is a factor. As if it is somehow wrong to discuss these things. If you had a different intent, please share it.
I used the word bait because unsubstantiated “DEI hate” is used on hackernews as lightning rods.
I haven’t shamed anyone. If you actually read what I said above, you would see that I’m not denying racism in hiring exist… but again there’s no evidence of that here.
Just because you may not have been around when a tree fell in the woods doesn't mean it didn't make a sound.
To my point that you're speculating about something you have no evidence of and know nothing about.
> I've overheard a lot of conversations from hiring managers and they did explicitly discuss candidates race and sex,
Anectdata.
> I think if you ask around you'll see you are the outlier in having never seen evidence that racism and sexism have played a role before.
I never said this.
> Just because you may not have been around when a tree fell in the woods doesn't mean it didn't make a sound.
You can't speculate that a specific tree was felled with an axe rather than a chainsaw when you weren't in the woods to see it happen.
-- on the contrary, I'm pretty sure a rational person could speculate that a specific tree was felled by an axe vs a chainsaw depending on what she knows about loggers in a given area from a given culture and during a given time period. It's a question of probability. It's normal and rational and fair to discuss probabilities when speculating. It's unclear that you understand the terms you are using though so I'm gonna peace out and wish you luck.
Given that you know nothing about the hiring practices of the OP's company, it's safe to say that you know nothing about the woods in this analogy either ha.
> It's unclear that you understand the terms you are using though so I'm gonna peace out and wish you luck.
I understand very well. You made an analogy, and I made a more apt one. But when in doubt, resort to ad hominem.
Move along.
I think you should learn the usage of terms rather run than me, lol.
Age-ism, ethnic sounding names, etc. What makes you think companies engage in all kinds of biased hiring EXCEPT diversity quotas?
If anything, the burden of proof is on you that they don't.
Any examples you'd like to share?
Five years ago I saw CRUD jobs unfilled a year after I started looking. They are effectively not desperate.
There’s a reason that the SAT (for example) is hundreds of questions taken as a whole and not a series of several sudden death pass/fail tests over the breadth of a four year degree. The second is simply unrealistic for squishy meat bags.
Next up, the "STEM shortage." :-D
The layoffs aren't a general crash, they're a correction of overhiring and overconfidence by certain companies that disproportionately gained from covid.
And while there are endless job openings, the average urgency to hire is low. Companies are not making offers if they don't fall in love.
I start with this technical interview question so I can calibrate quickly:
"If I run the following two commands:
mkdir a b c;mv *
What happens?"
One person so far has asked if globbing was active. Like half of people get the answer right if they assume it is.
This question is deemed as "not fair", though, because it assumes a linux admin would know about shell globbing. So we're trying to find a modern equivalent that is somehow relevant, even though we're literally hiring people to know some shell.
If you need good questions, maybe ask your current admins the five most common operations or pain points they have every day and then base your questions on that.
You should be focusing on a desired objective in the linux environment and then allow them to outline the steps to get to that objective.
This is “falling of trees” compared to any other industry. Being able to land a middle class job directly in the field of your education without having to move is a very nice thing. Even if it takes 200 applications. It’s not common outside of engineering.
The median individual income in the U.S. is 32k [1]. Software engineers in the U.S., as a generalization of industry around the world, is literally the best that it gets.
That being said. Job hunting is soul sucking. Good luck.
1. https://datacommons.org/place/country/USA?utm_medium=explore...
(Edit because people are concerned about my 200 number. I got an offer for the first 60k position I applied for and decided to turn it down. I was shooting a tad higher. I’m also counting “one click” applications: Zip Recruiter and Linkedin.)
I definitely agree that developers have it better than most people. Anyone who's watched someone outside the field look for work should understand that. But there is a huge middle ground between the Stanford graduate working at Google for whom every application results in an offer, and people applying to bad jobs with a 90 minute commute just to find something. That middle ground is what you and I are talking about, where you do have to send out a lot of applications, 100 or 200 or more, but there are also a lot of companies, you can work remotely and they pay really well compared to other jobs in the U.S., let alone worldwide.
If you're applying for "senior" positions and have the CV to back it up and you're still batting 1/200 getting to the first interview then you are either the unluckiest person ever or there's a red flag you haven't noticed.
But, with a track record and you aren't trying to career change? That is a lot.
Also, there are red flags, and there are red flags. I have some red flags I can't do anything about, I just have to push through them, but they shouldn't be a dealbreaker for anyone actually desperate to hire.
Frankly, companies don't train. Mt company talks about training all the time and it's a joke.
The company I ended up working for basically would stick 10-15 potential Junior engineers (majority from bootcamps) in a room for 2 months and give them all 2 identical features to ship. Then access to the dev codebase, docs and the ear of senior engineer.
People would help each other, it was expected. People would go learn parts of the stack come back and teach everyone else (this is how I learned about GraphQL). At the end of the 2 months anyone who couldn't preform was let go, everyone else was placed.
I understand this was a boomtime thing that only works as massive companies, but it makes getting a new person on your team easier if they know the codebase/workflow. For the new engineer it also really helps to get used to how code works in a massive repo when all you've done is tiny self run projects.
But I also target the mid-tier, not FAANG, finance, or top-tier startups that hire like FAANG. I'd break down halfway through one of their day-long interviews no matter how much I studied leetcode, and I know it. Put me in any kind of meeting for more than a couple hours and I'm braindead, and interviews count as meetings. Even worse than ordinary meetings, really.
Yeah, if I had to send 50, let alone 200 applications in one search... I can't even imagine. If I hit 100 with no offers I'd for-sure reckon my career was over and I needed to look at jobs several notches down the economic and social ladder (and tech's already not that high on the social ladder).
- previously passed a loop with FAANG ( didn't join tho ) - have a strong portfolio in a hard to resource niche
Easily send out 200 apps and get ignored.
The market is dumb, not sure I should quit over it tho
I’m not even remotely FAANG level but if I wanted a job I’d email some people I know or Tweet that I’m looking - not fill in a form.
Have you tried working your network? Emailing some friends?
What's the word for cronyism if the person is qualified?
And at the end of the day - do whatever you need to within reason to put food on your own table. Don’t worry about someone else judging you for cronyism for feeding your family.
I think we already were? That's exactly what I said. Who do you think isn't being honest?
Someone who doesn't really check boxes and doesn't have a network may have to play a numbers game.
On the other hand, more senior and more specialized people (both in and out of engineering) will often have a much smaller number of holes that they would fit properly in and just sending out resumes is unlikely to be nearly as effective as networking.
Err yeah kind of. I always recommend people find someone in the team they want to join and reach out to them personally or via a mutual.
If you fill in the form without someone on the other end waiting to pick your application out of the firehouse it can get lost in the HR mystery machine.
I think that’s a pretty common opinion? I’ve never gotten a job with a blind application. I’ve gotten every job I applied to when I did it by reaching out.
Also the teams in smaller places are not anything spectacular, just backend, frontend, data, whatever, with a lot of overlap, so the idea that someone would be aiming for a particular team, meaning whoever is working on that part of the stack this month, is also strange.
What you're saying makes sense with big, complex companies with huge HR processes and teams of varying levels of prestige and expertise. Probably a good idea if you're aiming particularly for a team at Google that works on a particular thing you like.
The point is that giving preference to someone you know reduces or even eliminates the other person's opportunity. This is especially important for minority groups that may not have as many connections in a given industry. Sure, people do what they need to for work, but people skipping in line...
But picking someone to join your team isn’t taking the first person who appears in line.
In the UK the market is pretty dumb. Folks are mainly looking for reasons to exclude you rather than focusing on the positives. Ergo, I fire and forget resumes and only really put effort into the ones that come back positively.
When I get past the gate keepers, I almost always get an offer.
So my point is, "hang in there".
I'm a reasonably good developer, but not top tier by any means.
But my starting point is usually a recruiter contacting me. It's been a long time since I've chased a recruiter or company. And I've never sent out 100+ applications in my 22 year career.
Maybe geography plays a part. London and Dublin are full of tech jobs. Isolated cities in the US might be different, with moving or commuting to a different city not an easy option.
I'd like to see some of the CVs that keep getting rejected or passed over, because that volume (100-200) doesn't feel right to me.
I'm not saying it's bad, I'm just saying I would never use that expression to describe it.
I really do feel for those without a decent network.
Certainly hasn't been the case since. To be sure, the few other jobs I've had have all come through personal connections.
I can't imagine sending out that many having spent large quantities of time on each one.
[edited to fix typing the wrong word]
Though I'm also open to the possibility that some companies just want to hire some number of developers with 3-5 years of experience in $TECHNOLOGY and aren't too fussy beyond that. In which case, it may indeed become more of a numbers game if a company is basically picking a handful of resumes at random that clear some minimum bar.
Of course everyone wants to be a premium brand but sometimes it just doesn't work out like that.
A challenge is that most job listings are mostly "3-5 years of experience in $TECHNOLOGY," or rather there are so many $TECHNOLOGIES listed that almost no one is going to be an expert in all of them. It's difficult to tell from the outside whether they want someone who has experience in at least some of the core and can learn the rest, or whether they're holding out for the perfect candidate.
The median full-time income in the US - which is a much more applicable reference point - is around $55,000.
I thought it was $42k a year or two ago, but haven't looked since, and I don't remember if it was strictly full-time.
Searching Google for "median full time income" pops up $51,480 in bold. The next link is to the BLS (US Bureau of Labor Statistics): https://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.t01.htm
For Q3'22, it was $1,068/wk, or $55,536/yr.
This should be emphasized. I have a friend who quit a terrible, stressful job without something new lined up, and it took him a year to find another one. After an excessive number of interviews at one company for one position, he got annoyed and asked them what the deal was. They said that they were impressed by him, but were honest and said they were trying to figure out "what was wrong with him," since he wasn't employed, and then gave him an offer.
And I wouldn't consider myself an amazing developer (I do alright, but I'm not 10x) or have an amazing portfolio and I don't have a FAANG on my resume, just a large corporation that no one has heard of, a couple medium-sized companies, and several smaller companies / failed startups.
Might be a bit different now, this was back in June/July 2021.
Also that sounds like an impressive background, 6 or 7 or more companies over I'm guessing 10-15 years? Also the stuff on your HN profile looks pretty good too. Don't sell yourself short.
That was near the peak, it was a completely different world back then.
What you should look at is median earnings of full time workers, which is about $1000 per week, or $52K per year. This does not include benefits - in the U.S. things like healthcare are primarily funded by the employer and retirement is roughly half funded via social security matching contributions, so total compensation would be about 70K/year.
https://www.bls.gov/charts/usual-weekly-earnings/usual-weekl...
this sentence is confusing to me. Are you saying there are a lot of SWE jobs in India and China? Or are you saying there are a lot of people from those places looking for SWE jobs.
Or something different?
So of course this is only anecdotal but I've never sent more than 5 applications out at a time even back when I was a junior dev. In the last 10 years I don't even bother looking for jobs actively anymore, I just turn the switch on my LinkedIn indicating that I'm seeking employment, and let recruiters do the rest.
I'm not sure what the difference is, but I would consider myself to be an outlier as far as traditional engineers go, in that I am both exceptionally articulate and naturally extroverted. If I can get to the point where I have a face-to-face or a phone interview, I'm fairly confident that I'll be able to acquire an offer. Without specifics I can only recommend that engineers work on developing their soft skills if they don't already have them.
On the other hand I'm not particularly picky in terms of companies, and I have a wide range of senior level experience in major platforms including C# and node/typescript/JavaScript.
Just a counterpoint for all the gloom and doom but I'd say that you have nothing to worry about if you have the following:
- in demand skillset (ts/js/c#)
- people skills / charisma
- US citizenship
- 10+ years experience
- reasonable salary expectations (140-175k)
Sorry, but what does "ts" stand for?
Even if it's true, a random statistic fact cannot make your situation better. For example, earning $32K puts you in the top 1% of the incomes across the world. Does it make you feel any better?
Not that I'm complaining. I loathe most recruiters. It's just an observation of mine that _seems_ to correlate with the state of hiring in tech.
To be fair, this was normal at the peak too. (as well as ghosting after doing 3 rounds)
Why? Because even if you are a good candidate, hiring is not as easy as people think.
Among the many challengues we have I can list the following:
1. The people interested in your profile have minimal influence in the process,
2. There are people who are always chasing for the shiny new object (or person, in this case),
3. There is a sea of resumes in our hands, and we pick the best, but they want the world and lose them during negotiations, and the ones at the bottom of the list who really want the job, move on because the process to get to them takes too long (several months),
4. People over estimate their qualifications. Their abilities may be good, but they write over the top accomplishments in their resumes that are hard to believe, at least without proof, and they are the first ones to get rejected,
5. HR interferes too much in the process. They sometimes change the job requirements, sometimes ignore candidates that we explicitely tell them to follow up with, sometimes extend meaningless offers just to keep potentially good candidates in the hook (people with offers at other Big Co.), sometimes force candidates to accept offers without a signed paper, so on and so forth. Obviously, good candidates get fed up with this and decline/renege the offer, we lose them, and the people below them too because the negotiation took too long (3-5 months),
6. I really want to hire motivated individuals, and I know many people like me across different teams, but we lose motivation over time because of all the roadblocks, and the cycle(s) described above repeats.
The whole process is kind of silly. I have reviewed hundreds of resume from people who are doing amazing work at other companies, but we reject them for very small things. Only two of approximately 20 referrals got an offer, and I am 100% sure that all of those referrals are as good or better than me (facepalm).
(source: I once worked in the states on a TN visa, and this was the practice at the time.)
I think it's precise. Two terms:
* Hiring -- When you are actually ready to make offers to hire people.
* Pretending -- When you are trying to keep the hiring funnel full, or to give the appearance of business doing well, but not ready to actually make offers.
Economists pull demand curves out of their asses when the only verifiable facts are actual, concrete sales.
I can understand fishing for individually contributing junior-to-senior developers, but for senior management roles? Would a company really troll waters to find a senior leader that they don't really need? "Hey, look what I found, let's find a spot for him/her!"
My theory has been either (1) those companies are super picky, which is understandable given the impact of those roles, or (2) they don't really know what they want, and they are using the interviewing process to figure it out. But regardless of 1v2, those companies likely have people fulfilling those management responsibilities today that they have otherwise deemed unqualified, or are very-senior C-level folks that are too busy to do it well.
But if I can't find the right person in a couple months time, I have a choice -- do I put some unqualified person there to do the job, or do I wait? I think there are strong arguments to wait, especially if the project is not time sensitive or a huge priority.
Or maybe to replace a person who has left. There's a gap and perhaps a not-quite-qualified (or a qualified-but-too-busy) person is temporarily taking care of things while the company tries to hire. There's a choice here too -- do you hire the least-bad person after say 3 months, or do you wait? Given the impact of bad hires at this level, I think I'd definitely wait.
A lot of people think they're way better at hiring than they are. Just like employees overestimate their skills (and are encouraged to because the resume process) employers also over estimate their hiring skills (and are encouraged to because the bureaucratic process).
Judging from the results for people I know who've had this person re-work their résumés, it's extremely good advice. Non-braggy résumés seem to just get round-filed for not knowing how to play the game, even if they're otherwise very well-written. I'm sure there are a few folks hiring—probably almost all at relatively small enterprises—who have the opposite reaction but they're instead rejecting good people who are simply playing their hand the best possible way, given the rules. Those who fluff up their résumés get much better results.
That doesn’t make sense, there must be a different causality.
To be clear, per parent, I'm not saying to lie but things can generally be presented in a positive way.
The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
People can have fewer accomplishments and make a big deal out of them and get more out of it. I would rather not make a big deal out of meaningless stuff. I recently certified as an AWS practicioner after my associate level certs expired. My manager wants to send an email out to the department about that accomplishment. I don't get it - it's just practicioner.
For example, if you say that you "developed software that saved the company $X million/year," that might look good to a non-tech person but a tech person will understand that could mean nothing. Maybe you spellchecked comments in a sub-subcomponent of a project a thousand people worked on. On the other hand you might say you "worked on v1 of the Frobnicator library" which might look like nothing to a recruiter but which is a legendary accomplishment in the field.
In my case I just say what I did in plain language that includes a bunch of keywords and hope that's enough.
I've been in the bracket where ageism is a factor for a while now and so have many of the best people I know who still work as ICs. Being told that no-one really has that breadth or depth of experience and unicorns don't exist should be surprising for this group but sadly isn't any more. If the person making the silly comment is an important player in a hiring process then that's not a good sign.
The worst I've seen is when you're personally invited in as an expert/consultant by someone in your network and then HR insist on treating the gig as if they're hiring some random junior developer applicant. Objectively the professional thing to do if you're getting messed around like that is usually to politely disengage but then you risk making your friend/colleague look bad. Sometimes going via your network is a double-edged sword.
It sounds like I would not want to work at Apple with all the games HR plays.
Do you ask them for proof or reject them without asking?
You would never get to the next round otherwise.
#5 sounds like you have a bad HR team, or don't have the right relationship with them. I've had HR discard good resumes because they were "over-qualified" and try and force me to interview people who aren't qualified, or try and convince me to say that I want someone with a college degree (the compromise was "or equivalent", which basically makes the request for a degree worthless) but ultimately, it seems like you should be able to control your rec more. The quality of recruiters varies wildly, have you tried escalating to get better support? Or maybe it's chicken and egg, because it's been two years without hiring, HR thinks you're the problem and isn't going to put effort into it?
Usually developers of all levels of skills work in teams and if something really good comes out as a result, frequently it's not a single-person merit.
Secondly, I do honestly wonder how many developers, even here on HN, have done something so impressive they think it's worth talking about in detail. Most likely whatever they have done, somebody else has already done it better than them in the past.
Finally, I can speak from personal experience, when I tried explaining how I (either alone or in the team) have fixed something by applying some solution, the interviewer had made me look like a fool by asking trivial questions, like if we had considered doing this or that, or why haven't we done this instead. During the very limited interview time, it is impossible to convey the full context to the interviewer and too often they don't appreciate that.
Too often the companies are looking for unicorn developers but when you somehow get matched, accept a job offer and join the company expecting that maybe this time it's going to be different, better somehow, you are met with the same awful solutions, everything barely working and people being people, just like everywhere else. Suddenly, the fact that you left your ordinary software house and joined FAANG (or MANGA, etc.) loses any significance, except for the financial benefit.
Hidden cheat code they don't tell grad students about.
All of these things together as a business owner, going into holiday times; make me keep the mindset that hiring anyone right now for a non-essential position can probably wait until I can understand better what our company's financial picture is going to look like.
edit for typo
How does what the US admin look like impact your business? Do you provide services to the government?
There's nothing wrong with that unless you're giving mixed signals to your applicants. Accepting resumes for a perpetual "general interest" position is no problem. Posting a new listing for a specific position and then assuring an applicant during the first interview that you're actively recruiting when in fact you're really ambivalent is not good. I'm not accusing you of doing that, I'm just saying, is all.
I've got ~20 years in the industry, including startup-sized companies, medium sized companies and FAANGs. Every job hunt for me is still around 100 applications : 10 interviews : 1 offer. These ratios have remained pretty reliable through bull and bear hiring markets.
I suspect people for whom "jobs are falling off trees" are rarer than HN commenters might have you believe.
This rough estimate agrees with the data I've collected from my own job hunting. My data say 100 applications : 14 interviews : 3 offers, specifically.
Same here. But, I'm horrible at selling myself.
> I suspect people for whom "jobs are falling off trees" are rarer than HN commenters might have you believe.
I don't think so. The people for which jobs are falling off trees are those who have spent at least 10 years building their brand and their network. It reminds me a bit of this comic I see on occasion: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DRwe2qaU8AAwLE5?format=jpg&name=...
And it's accurate for me. I'm lazy. That's why I became a programmer to begin with.
Speaking from experience as well as the experience of former colleagues. Of course, you may find that you don't want to grind out prep to increase the latter conversion, which is also fine. Just wanted to provide another data point.
Still luckily have work when I want it.
However, my general feeling is the market is cooler here in the UK. I used to get annoyed on a regular basis by the number of recruiters who contacted me .. it's happening a lot less often now.
I've been both on the hiring side and candidate side this year and demand is still very strong (granted moreso for more senior applicants than junior).
Couple of tips that have worked for me:
* Make sure your Linkedin is up-to-date, you have "open to work" turned on and that your experience is filled with direct results and accomplishments. Example of a bad bullet point (Used javascript to build a user-facing dashboard). Example of a good bullet point (Built a new dashboard product that manages x for y number of users. Ultimately drove z result.
* Tweak your resume details over time. Don't blindly apply to 100+ roles with the same resume. Not only could there be something wrong with it that's throwing off employers, it doesn't serve you as well as it could. If it's a full stack role, highlight more of those skills in your resume. If it's a iOS role, make sure more mobile experience is called out. Note: this doesn't mean filling it with things that aren't accurate about your background.
* Don't underestimate a solid cover letter (especially for smaller companies) and also reaching out to recruiters at those companies. Both of these things should take < 15 mins.
* Have a skills section somewhere on your resume that lists the technologies you are familiar with. This is critical to get passed resume screeners and it also helps free up your experience section to list more accomplishment details than technology ones.
* Leetcode, leetcode, leetcode. I know it sucks and it feels like a waste of time but your point of "several places where I was rejected after either the initial or tech screen" makes me feel like you could use some work here. Try to do as many mediums as you can. When I've been deep in interview mode, I try to solve 1 medium problem/day every single day. I set a 45 minute time and make sure I can get something working in that time. If I fail, I study the answer and get ready for the next day. After 1-2 months you should be in good shape.
Hope this helps!
I wouldn’t personalize your resume for any company, nor do I recommend writing a personalized cover letter for any of them — you have no idea the skill set that will be valued by the person reading the resume, as they are an unknown random variable. I feel it’s just a time waste and there is no proof that this sort of thing is fruitful.
Also fuck leetcode. I’ve refused to do the leetcode and still gotten the offer to do an interview without it. Imo, we should all show some backbone and stop accepting all this superstitious mumbo jumbo as the accepted form of recruitment.
Strangely enough, despite what you might think from HN, I haven't run into a ton of LeetCode algorithm-type puzzles at the places I've been looking.
Beyond that I don't think it's worth tweaking a resume for each ad, for example modifying word order. Nothing wrong with it exactly, but the gain is minimal because no one reads your resume that closely, and I think it encourages the wrong mindset for what is unavoidably a numbers game.
No one wants to read a multi-page resume, so you have to leave things out. Some of the things you normally leave out might be super-relevant for a particular role, due to the industry or business domain.
I don't know what proof you need this is useful - you're selling yourself, so make sure to sell what they're trying to buy.
For shotgunning applications, I don't customize. Way too much effort.
Master Drywall Contractor
Built walls using 5/8 in. x 4 ft. x 12 ft. Firecode X Drywall over 178,000 sq. ft. resulting in client generating $1.1b in revenue annually.
Happy to have my mind changed.
This is one of the most repeated pieces of advice I see, but, as a person who reviews CVs and does interviews, I would rather see the first point. From there, we would have a discussion about the technology you used and the features built for users. It could have been a dashboard that ultimately wasn't useful for users and had little to no result - I don't care. I care that you're able to build it.
I know LinkedIn and recruiters get kind of a bad rap but I really like working with them over applying the old fashioned way.
You get more phone calls but it beats filling out forms. If you get multiple recuriters working on your behalf you can setup situations where you try to interview for lots of companies at once in batches. If you're currently unemployed and have the time for that, some companies will eliminate time consuming steps in their interview process to hire you before one of the other companies does.
I haven't looked in the last few months but this is most of my strategy for finding good jobs without having to bother with annoying things like job applications or too many interviews.
Long term an additional thing you can do to boost this is continue to add recruiters on linkedin even when you're not actively looking.
I don't enjoy the job search, so I let the recruiters do it for me.
You can be pretty straightforward with them too because they're incentivized to get you a job with commissions. You might be surprised with what they come back with if you tell them very explicitly what you're looking for (money, remote, type of interview, etc). Of course the more recruiters you work with the more likely some of them will be able to turn up these roles.
I also like this system because it ensure you are only working with companies extremely motivated to hire. At the point where a company has hired an external recruiter, they have already spent thousands of dollars to try to hire you, failed, and now they're spending thousands more in commission to send someone out into the wild to find them someone they can please hire.
One last thing I'll throw out if you're still having trouble past that or if that strategy is unpalatable to you. You could pick up a couple AWS certifications.
They aren't easy, but they aren't that hard either.
AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate AWS Certified Developer
These certs are extremely similar and if you study for one you can do just a little more and pass the other too.
Cloud skills are in especially high demand and some companies agreements with AWS even require them to employ a minimum number of people with AWS certs.
The AWS certs in particular are nice because they are quite cheap compared to many certifications. $150 each for the 2 I mentioned. You'll want study materials as well. I really liked the courses offered by acloudguru which I believe is now owned by linux academy.
https://acloudguru.com/forums/certified-solutions-architect-... https://acloudguru.com/course/aws-certified-developer-associ...
In any case sorry you're in that situation. Job change is always stressful, especially when it doesn't go smooth. Good luck!
I used to keep a spreadsheet of what dates I'd log in, and what actions I'd take, then I'd wait for the summary email from LI and put the results in it. Anecdotally, after logging into LI and making minor edits to my profile, the "number of times you've appeared in search results" emails I receive indicate a 2-3x increase over baseline.
By minor edits, I mean changing punctuation or other small changes to a sentence or two. Major edits would dramatically increase my search results, such as adding certifications, but that's to be expected.
I've gotten certificates in the past and used to put them on my resume or LinkedIn, now I just leave them off. They're so minor compared to the rest of the stuff on my resume that realistically they aren't going to move the needle. In fact, no offense intended, but it feels like a junior move given my existing background, like putting my high school on my resume. I can see them being really helpful for some people, though.