> Very few of us are going to bat 1.000 during our careers, especially with the industry reshaping itself under our feet.
This feels like it may be an iceberg. Could you expand more on what "reshaping" you're seeing? Are you referring to the mass layoffs specifically or is there some broader context to this comment?
I think SWE is a very young field. Just 50 years ago GOTO was commonplace (apparently?). In any case I think the future hold some interesting prospects, with copilot and gpt and all.
Not OP, but the significant change I see is FAANG can't hire simply to keep talent away from their competitors anymore. Not sure what overall percentage of people working in those jobs were hired for that reason, but they'll likely never see that kind of salary again.
I'm guessing #7 contributed to the fact that it took the author 1 year to find another job. If you're desperate, you can most likely find an _okay_ job in 3 months. If you don't have the luxury to wait for a "good" job, finding a job tends to happen faster.
I'm in similar shoes to the author here, and am glad to hear you show some understanding for this.
I interviewed with a quite promising company beginning of December, only to immediately get the written feedback (after the first call) of
"Well I know a lot of SWE in this town and none of them are struggling to find a job - so if you've been looking for X months, surely there's something wrong with you - and anyway, we've already signed a contract with someone else in the 5 days since we last spoke."
(To be fair to them - I had mentioned how frustrating it was to simply get "no" as negative hiring feedback and asked them to elaborate if at all possible)
I take it as a "well, bullet dodged" moment, but I am not going to lie and say it didn't sting.
This sort of thing is pretty common. It happens in both directions, if you're employed job offers line up, if you're available there must be something wrong with you. Highly frustrating. A couple of takeaways: unemployed < freelancers < has a job < has a prestigious job. So if possible and you're on the job market at least fill the time freelancing so you don't end up with the 'unemployed' status because hiring managers are going to see that as a way to excuse themselves, from that point forward they look at employing you as taking a risk, which, as a rule they are trained to avoid. VCs suffer from the same disability: the start-up that has a deal on the table will have multiple parties trying to get in on the deal, the start-up that is just pitching is probably somehow faulty or someone else would have given them a terms sheet long ago. They see no inconsistency in this. Also, you don't necessarily have to inform them of your feelings and the fact that you've been rejected more than once. Best of luck there!
> I had mentioned how frustrating it was to simply get "no" as negative hiring feedback and asked them to elaborate if at all possible
Don’t do this! You’re inviting feedback from someone who is basically a complete stranger, who has an undisclosed set of “standards” they’re judging you against, and who might not actually be very good at assessing talent. The odds of getting a “false signal” are high.
Asking for feedback is okay if you're in the right mindset. Understand that unless you completely failed something, it's probably them, not you, and any feedback you get should be seen as likely rationalizing a decision they made for who knows what reasons. So as long as you don't take the feedback too hard or too personally, you might get some ideas for how to improve your chances with the next employer.
I've honestly made enough of a positive experience to recommend doing it.
Sometimes people just genuinely tell you things like "there wasn't enough detail about X on your CV, but we took a chance and called you anyway" - that tells me that I can improve my chances for a callback in the future by adding more detail (if I get that same feedback 2-3 times).
You're right though in that a looooooooot of hiring people also have no clue what they want to see.
>"so if you've been looking for X months, surely there's something wrong with you - and anyway, we've already signed a contract with someone else in the 5 days since we last spoke."
I think letting them know you are currently unemployed is a mistake. Frankly your current state of affairs is not their business. You can always tell them that you are ok but looking for a better job. Very simple and understandable. Yes it is a lie but it is the only reasonable option. Telling perspective employer to sod off and not to stick their nose into your internal situation is not going to do you any good. Telling that you are out of job and looking will immediately put you into unfavorable position. Treat yourself as a business in this particular case. Businesses have zero problems lying to each other / their employees for as long as it does not break a law.
There's really no way to hide you're currently unemployed, or at least not employed in the tech field, unless you make up an entire fantasy world. Not only will you have to put the lie into your resume, and maybe provide fake references, but you'll also get tons of interview questions about skills and projects and challenges from your current job.
>"There's really no way to hide you're currently unemployed"
It is absolutely trivial.
>"but you'll also get tons of interview questions about skills and projects and challenges from your current job"
Your last job unless it is 10 years old should provide all of the answers. Any really identifying details should not be asked / answered as the employee is normally under NDA.
Same for references. Reference from "current job" can simply be refused. I can hardly imagine employee going to their boss and asking for a job reference while still working.
Anyways I am independent and run my own company. Maybe I am not up to date about how deep the US employers are able to stick their fingers up that proverbial hole.
While interviewing in the U.S. you'll get a lot of casual questions about your current job, such as what you like best about it, what skills you use there or why you want to leave. These will come from the recruiter, the manager and your future peers. These are both technical and social questions. Refusing to answer any of these questions would be very weird socially, and even very restrictive NDAs should allow you to at least speak generally about what you're doing.
>"While interviewing in the U.S. you'll get a lot of casual questions about your current job, such as what you like best about it, what skills you use there or why you want to leave. "
These fall perfectly into experience with last job. Does not have to be current. And all those questions you asked are trivial. Also I've never dealt with the recruiters. I have always searched and found perspective companies myself and no they were not Amazon big type. If I could not speak with the owner I would simply walk away - not my kind of place.
My first programming job in Canada - I just simply walked into the office and asked to speak to the owner (I knew it was small 20 person consultancy).
Since 2000 I am on my own but I still find clients and have interviews. Just a different type of interview of course.
I can respond to this having gone through a similar process in the past few years. There’s ok and there’s the (IMHO) more common bad. I turned down several offers myself, for reasons ranging from ‘not wanting to be the public advocate for something I didn’t believe in’ to ‘discovering the leadership were crypto scammers’.
Just curious, what do you define as an _okay_ job? Would you be willing to pay the opportunity cost to take it?
For what it's worth, I thought the same. I applied to over 50 companies and not all of them were FAANG by any stretch of the imagination. I'll admit I'm not the best at interviewing, which certainly was a factor. But even as I broadened my search to the "okay" roles, I still had difficulty landing work.
> Just curious, what do you define as an _okay_ job? Would you be willing to pay the opportunity cost to take it?
If I didn't have enough money to pay for food/rent, I would take the first offer. Fortunately, I've never been in that situation.
> I applied to over 50 companies and not all of them were FAANG by any stretch of the imagination. I'll admit I'm not the best at interviewing, which certainly was a factor. But even as I broadened my search to the "okay" roles, I still had difficulty landing work.
If you're thinking about the distinction between FAANG and not FAANG, then we are talking about completely different levels of _okay_. I'm talking about non-tech companies, where you'd most likely be working on internal tools or whatever. Maybe you'd be writing crappy Jira/Confleunce/whatever plugins. Or gluing together one internal system to another internal system, etc.
I consider _okay_ to mean a job that pays enough money to cover rent/food.
It would be great if you could share your insights about finding work at these non-tech companies, either here or at my recent post at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34108841. I've applied to far over 50 places and would be satisfied with that sort of thing at least for the near term.
You're looking for a remote job. The sort of companies I'm thinking of most likely won't do remote. Maybe it's different now in the era of COVID, but I suspect they'll still be "asses in chairs, look busy" type places.
Go on monster.com (or any other job search site), type in "programmer" (or "<language> programmer" if you only have experience in a single language) and start applying. If you don't recognize the company name or what they do, that's good. If you're looking for a consultancy gig, then you probably want to look out for keywords like "government" or "client". If you're looking for a non-tech company, then you need to google the company name and see what field their in.
If you know Java, you can probably search for "Jira programmer" or "Jira developer" and find a pretty cushy gig writing those. If you know PHP, then search for "wordpress developer". If it's python, search "Django developer" etc.
Yes, remote only if at all possible. I'm surprised that non-tech companies care about looking busy, since tech is a cost center for them and I would guess they're hiring grudgingly at best.
I've looked mainly on LinkedIn and some smaller job boards, not Monster or Indeed or Dice or any of those.
Another thing is that I'm avoiding complex applications, the ones where you're immediately asked to create an account and once you do they ask you for a ton of information like every job you've had in your life. Are the jobs you're talking about often gated behind these applications?
> Are the jobs you're talking about often gated behind these applications?
Most likely, you'll start to recognize the different software companies use to track job applications.
My only experience was helping someone out when they got laid off. They had a mortgage to pay, a new born and a wife that quit her job to look after the new born.
Being picky about job application software wasn't a the top of our list. I think we applied to over 500 ads over the course of a few days, basically every single commutable job. I think from those, there were 20 interviews and 3 offers.
Some of the software automatically scans your CV and populates stuff. If it can't do it properly, restructure your CV until it can. You might need a few different CVs for different software.
I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but you don't sound very serious. Or at least not desperate (which is probably a good thing).
If you're looking for a job full time, you should spend a few hours a day grinding leetcode and a few hours a day filling in those shit applications. Obviously I don't know you or you situation, I have no idea if this is good advice for you or not.
You can judge for yourself whether I'm serious or desperate or not. If your standard is 500 applications within a few days, then no. I can't even comprehend that. Are we talking like 10-15 applications per hour?
I don't care about the software as such, but so far I'm not desperate enough to provide detailed information about every job I've had since I was a teenager, every reference up front, agree to legal statements, or whatever else they might insist on, knowing I could be fired later on if I get any of it wrong, just to maybe get the first 30 minute phone call from a recruiter. On top of this is the simple logic that any employer that puts up all these barriers is probably not really interested in hiring anyway. More work for less reward, so that my time would be better spent looking for more likely positions.
That said I'm willing to have my mind changed on this. Maybe all of these jobs are actually super eager to hire despite being so hostile to applicants.
> Are we talking like 10-15 applications per hour?
Pretty much, around 5 minutes per application.
>provide detailed information about every job I've had since I was a teenager, every reference up front, agree to legal statements, or whatever else they might insist on, knowing I could be fired later on if I get any of it wrong
Either you're completely overthinking it and you can just omit a bunch of stuff, or you're applying to some job that requires security clearance and they use those questions to prescreen. I remember the application for some defense contractor was too painful and we gave up.
But if it's some standard jobvite or whatever form, just fill it in. Only include relevant tech jobs and your university education (if you have a degree) and move on.
If it's really that big a deal for you, shortlist 50 jobs from those job search sites. Then go to /r/slavelabour and pay someone $15 bucks to apply for you (given your CV and email).
> That said I'm willing to have my mind changed on this. Maybe all of these jobs are actually super eager to hire despite being so hostile to applicants.
It's more likely that at some point that bought a license for the applicant tracking software and they'll use it forever. They probably have it on some default settings so it's not the best for tech jobs. That doesn't mean they aren't serious about hiring.
But those job aggregator sites are a bit shit, they'll have listings for jobs that are already filled or no longer available.
We may be talking past each other. I'm talking about applications for unremarkable positions at large corporations where the application forms are either branded by the company or done through something like iCIMS, Taleo or Workday. You create an account and then you're faced with several steps asking for who knows what. The experience question might be "List all past jobs starting with the most recent" with no date limit. Later on you'll have to agree that you answered everything fully and honestly or you can be fired. Maybe I'm a fool for taking that seriously but the meaning is straightforward to me.
These are also the sorts of positions I think people are talking about when they talk about HR being a barrier, filtering on keywords, or how important it is to network around them before applying. So I don't think it's a matter of the company being stuck with software they can't do anything about, instead the hostile and opaque application process mirrors their actual hiring process, or at least I assume so. I'm happy to hear if you have any insight from the recruiting side at these places.
> List all past jobs starting with the most recent" with no date limit. Later on you'll have to agree that you answered everything fully and honestly or you can be fired. Maybe I'm a fool for taking that seriously but the meaning is straightforward to me.
This is the most standard thing ever. The ycombinator job board[0] works the exact same way. No one is going to fire you if you leave out that you worked at Pizza Hut when you were younger. They will fire you if you claim to have worked at Google but never actually did. Or if you claim N years of experience in some technology despite never using it. Just make sure your CV matches what you enter into the software and that you're not lying on your CV, that's it.
> I'm happy to hear if you have any insight from the recruiting side at these places.
I have experience working on the recruiting side of a fairly large company that used Jobvite (which is why I mentioned it, first piece of software I could think of) for their application tracking system. It asked you the same sort of questions, even some really stupid ones like your Myers Briggs personality type, despite me arguing very strongly against it.
Yes, HR would do some filtering, they probably filtered out good candidates and let many bad ones through to the next stage to get filtered by the hiring people. This shouldn't stop you from applying, who cares if you get filtered out by HR at X% of the time? You'll get through 100-X% of the time, and if you apply to a lot of places, that'll be a lot of people looking at your CV. An application should not take you longer than 5-10 minutes, it's not a big investment of time.
> instead the hostile and opaque application process mirrors their actual hiring process, or at least I assume so
Yes, the hiring process will be shit. But it's not intentionally hostile, it's "hostile" because that's the way it's always been and there's too much momentum to change it. I'm certain the Myers Briggs questions turned off many good candidates. I would immediately close a job application if it was asking stuff like that (assuming I wasn't desperate). But the company was genuinely looking to hire good people. I feel like you underestimate how difficult it is to change anything at a large company where tech is a cost center :).
There are many tech jobs out there that just ask you to send in a resume and cover letter and answer some questions. Saying it's technically possible to get an interview from sending out an unfocused 5-10 minute application to a big corporation using something like Taleo is not a strong argument in itself to do that.
Coming off my own job search, my take is that the era of remote work has fundamentally changed the entire process. I'm going on 24 years of professional experience and applied to more jobs in that search than in the rest of my career combined. Prior to this year, I've had exactly two applications that didn't result in an interview, and only 3 interviews that didn't result in offers.
In this past search, I applied to about 50 jobs and had 4 interviews. According to LinkedIn stats, most of those jobs had 30-200+ applicants. The results of those applications were:
~12 screens with recruiters that resulted in rejection
~ 8 rejections w/no conversations
~20 no reply whatsoever
~ 3 rejects in first round
- 1 second round reject
- 1 final round reject (a nearly 2 month process!)
- 1 offer for about 50% of my previous salary, but a more more interesting role
- 2 replies indicating a desire to move forward that came 6 weeks after my application, and after I'd accepted a job.
My takeaway is that it's a numbers game now. In the past, I was very highly targeted in my searches, but now that the doors are wide open to everyone across the country for many roles, it's about getting someone's eyes on your resume, and that requires a certain level of aggression in applying.
The bar can get very low! Look into local low prestige consulting companies if you’re really desperate for something. I worked at one after moving to the US and the hiring bar was extremely low and I was working there a few days later
I agree. I was hired over a year ago to a similar place that's since been acquired by a Big IT Consulting Company. One benefit of that situation is that a) I can kinda just blend in and do my job quietly without attracting much notice, and b) the hiring bar was insanely low, the easiest interview-to-offer pipeline I have ever fallen through. I'm not planning to stay forever, but they're paying my bills and giving me work so for now, I'm content to stick it out, maybe through the end of next year even.
For both your and the GP's comment, it would be great if you could share some details on how job searching with "local low prestige consulting companies" works, either here or in a recent post I made at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34108841.
I was about to say the same thing. #2, #4, and #7 partially contradict each other.
I think you can go faster if you use third-party recruiters, as much as I often despise them. Try to pick out one or two individuals within recruiting firms that are not awful. They're out there. Recruiters are given the jobs that corporations need a warm body to fill now.
Yes, you can absolutely always quit that un-ideal job and completely omit it from your resume. I don't see the wrong role as a good reason to turn down a job when you have bills to pay.
My other feedback on this article:
I wish it generally talked about unemployment insurance. It can be a complicated process, and I wonder if the author had any success there.
#1 should is a part of the basic life skill of understanding the difference between coworkers and friends. I do have friends that started as coworkers, and they did a lot more than help with the mechanics of getting laid off. I do agree that it's not a life skill that is taught very well.
If you want to turn coworkers into lasting friends, you need to be proactive and invite them to do things outside of work.
#3, I'm just not sure I agree with it. Getting interviews is an excellent indicator. At the very least it means that your resume is attractive. I don't think it's very common for companies to waste their own employees' time interviewing people for roles they aren't serious about filling.
My rule of thumb is that if you get beyond the recruiter and talk to the hiring manager, the company is serious and intends to fill the role. Maybe they get around to it or maybe not, we all know how priorities can change.
#5 seems like a waste of time. Either you know someone who is a hiring manager or you know someone who can refer you through a company's referral system. I think those are the only two activities that are productive. I wouldn't want to get any of those requests in my LinkedIn Inbox.
Writing open source software is a waste of time with respect to job hunting unless you are looking to build a portfolio. Your time is better used physically applying for jobs (which takes a legitimately solid amount of time).
#6, totally agree with that. The author absolutely overshared, and should have known better. Corporations want to know that you can keep secrets. Transparency is almost never in the best interest of a company.
As I mentioned above, I'd only agree with #7 if you have runway/a spouse earning income.
I'd almost replace #8 with "enjoy being laid off." Spend some days doing activities meant for joy, especially if you've exhausted your job application pipeline for the moment. I'm almost hoping I get laid off, I love not working, and I loved all the stuff I got to do the last time I was laid off. I played two video games the whole way through and read an entire novel, which are things I rarely get through when I'm employed.
I've had very little luck with third-party recruiters myself, personally. My take is that because the job is theoretically easier to get, there is much more competition, and the recruiters are more ruthless in removing applications that don't meet the exact specifications from their client.
Also it pains me a little for you to say that reading one book is a big sign of having lots of free time. Maybe you're not a huge reader but I hope you normally do stuff you enjoy, reading or not, whether you're employed or not, if you don't mind my saying so.
I'm just not a huge reader. It's far down my usual list of free time activities.
Basically, the fact that I had enough free time to finish a book and do all the things I like to do higher on my list was one of the joys of unemployment.
> You will have to interview for jobs where you will use a language you despise. Maybe even Java. Definitely Javascript.
No.
Or rather, maybe?
I have been fortunate enough that in a couple decades in this industry, including two major downturns, I've never been in a position that I /must/ find a job on a particular timeline to pay the bills. While my life situation helps with this, I do recognize that luck is a major part of it.
As a result, this line in particular fails to resonate with me. If I take a job doing something that makes me miserable, I will be miserable. Maybe I can put up with it for six months, but what's the point? During those six months, between working full time and being miserable, I will not be effective at looking for a long-term role I enjoy. Better to take a personal bridge loan and keep looking for something that works for me.
We're software engineers. If, like me, having someone pay you to build cool shit is about as good as it gets -- hold out for that, don't settle for doing what you "despise" instead.
I started programming c/c++ then perl/python and i hated java initially, but it actually taught me CS. Java has very mature and powerful libraries, e.g. rxjava and guava.
I think you're in a more fortunate position than many.
> Better to take a personal bridge loan
You often won't be able to get a loan without verifiable steady income.
> Maybe I can put up with it for six months, but what's the point?
To bring in income. Pay for living expenses. Pay off debts. Provide for family. Start/increase/replenish savings.
> hold out for that, don't settle for doing what you "despise" instead.
People with families and multiple financial responsibilities beyond their immediate needs often have to do things they "despise", if even/only for a short while.
Your post, while not having anything specifically 'wrong' in it, comes across as a bit privileged. You recognize that luck is a part of it, and you recognize your own life situation helps, but you still tell people to 'hold out' for 'building cool shit'. Not everyone can hold out, for a multitude of reasons.
This is totally fair, and I was trying to acknowledge my understanding of these points. But I do have to take a bit more of an aggressive stance on some of this -- by simple virtue of being software engineers successful enough to be laid off in bulk, rather than dismissed for cause years ago, we are in an elite group. Over the previous years, we've had great opportunities, including the opportunity to save enough money to ride through hard times. The amount one needs to save, and the amount of hard times one can ride through, absolutely varies with life situation; and a black swan event like medical bills can destroy any amount of savings. But I do feel like the vast majority of folks looking to get a second, third, or fourth job as a software engineer (as opposed to that first job) should be able to hold out for something that is at least not "despised." And I do hope that those reading this who are mentally responding "nope, I'd have no options" might consider the value of having those options, and perhaps adjust spending vs savings rates while they have an opportunity to do so.
Agreed, and I may have been a bit too quick in the reply.
I think age and life situation play a much bigger part in this than people recognize, and I'll go out and say "especially younger people". You can pay lip service to it, but if you're in your late 20s or early 30s starting a family, your financial obligations and priorities are vastly different from an empty nester or single person in their 50s.
By almost any measure, a software engineer with 20+ years of experience - especially someone who perhaps didn't have kids - should probably have months of years of savings to tap in to to weather a downturn. But I've also known folks with 10-15 years of increasing experience who still struggled financially, and it was usually a mix of having kids and limited forward planning that kept them in a 'paycheck to paycheck' lifestyle - often, not even a terribly extravagant one.
Most of the bad decisions I've made have come during times when I was in very bad financial situations. The stress contributes to poor decision making, and it was often something I wasn't even aware of in my early days. I just thought that's "how it is". Even getting to the point of having 3-4 months of savings seemed outrageous and out of reach to my younger self.
And yes... the black swan of a medical situation can deplete savings enormously quickly. Even relatively small hiccups we've had over the years have ended up taking thousands out of pocket that were unexpected. Having, say, $30k in savings can help you weather a lot of unforeseen setbacks - car issue, housing issues, moving expenses, etc. A medical condition may drain that 'overnight'. There may be loads of billing delays/etc which may drag it out over months, but the 'debt owed' may be immediate.
My wife got sick and within a few days, we're in ER with double pneumonia and she's struggling to breathe (scary). $4k owed. I blacked out from covid shot - ambulanced to ER. Another $4k owed. Older me can weather those costs now. 25 years ago those sorts of expenses would have been crippling. And these are tiny compared to other things that can happen - my family has generally been quite fortunate with respect to health conditions and medical issues over the years. I know others who are far worse off.
Thanks for taking the time to read this post. I decided to spend Christmas break in CDMX[0] by myself in order to reflect not only on the past year, but just how far I've come since I got laid off. This is the result.
Thanks for making all those hours at the café (instead of at a museum or bar or whatever) worthwhile.
[0] I'll be here for a few more days if you'd like to meet up!
> Only in retrospect did I understand the connotations that post broadcast to potential employers.
So, you wanna share with us what the connotations were? Is it just that the recruiter read "oh, you're failing a lot, you must suck"? Or is there something else more interesting to this?
I'm disappointed that this post is somewhat vague on specifics. But on the one situation that is set up very specifically, we don't get the punchline.
Not OP, but I'll take a guess that it makes the OP look like a troublemaker. Someone who has the nerve/gall/gumption to be so open as to name/shame other companies may not pull any punches when it comes to naming 'company X' in the future after something bad goes down.
Posting "here's a list of companies that haven't got back to me" (which is possibly implicit in an open spreadsheet sort of post) is likely perceived as a troublemaker.
The connotations I had in mind (although I obviously cannot be sure what the recruiter thought):
- what mgkimsal said
- "This employee is applying to really big companies. I'm not sure they know what they are really looking for. This is a mission-driven company, and we want people who want to be here"
- "This person has applied to 30+ places and hasn't landed a job yet? Must not be that great after all"
- "Someone who posts this information publicly has low EQ, I wouldn't want to work with them"
Part of it is, indeed, talking about unspoken rules. But part of it is that the hiring managers and CEOs are humans like everyone else - some may have ego issues, or buy a little too much into their company's branding.
Exactly this. The first rule of fight club is don't talk about fight club.
What surprises me more: Many people don't think interviewing is a game. They think it is straightforward and "rules-based". I guess those same people also believe PR. :)
Well written thoughts! I've definitely shared many of your feelings more times than I would have thought at the start of my long career.
Corporate jobs disappeared due to the financial crisis one time and a hostile takeover another time (both of those I was personally happy about). And a couple startups were acquired sooner than expected. There can be upsides, yes, but it can still leave you with months of trying to figure out what to pursue next, and that can be a weight on your mind even when you're making the most of your time off. When you are committed to a full-time job, something you have to do every day, you may dread going to work sometimes or just wish you could hike up a mountain or something, but it helps frame your day and reduce the number of decisions you have to make, so when you don't have that there can be a significant cognitive load trying to decide how to spend your time in a way that others may not understand. "Oh, that's nice, you're consulting, how flexible, lucky you!"
Early in my career I learned about how to come out of the gate blazing fast since when I graduated from college a couple decades ago half of the tech jobs were gone, and I had to work hard for months after graduation just to find a specific kind of application development work I wanted at the time. I was fortunate to find that but many others were not and had to take whatever came their way. But it wasn't easy, and like you said, I found out early that lots of interviews on your calendar isn't necessarily promising, so over the years I've tried to find alternate routes to work by meeting with people inside the company first to find out what it's really like, and how much they want to fill a specific position, etc.
And more important than all the above, I recommend finding a listening ear to share your journey with, someone who will try to understand where you're at! I have some friends who have had the same job for a couple decades and even though they may not relate well, we can still try to share our different lives with each other and it's more helpful than you might think!
thanks for the post Steven. I especially appreciate Hard Truth #5. Most folks end up not knowing exactly how you may want to be helped and having a clear and specific ask helps a lot.
When I was laid off in 2010, I found another way in which honesty bit me. Or maybe it was a lesson in recognizing the limits of offers of help, because it wasn't my "transparency" which was the problem.
Of course I had my friends looking for opportunities and making referrals. One of them had a kind of clunky opportunity for me as an independent contractor for their company. It was a lengthy process to get it done, in part because they didn't really have their own contractor infrastructure so I organized an LLC, got my proper insurance, etc. Of course, I didn't tell me other friends about this opportunity because it wasn't a done deal yet, and I kind of knew the contracting thing was going to be short-lived anyway. Well, it turned out to fall through completely, which wasn't a huge surprise; but I found out that the hiring manager had told all my other friends to stop looking for jobs for me, because I was coming to work for him! So I was back to square one.
Given that you now know what it will be like if you get laid off again, have you changed anything about how you approach your non-work life? Things like non-work friends you hang out with, non-work activities that you do for fun, Etc. Sort of "if I'm laid off again, then I'll fill my days with interviewing and ..."
Glad you're back up and running and have processed the layoff!
It very much depends on their specialty. Some niche position are available once a year or less, in my country, while regular developers are hired by the thousand every month.
>Do not disclose the current status of your interviewing process
Not sure exactly what this means but it's pretty common for recruiters to check your timeline and try to work around it. For instance, they'll try to expedite you if you already have offers on the table or relax the timeline so it fits with interviews.
I strongly recommend only sharing minimal information about your job search with employers. Don't share when you started looking, because if it's been a while then you'll look bad. Don't share that you think you're far along in the process at some other place, because if that falls through then you'll be embarrassed if it comes up again or it might look like you were lying to put pressure on them.
The fact that an employer could speed things up for you if you have active prospects elsewhere is a little insulting because it's the flip side of saying we know we can put you on the backburner because you're unemployed and struggling.
You can say whether you're actively or passive looking, or if you have a firm offer on the table, or if you're especially interested in employers in some particular area if it makes you look good with this employer. Otherwise don't bring your search up and politely deflect questions if you can.
#1 it's lonely? April 2020, 1 month into the pandemic.
I found the pandemic lonely. I saw less than 1 person a month for the first 14 months of the pandemic. And i find WFH incredibly lonely. I haven't recovered. I'm utterly alone most weeks. I see no one. Even if I go to work, no one is there. I moved cities a year ago and have only 1 friend and 2 acquaintances in the new city. 2 of those 3 are married and I see them maybe once a month, if I'm lucky. The 3rd I haven't seen since August. The pandemic as killed meetup.com. It used to be full of activities. I don't think there is 1/20th of the activities there used to be.
Hey, author here. I get it, trust me. This post meant to encapsulate my feelings during the one year I spent unemployed. During that entire time, I was alone. I had a falling out with my parents. I moved to a foreign country where I knew no one in order to stretch my savings. I totally get it.
If you need to chat with someone, I'm happy to lend an ear. Contact info is in my profile.
> I moved to a foreign country where I knew no one in order to stretch my savings
I have found NomadList (nomadlist.com) and NomadSphere (nomadsphere.io) invaluable for meeting up with people when abroad, although usually people who are there to work remotely.
Loneliness is a killer[0]. And we're doing ourselves no favours with the way increasingly we meet people through apps and not face to face.
I'd be lost without the friends I made in education settings. This might sound silly but any chance you could swap a meetup group with some sort of class? Art, writing especially something that involves discussion?
For what it's worth, I've been working from home for about 8 years now. The only way to make it work for me was deliberate social activities with my neighbors, people from church or local charity orgs (Rotary, etc).
I met them, I got their numbers and I started asking them to lunch at least once a week (sometimes more). That small, very determined activity just leads to more. You have to do it very consistently.
Hosting a poker night is very similar. It will start small and sometimes not happen, but you have to be relentlessly consistent to get it established.
Meetup.com seems to be sort of back where I'm at (Chicago area). Some of the groups are now toast (including the one I used to admin), but several are back to regular events again, and there have been some new groups since.
I've tried to be a little careful still (still haven't gotten Covid as far as I know, I don't know if I'll be asymptomatic or end up in the hospital or something in between), and yet I've gone to several picnics, hikes, board game nights, outdoor hangouts, karaoke, movie nights, trivia, dinners, etc. via Meetup.com this past year.
Also supplemented that with Facebook events and the local forest preserve and local library's posted events.
I still have a core friend group (who I met thanks to Meetup.com many years ago), but several of my other friends have drifted off since the pandemic started (married and started having children), so I started doing meetup more again to compensate.
Another option for meeting people is volunteering.
And almost any sport, appreciate you may not play any, but a group of the same people go to the same thing week in week out. You can even pick something where you can get lessons first then join a club.
Sometimes there are more social sports clubs that aren't really competitive. Here in the UK for example there are social badminton clubs and competitive badminton clubs. You will get a real mix of skill levels at the social clubs, and these might have regular meetups outside of the badminton. The one I'm part of do meals, theatre, outdoor events, etc. together. It depends on the people running it.
Loneliness is bad in itself, but it can get worse if you are:
- Not going outside every day
- Not keeping yourself fit
- Eating junk food
In my region there is a lot of office only/mostly hybrid (3+ days in the office) jobs, probably for the reason that you mention. Of course when I ask why I need to be in the office people tell me about culture and stuff... But the true reason is probably more along the lines: loneliness, small baby crying at home, apartment not appropriate for remote work, annoying roommates/spouse/during divorce.
Maybe changing jobs right now is not the best idea - so I will not suggest it. I will only suggest to get real human contact, as being on-line and talking on forums/social media does not work (at least in my case).
If you have a chance you may try to find some meetup for startup entrepreneurs, even if you are not interested in startups. I find people there to be really hyped and full of positive energy. Usually there is also a motivational speaker there. YMMV but in my city there are some free and open meetings like this.
Isn't this the crux of the issue? If OP was getting real human contact, they wouldn’t feel lonely.
This pandemic has really thrown us for a loop. New habits have been formed that are hard to break.
One of the first times I dipped my toe in the social pool in early 2022 was at a tech meetup. A bunch of us who went got COVID. I recovered but was the sickest I’d been in about 20 years. It doesn’t take much to withdraw more.
My circle of friends shrunk some during the pandemic and after the vaccines came out I put a lot of effort into building it up (larger than before). Some data in case helpful:
Friends made over 1 year, 3 months:
Meetup - 1 friend. Had a poor time-to-friend ratio for what I put in, but that's an n=1 and I mostly frequented just one meetup, although I tried like 3. Negative experience overall (for me, ymmv). Friend is great.
Local discord group around a hobby of interest - 2 friends. Many friendly acquaintances. Had to find the right group as a few I tried didn't feel like as-good fits. Positive experience, the friend making process was enjoyable and the friends are great.
Meeting at an intro class for another hobby (a semi social one - need at least one partner) - 2 friends. We were all new at the intro class and it was hard to find people, so we swapped numbers. Got to know each other through the hobby then became friends. Probably would be difficult to replicate intentionally.
Friends of Friends - 1 large group. 5 that I'd call friends and several more that I'd call group-friends or friendly acquaintances.
Friends of Friends are exponential. There's an excellent time to friend ratio, and the people you meet come pre-vetted. But note that some friends may be hesitant to make inter-friend connections even after they know you well, depending on how closed-off their other groups are. It's, of course, also not generally accessible until you have enough of a circle that like/trust you enough that you're getting invites to their other group things.
100%. My last layoff was in 2011, but at that time they closed the entire office I was in at the time (50 of us laid off). We helped eachother find places to interview and met up once a week to have lunch. I ended up working remotely with 3 of my old co-workers.
> Don’t discount the physical aspect of loneliness either. If you’re like me, work is the primary shaper of your life. Work gives your life rhythm. It is the gravitational center around which the other activities in your life revolve. Then, one day, poof—it’s gone.
Exhibit A of why not to take your day job too seriously. Be professional — but that’s as far as it goes.
> Come up with a more, uh, positive reason for why you’re interviewing instead of disclosing that you were laid off.
There’s nothing wrong with being laid off. I was, last week. Saw it coming from a mile away. Told my new employer about it.
Here’s the secret for getting a job you’re happy with. Try to have competing offers. I would have had to take over a 60% reduction in salary if I hadn’t had one. But I did, and so it was merely a 37% reduction. I’m very happy with it.
This is an area where I have to give tptacek lots of credit. I sort of shuffled from job to job until he posted this nugget of wisdom, and it’s quite true. None of the points in the article applied to me because of a fundamental shift in mindset. It happened around 7 years ago.
I think the loneliness aspect is intertwined with the reason why most people don’t try to go interview while you already have a job. You see your job as something more. It’s not just a job; it gives your life rhythm.
Maybe so. But in my experience, the way to be happy is not to care so darn much about it. Do a good job. But try to get a better one. And when you’re on the market, try to get multiple.
The recent thread about the engineer who got their offer rescinded from two different YC companies is exhibit B. They mentioned that they stopped looking for new jobs after things seemed to be going well during the pre-offer phase. Don’t do this. You should be doing a breadth-first search of all possible opportunities: talk to as many people as possible, and spend your time weighted by expected outcome.
> Exhibit A of why not to take your day job too seriously. Be professional — but that’s as far as it goes.
People spend 8 hours + lunch and commuting every weekday on their job. It's almost 50% of the time you spend conscious during a week. Most people want more out of that than just a chore that needs to be done.
Embrace distributed WFH and you can spend 4 hours in the morning, have a nice picnic, play some basketball, have a couple beers, then retire to your room to do another 4hrs. Or just fuck off some days and counterbalance it by doing hyper focused 12hrs days some other time.
Also: unless you're genuinely curing cancer or flying food to starving African villages or something, 95% of software companies are pretty damn useless and any impact a SWE imagines is basically just a mental fantasy that helps one keep working. No one is genuinely happier because another API is created or some rich person has a better way of managing which products he's selling to other rich people. It's all basically useless and just a way to make money.
That wasn’t an option until a few years ago, and it being an option coincided with the crescendo of a 14 year bull market. Having a few beers before your afternoon shift isn’t likely to viable for long.
Harsh words, but likely unfounded. You don't know their reason for being laid off, it could be that their company didn't product a profit (since in a bull run they don't need to), it could be that a competitor caught up to them, it could be that their division was no longer needed, and so on. Poor performance attributable to WFH necessarily is not very high on the list of why people are laid off, generally speaking.
Heh TBH in most cases I doubt an individual has much if any control over a) if there are layoffs, and b) if they are part of one. I've had the "privilege" of seeing the internals of a few large layoffs, and being caught in one, and from my experience they are usually tied to business decisions outside of the control of your average IC (currently interests rates are putting a major pinch on companies that hold a lot of debt for example) and performance is rarely an actual factor in who goes. In most the large layoffs I've seen the list of who is going is handed down from C or VP level execs with none of management below having any say (which explains why so many take out key resources). Only in one case have I actually seen managers select who to keep.
The whole "layoffs happen because employees are lazy, and affect lazy employees" is a nice narrative of your a business owner to keep the rank and file "motivated", but it's rarely an accurate portrayal of the situation.
Haven't missed a deadline in more than a year, which is more than I can say for most of my coworkers. It turns out that work with a fresh morning brain for 4 hours, a long break, and then later on more work with a refreshed brain is much more efficient than sitting for 8 hrs in an office for no reason.
If I choose to refresh myself via mid-day beer, so what? The code doesn't care how long I sit inside an office. It cares how well my brain works.
(..yes, too much beer and it won't work anymore. Everything in moderation.)
Counter opinion: You're going to be one of many applicant because everyone else is embracing WFH trend too, so you are competing with everyone, especially with some much experience to show, or a portfolio of trending technologies.
It might be that a dev that has a money cushion and is willing and able to relocate can compete on a level others can't because competition would only be localized.
OP was unemployed a year. Time adds up, that's a lot of money.
> OP was unemployed a year. Time adds up, that's a lot of money.
Luckily my government gives me a full year of unemployment benefits at 2/3rds of my salary besides my savings. Obviously, I don't wish to test my luck regardless, but not everywhere is as cutthroat as the US.
More accurately: your government takes your money and then, maybe, gives it back to you in the form of unemployment benefits and the like, minus significant processing fees.
The alternative is to use the money the government doesn't take and save it for your future "unemployment benefit".
The government would give me more than I would be able to save myself in a year. Over multiple years, I would be able to save more efficiently than the government, true. That's assuming everything goes perfectly however, so I view it as a form of insurance: I make less in order to have less anxiety that I will not be able to provide for myself and my dependents if the overlords decide I am no longer worthy of my job. It's a tradeoff, but one that I will gladly make. As a social good, that money also goes into helping those that were not as lucky as me to be able to make good easy money. And perhaps one day I might be like them too, who knows?
I think the OP is saying that there’s no expectation that the company provide more than what they seek from you. Keeping it professional allows you to compartmentalize the fact that you are there because you add value and nothing more. You can form friendships. You can form guilds/clans/clubs/practices within. You can provide culture and mentorship beyond the duty of the role. At the end of the day though, it’s not a day care and you are there to provide value to the business objectives. My professional colleagues I deeply respect. My friends are sometimes idiots. That’s how I see it.
I think there's a benefit for some people in letting go a bit. Even if you love your job, you need to understand that the system we work in is purpose-built to exploit workers. It's great to be focused on your work when you're working, but once you're done for the day you should unplug as much as you can. Taking PTO? Don't check slack or emails.
I love what I do, but I've found that even still if I let that fact convince me to work more than what is required of me I will eventually feel burnt out and eventually depressed. Maybe this isn't the case for everyone, but it's life outside of work that brings true meaning and purpose to my life. Time with friends and loved ones, going outside into nature and having new experiences, these are all things that make me actually happy. Loving my work just means I'm not sad when I'm at work.
Being spoiled for choice with offers is great if you can manage it, but not very useful if you're OP who couldn't find something for a year.
Also, having a job gives you a basic social identity to use to interact with people, and positive cash flow lets you be expansive and outgoing. It's very easy to take this for granted, or assume focusing on work is ultra-materialist, if you don't have a lot of experience going without. I agree that it's healthy to not worry so much about the day-to-day minutiae of a specific job, but this is a lot different from the inevitable decline that comes with not having any job at all.
Just because this is a norm doesn't make it healthy. When your identity is rooted in something that can easily go away, it makes for a weak foundation. Lot of examples of jobs that are relatively short-lived (athletes, military, etc.) can show how difficult transitioning is when your identity is tied to your job.
We need to distinguish between being at some particular job and being in a profession or similarly in any job at all.
I think it's unhealthy to have your identity tied to your specific employer, job title and tasks that you do for them. You as a person should not be defined by the tickets in your current sprint.
However not having a profession or any job is much different and worse. Unless you're older and retired, or independently wealthy, then it means you're going to cut back on everything. You won't socialize with other people society deems successful, you won't date, you won't grow a family, you won't travel or do anything other than continue to exist. All parts of your situation will shrink and decline. You are running out the clock toward total destitution.
I'm making this point because it's easy for people who are having a successful career to say, oh, of course I'm not my job, while missing entirely that they see themselves as a person who has a good job and will likely get another good job if their current job ends. They don't mean that they see themselves equally as a software developer or a dishwasher or on the street and it's all the same to them, so sharing the perspective that you are not your job in a discussion about extended unemployment is maybe not very appropriate.
Whether this latter reality is healthy or not, I don't know, but people have identified themselves as successful based on their trade or other social categorization for thousands of years, so at least we can say it's not new.
Part of the distinction I was trying to make is that it's dangerous to have one's identity tied primarily to any singular thing. In western culture, it just seems like a job/profession is the easiest identifier.
Will Storr writes about this much better than I can explain it here. But his point is essentially that the healthiest approach is to have your identity tied to many disparate parts of your life so that if one falters, the way you view your status doesn't hinge on that one failure. Just like you stated that "people identified themselves as successful", is a measure of status. If your esteem/status is based on that one domain, you're putting yourself at greater risk. It doesn't matter if a buggy-whip maker was the best tradesman around, he's status is still at risk when cars become popular.
The other part is that I believe research shows it's typically unhealthy to have one's social circle centered around work because those aren't very tight bonds. Again, it's a point to spread your social circle across shared interests and values rather than a job.
What I'm really talking about when I'm talking about the threat of extended unemployment is the threat of losing socioeconomic class. So much depends on class: where you live, what you eat, where you worship if anywhere, where your kids go to school, who your friends are. Almost everything. It's very difficult to diversify your social and professional network outside of your class.
In most cases switching from one tech job to another will keep you in the same middle-to-upper-middle class even if you have to take a relatively large pay cut. You can even lose your job without something else lined up and it's not a big problem as long as you're confident you'll find something similar soon.
All of that is at risk with extended unemployment or being forced to indefinitely work for lower pay in a different field. Consider all the life changes someone might have to make if they have to change from being a software developer making $150k to being a rideshare driver making $40k, after six months, a year, or five years. I don't know about buggy-whip makers but probably they'd be okay with losing their jobs if they were guaranteed equal work in the new car factories. What they really dreaded was having to work for less pay in the new factories, or becoming day laborers or similar. This is what motivated the original Luddites.
I don't think we disagree on much here. When you say "socioeconomic class", that is largely valuable because of the status it confers. When your status changes to a lower rung, it hurts. Will Storr is saying having your entire status/esteem wrapped in a single measure like socioeconomic class is unhealthy. It is much healthier to have your status spread across multiple domains so that if you lose your position in socioeconomic class, your entire identity isn't shaken.
We probably do disagree on the buggy-whip/factory point. Being a craftsman carries more status than being a cog in a factory. The reason why Henry Ford made $5/day a thing was workers were leaving in droves because the work was miserable and monotonous. High pay compensated for miserable work and lower status. I've known people who go from being "somebody" in a particular field (like the military) to being a "nobody" in a different field (like a factory). Even though they got paid better in the latter, they yearned for the former because of the lost status.
What your replies seem to confirm is how much we as a society base our identities on work, sometimes to the exclusion of so much else.
I'm referring to class as a person's conception of themselves, and others' conception of them, as someone who can live the life they're living and can expect to continue living that life. Losing this doesn't just mean the loss of some sort of social authority, of having an impressive job title at parties, but also and more importantly it can mean almost everything in that person's life changing for the worse, indefinitely: worse neighborhood, worse housing, worse medical care, worse food, worse schools and college funds, worse retirement, worse jobs, worse hobbies, worse transportation, worse life expectancy. That would devastate anyone, and it's not so much about how a person self-identifies but about how much they can afford.
By that same measure, anyone who lives in a lower socio-economic class would have a lower sense of well-being. This is true for people with extrinsic work orientation, but not to those with intrinsic orientation. Again, a lot of it comes down to one's relationship with work.
People who are forced to receive worse medical care, for example because they can't afford necessary medicine anymore, are tangibly worse off than they were before. It's not a sign of an unhealthy relationship with work if someone is upset at not being able to buy medicine. Framing it that way is unhelpful.
Also, if you can't find a job in a year then maybe you need to lower your standards somewhere. Even as a self-taught, very junior (at the time) engineer it only took me 4 months to receive (competitive) competing offers.
By that argument he could have taken a job at McDonald's flipping burgers and would be better off than 'zero'.
He did take a pay cut. 37% can be felt by anyone earning an income. It's often the decider if you have money left over after living expenses or not.
Let's say you earn 200K. 100k goes away for taxes et al (I am simplifying here), leaving you 100K for expenses. If your living expenses are 60K for rent, food, transportation, fun, family, you can save 40K a year for retirement.
Let's say you earn 37% less. That's 126K. 60k goes away for taxes et al (I am simplifying here), leaving you 66K for expenses. If your living expenses are 60K for rent, food, transportation, fun, family, you can save 6K a year for retirement.
Your savings just dropped by 85%, putting your retirement in danger.
Not saying OP shouldn't have accepted the offer. But let's not pretend this wasn't a significant pay cut.
It was $400k to $250k. Significant, but given the recession, it’s a nice position to be in.
There’s a fella on TikTok named Frank Niu. He made $500k at Netflix, and his job was basically to run around fixing things when they broke. It was a nice reminder that the good times can be very good, and the bad times are worth scaling back one’s expectations appropriately. I doubt he’d still be in the $500k bracket if he were still working, but you never know.
Also, don’t scale your living expenses! It’s tempting, but my current employer almost didn’t make me an offer because they assumed I was living at a $400k lifestyle. In reality we were just paying off our house and driving the same old car.
I'm not the person you're asking, but the answer seems to be quite obvious (unless you think they're lying about being happy about the situation)— they were making more money than they need by at least 37%.
The last 5-10 years have seen crazy money. I think most of us will see pay cuts sooner or later. Definitely when you get in your 40s+ you're likely to get a pay cut for each new job, unless you're management or architect or similar.
> Exhibit A of why not to take your day job too seriously.
This can be more difficult when you have been part of transforming a company for 20 years instead of job-hopping every few years. When you have advocated for changes and they have been implemented, there are parts of "you" in the company.
Also the CV looks very empty in this case, even when having implemented many interesting things.
> Exhibit A of why not to take your day job too seriously. Be professional — but that’s as far as it goes.
+1 on this. His #1 is exactly why you should not let work, and especially work social events, become the "primary shaper of your life" - they can and will get rid of you anytime they think it might be convenient for them. It may not have anything to do with your skills or productivity, it may be just what someone high above you felt like doing for reasons that have nothing to do with you.
> Exhibit A of why not to take your day job too seriously. Be professional — but that’s as far as it goes.
I think that’s the wrong message to take away from this. The author’s problems wouldn’t have been solved by remaining more distant from his job and coworkers - he’d just be lonely all of the time!
The real answer is that you need to cultivate relationships and a life outside of work, too. By all means, become friendly with and get to know your coworkers, but don’t let work be your only source of relationships.
Getting laid off absolutely sucks and it could potentially happen to anyone, thus it's important everyone has some sort of nest egg.
And please... network, network, network! I know not everyone has this opportunity, but if you leave a good lasting impression and make friends with strong coworkers, over time they will get promoted to higher and higher positions making it incredibly easier to find a job when needed.
>You’re going to have to grind Leetcode. Yes, even the dynamic programming problems.
Why there isn't this much problem with having to learn yet another JS framework,
get familiarity with database of the month, learn some tool like docker/k8s/ansible/vagrant/blabla or yet another proprietary toolchain like AWS/Azure/GCP
but foundational cs/programming knowledge is top hated thing, that people even call it "discriminatory for people with families" or something like that
Because companies tend to let you learn those on the job. Nobody complains if I don't quite know Flask in interviews if I know Django. Certainly nobody cares if you know the details inside out or want to refer to docs.
Algos is a skill you do not use on the job and companies are extremely picky about you getting the correct answer.
You're assuming that that awareness of how to solve a problem and immediate hands-on-keyboard test for materially different success rates while actually employed. My experience is that by the time you've gotten the job, most of the crammed-in Leetcode specifics have leaked back out and you're in the same place as somebody who knows the thing from school or from using it in prior projects, but didn't have it in their fingertips during the interview--you're looking it up again, because you know what you need but don't have the details top-of-mind.
The insistence on being able to spew out code-first answers to contrived problems during an interview situation is silly gatekeeping, but it makes the people who pass feel good, and that's why it persists.
For 99% of the roles out there, needing to drop into algorithms all the time is an anti pattern that demonstrates lack of knowledge of your tech stack. I’ve had to clean up a lot of code written by people who wanted to show off their algo knowledge to solve a problem that should have been addressed with a few lines of SQL.
Because after a successful, productive, 5-10 years at a company you tend to forget the algorithms you don't use. I can remember enough about the knapsack problem to talk intelligently about it. I can't remember how to do the dynamic programming. In 90% of cases given infinite time I can eventually arrive at the solution to most med-hard questions. However, you don't have infinite time. I find problems like optimizing how much water goes into buckets to the point I can solve it in 4 minutes with variations so far below me it doesn't even register on my radar. For the record, I have over a decade in this industry. Having to do these problems makes me feel like that hard earned decade may as well had not happened.
For those of us with lives, hobbies, etc grinding leetcode is exhausting. Moreover, you can't just grind it. You have to grind it to the point you literally can brain dump answers in an interview.
Interviewers rarely care about your accomplishments. No one cares you did staff eng. at XYZ, managed engineers, have familiarity with all sorts of frameworks, etc. This is the only industry where every time you look for a job you're treated like don't have a resume. I think many (if not most) people are insulted by this because the people in charge are belittling them. I would bet even Knuth would struggle to tackle a modern programming interview. That's a problem.
In my experience you're overstating the need to be able to instantly brain dump complex algorithms, except maybe at the FAANG level where I have no experience. It's far more important to be comfortable solving any simple coding challenge on demand in front of people in a high-stakes situation like an interview.
My feeling is that the fundamentals are difficult in their own way: requiring math, logic, creativity, seemingly arbitrary constraints. Learning the flavor of the month on stack X is often just learning their jargon, keywords, and matching common patterns one probably already knows.
All that said, sentiment against stack churn is significant and a common theme here on HN.
> Come up with a more, uh, positive reason for why you’re interviewing instead of disclosing that you were laid off.
I don’t understand this assertion, unless “laid off” now means “fired with cause”. People are laid off all the time, for no reason other than the company wants to reduce their labor costs.
Perhaps the author is assuming that the company is also making a judgement about their skills, e.g. that they’re somehow not up to some arbitrary standard? (I think that it is very easy to make this assumption, especially when laid off the first time.)
Anyway, there should be no need to give a potential employer a reason about why you were let go other than the position was eliminated.
yes and no - unless companies laid off everybody, or an entire division/location for example, they already made some sort of decision on who would stay and who would go - if you find yourself in the 'let go' category, than someone likely made a judgement about you already and found you less desirable than the 'keep' category - thats just the unfortunate reality.
"Laid off" should be one of the safest reasons to give for leaving an employer, right up there with giving birth to a child or taking care of a sick loved one. Layoffs from big companies are in the news now and there's rumors about how employees were chosen, but by and large saying you were laid off from some random company shouldn't mean anything other than that employer restructured and you had bad luck. Certainly you as a job applicant are under no obligation to speculate during an interview about why you specifically were let go.
Of course someone made a judgement, you just don't know what criteria they used, so it could be anything from "didn't like his face" all the way to "had the highest salary".
Furthermore, how does it help in any way to assume that the reason for the layoff was because of a personal shortcoming? And why should we assume in advance and without evidence that a potential employer won't consider us because of this?
IME it's arbitrary criteria - either last hired, first fired, or most expensive people, or older people (illegal, but they use other proxies for age to hide it), or most of a division because they're pivoting/no profitable, or you don't want to work 100 hour weeks sitting on the floor near your new CEOs office, or...
Getting laid off from some places is a badge of honor, IMO.
I think the author has come away with the wrong lesson here.
Many engineers, particularly those that don't pay too much heed to social mores, think they have some God-given right to share details of all their private interactions publicly. Every tech test they do is pushed to GitHub with an accompanying blog post. Every interview has a transcript (somewhat one-sided) published and shared to Twitter. This is typical oafish behaviour displayed by mamy engineers and frankly, it annoys people. It's often considered a red flag when hiring. Understanding when to be discreet is an important skill for any employee.
Lying about why you're looking for work is a bad idea. That small lie will escalate, you'll have to start stringing together more lies, and when you get found out it won't reflect well.
This has nothing to do with radical honesty. I'm not suggesting you air all your dirty laundry during an interview. But don't lie. And don't publish all private interactions because you're a fan of free software. It's not the same thing.
If a company asks you about stuff that isn't any of their business you have my permission (not that you need it) to lie your ass off if you think it will help you. The power asymmetry is such that unless the counterparty is extremely careful about abusing that power that you will end up being cornered and taken advantage of. If you present yourself as more desirable than you are based on your current situation and it lands you a job at a higher salary than you otherwise would have: more power to you. But don't overdo it and realize that there is some risk involved.
I think it's healthier to instead develop the social skills and confidence needed to answer any questions confidently while enforcing boundaries about what you will and won't answer. Outright lying can come from a place of weakness and fear which isn't good to encourage.
Let me give you an example: you're gay and your employer has a thing about gay people. They will not ask you outright 'are you gay?' because that, while legal might result in an anti discrimination suit upon rejection of the candidate which they could very well lose.
Lots of other situations and questions like that which are strictly speaking none of the employer's business. When given the option between telling the truth, evading the question, enforcing your boundaries or lying the only one that might result in you getting the job (assuming you need a job and wouldn't mind working for a bigot because a paycheck is better than no paycheck) I'd be fine with you lying. That is still problematic, but you don't have any moral responsibility towards your employer if they transgress themselves.
The same goes for questions about unionizing, wanting children, having chronic diseases and so on.
You’ve drastically shifted the goal posts from the topic of “are you looking at other companies?” to discrimination. It’s hard to have any meaningful insight with those in the same bucket.
The former is completely standard procedural (do we need to accelerate the process to compete) and competitive (who are we up against).
Maybe you picked being gay as a hypothetical out of a hat but it's a terrible example. Unless we're talking about extremely repressive societies where there are literally no professional options available for LGBT people, almost no LGBT person would recommend going back into the closet to find work with a bigoted employer. LGBT people regularly run away from home as teenagers and become homeless to avoid bigotry, that's how serious it can be for LGBT people to live authentically. A key part of the emotional growth involved, what a lot of it goes back to is, as I said, having confidence in yourself and being willing to enforce boundaries.
Leaving aside this particularly bad hypothetical, lying about yourself to get a job probably won't set you up for long-term success. What's the end game of claiming you don't want kids when you really do, after you get the job and then become pregnant? Now you need the job even more and your employer both resents you being pregnant and for having lied to them.
If you're really saying it's okay to lie to employers if you're truly desperate, then sure, why not. If you're actually starving then a lot of things become options, but this isn't really good long-term career advice.
A ruling by a court isn't the same thing as federal law.
There is no federal law establishing my rights, so if a company tries to ask about my personal life (wife, kids, etc.) I politely decline to answer, or I answer vague enough that doesn't give them any useful information.
How often does that happen though? I'm straight and I don't recall ever being asked about my family or love life in a job interview. Not that I'd keep it secret if asked, but why the hell would they be asking?
Yeah I'm also curious. When I was at Google there were a list of things you were never supposed to ask a candidate because that's Super Illegal(TM) and could expose the company to lawsuits. That included sexual orientation and marriage status. That was more than ten years ago, I'd expect most IT companies would do the same by now, at least in the US.
There are ways to ask those without being illegal and these are employed quite frequently. Essentially any kind of probing into someone's private life should be off-limits.
> There are ways to ask those without being illegal
Strictly speaking, its not illegal to ask the question. However, because it is illegal to base hiring decisions on it, asking the question is legally dangerous in two ways:
(1) Asking the question in an employment interview is evidence which can tend to support that you intended to use it in a hiring decision, and
(2) The interviewee answering the question is evidence that you had the information, and thus the opportunity to use it in a hiring decision.
As a result, the usual legal advice is to strictly avoid asking the question: you can’t legally use the response, and by asking it you make yourself unnecessarily vulnerable. The idea that it is illegal to ask the question is probably a consequence of this.
I've never been asked this sort of question at a large company. Mostly "startups" (scare quotes because they're not Silicon Valley startups; think Orlando or Chicago instead).
They also tend to ask a lot about things that might sound innocuous, like hobbies.
If I was being stupidly honest, I could talk about my involvement in the furry community. Most furries (~80%) are LGBTQ (versus ~3% to 5% of the base population).
Instead, I make vague allusions to being a gamer. (I play video games less than anyone I know, but it's not zero, so that's still technically true.)
The annoying part is that you are essentially cornered, being either LGBTQ and/or furry is a large part of your identity and it is hard to have to divorce yourself from that for the purpose of getting hired. Companies really need to get over this desire to know more about the private lives of their employees during the run-up to being hired than they are willing to disclose about their own affairs (such as: financial health of the company, maturity of leadership, attitude to quality of life issues, health care and so on).
That's exactly the sort of exchange that I had in mind. Likewise for work at a previous company, your current salary, whether or not you plan to have kids and so on. Depending on where you live some of those may be illegal but still, you need that job...
> A ruling by a court isn’t the same thing as federal law.
A ruling by the Supreme Court applying a federal statute is binding federal law nationally, it can be overturned either by the Supreme Court itself, or by changing the law that the Court applied, but that’s actually stronger than federal statute law that superficially seems to more directly protect a right but which does not have such a confirming opinion.
Even when applying to companies that are LGBTQ friendly? I sometimes self identify on applications if the company has a good reputation with that kind of thing because I’d expect It would give me some diversity points. But maybe that’s not the best idea.
> Even when applying to companies that are LGBTQ friendly? I sometimes self identify on applications if the company has a good reputation with that kind of thing because I’d expect It would give me some diversity points. But maybe that’s not the best idea.
Pretending to be LBGTQ friendly is a good PR while changing actual company culture is hard, expensive and takes time. So don't get fooled by PR stunts and changed policies because they will always be eaten by real company culture.
Gosh, no - strongly recommending not doing this. (The lying part)
Lying is one of the worst things you can do, it usually speaks to an issue with integrity, a concern that comes before almost all of them even intelligence, education, aptitude, skills.
Learn the skill of polite deferral, of saying things without saying them, diverting or embellishing a bit - and then only if it's an issue not relevant to the job.
If someone in an interview asks you your 'political orientation' (which obviously they shouldn't do and it would raise a big red flag anyhow - but just as an example) you do not have to be candid, but don't lie. You can say "I have a variety of opinions, I try to keep an open mind" - so long as you are comfortable with it and it's true. You have not lied, but not fully answered the question because it's none of their business.
I also think the OP here has misinterpreted 'transparency and candor'.
Engineers who 'over share' are a bit annoying but then again, you don't have to read their posts - but this is not the issue.
The 'issue' here is the absolutely truthful information that is 'just too much' for an interview setting.
Everyone needs to be honest and candid but not transparent like you're talking to the IRS or your accountant.
Suppose they ask you why you might want to work at the company, and you don't really feel hugely inspired, well, instead of saying literally that, you can find at least something interesting about the situation and allude to it. There's something interesting about every situation. And of course, if it's truly a bad situation just say that politely and assume you won't be working there.
It's ok to ask 'Elephant in the Room' questions especially if they are asked politely, if they can't handle that you don't want to work there.
It's ok to be turned away for something arbitrary or mundane (or any other reason) there will be other opportunities.
Getting turned down can make you very cynical and brings out our worst, even conspiratorial tendencies so try to stay grounded and keep your head on straight, don't be sucked into the vortex of weirdness and 'ultra competitive civility' of getting job shenanigans, it's not real, it's a big of a game, recognise it a such.
Kind of like telling people to 'don't be nervous' on a date, what I'm about to write is super glib but I think it's true: stay true to your basic values and identity and I think it will be easier to be more relaxed and authentic in interviews. The 'game' will pull you towards negative behaviours I have found it's a lot easier not to do them if you literally just decide that you are not going to do so for reasons of morality or values or whatever.
> And of course, if it's truly a bad situation just say that politely and assume you won't be working there
Or "this situation sucks, that's why I'm excited. I want to lead the charge out of the darkness and into the light" or some such self-aggrandizing metaphor. Assuming, of course, you are willing to take a job whose primary function is fixing a broken team.
Companies lie to their prospective employees all the time. About how much runway they have, about the work that you'll be doing, about what it is like to work there.
I wish companies lying to users (in terms of service), shareholders, public announcements, employee announcements were all illegal and criminally prosecuted.
You are generalizing a lot. I outlined a very specific situation: A company inquires into aspects of your life that are none of their business.
In that particular situation as far as I'm concerned - and not as far as you are concerned - you are free to lie. Because the alternative is going to end with you not getting the job, no matter how qualified you are.
Lying about being arrested is a quick way to get fired when the background check comes through. Your antisocial suggestion has now escalated from something you could have preemptively explained into termination of employment. Nicely done.
Of course there is a point in asking, to find out. The background check is verification.
Did you know that employers frequently ask for your employment history in the form of a resume, but then they’ll contact one or two recent employers to confirm you were employed?
Trust, but verify. It’s a leaky but effective check against con artists.
Mmm objectively (black and white) lying is a stupid but man taking a moral high ground is even stupider. If you're caught into a position where you either need to lie or divert it's likely a bad situation. The right people, the right job, the right opportunities won't put you in a situation where your boundaries will be tested or you need to lie.
It shows to me that some people have never been in the situation where they really needed to eat and/or feed their families. The moral high ground is a fantastic place to be but the wrong hill to die on when it comes to employers prying into your private affairs as a means of possibly discriminating against you.
Lying is always risky, though. If the truth comes to light, you are screwed. Even if it doesn't, you have to remember and internalize your lie, and make sure anything you say in the future is consistent with it. That requires extra work and can be stressful. (And if you mess it up: again, you are screwed.)
I don't buy the "you don't want to work for a company that would ask you XYZ anyway" line. Sure, in some cases that may be true, but sometimes someone (that is, a random person on the interview loop, not a "professional interviewer" like a recruiter) will ask or say something they shouldn't, and that doesn't need to reflect poorly on the company (or even on the person; who hasn't said something dumb on occasion?).
If you think a question is inappropriate, politely decline to answer, using whatever verbal finesse you have available to yourself. It takes practice and confidence to do so, but it's the right thing to do.
The right answer to those questions is: Sorry but that’s quite a direct question, why do you ask? (And how is it relevant to this interview?)
Those are bad questions to ask as an employer, and you should probably move on to the next opportunity anyways. Still, faking to have children when you don’t, or the other way around, is worse.
We've heard "transparency" so much lately that it now gets confused with honesty.
They're not the same.
If a company asks where else you are interviewing an honest but not transparent answer would be something like "I'm exploring other opportunities at various places but don't feel comfortable providing more details." If you were to ask a company who else they are interviewing for the same role, you would expect the same answer. It would probably cause alarm if they actually told you the names of other people they were interviewing!
during one of the first interviews I ever had, the interviewer took me to a private room where I could do the coding part on my own
on the desk was the laptop they wanted me to use, some pens and paper, and a stack of resumes from other people
the interviewer made no mention of the stack as they were leaving or when they came back, and when I asked about it at the end of the interview, they chuckled and changed the subject... to this day I'm wondering if it was some test to see if I threw the other resumes out (didn't get an offer btw)
Pretty sure the test here is to see what you do when you discover them. I'd give them more benefit of doubt and guess that they wanted you to report it immediately, and letting any mention of it wait until the end of the interview was the wrong answer. If you're the sort of person that believes in these sort of tricks (I don't), you'd probably jump to the conclusion that the person ignoring the pile of resumes was okay watching the place burn down around him as long as it wasn't his job to fix it. That's a huge leap of logic to make, except in the whacky world of job interview shenanigans, where it's basically par for the course.
> If you're the sort of person that believes in these sort of tricks (I don't), you'd probably jump to the conclusion that the person ignoring the pile of resumes was okay watching the place burn down around him as long as it wasn't his job to fix it.
Alternative theory: since the information on a resume is not exactly sensitive (it's not the same thing as a job application), then someone who doesn't take the opportunity to study them is labeled as incurious
I was shocked by that too. Maintaining such a sheet is a good idea, but never _ever_ share it. It's bad operational security. It's also revealing more about you (what other companies think of you) than it is about the companies in question.
Also in making it public—even with operational security flags aside—if I’m seeing that a candidate has been through 30 interviews (arbitrary number), at a certain point it’s a flag for me about why they haven’t reached an accepted offer by that point, regardless if they’re a strong candidate.
Would you approach dating the same way? “By the way, here’s all of the dates I’ve been on in the past year and I’m currently still single”—maybe there’s a perfectly valid reason for it, but it’s still going to be off-putting to someone who you’re trying to make a good first impression on. It’s got a non-zero chance to put them in a suspicious place instead of an inquisitive or curious one, which, if you’re still looking for dates (or work), probably isn’t what you want.
Edit: I think it's the difference between "honesty" and "oversharing". It's being honest to say "I've interviewed with multiple companies and we haven't been able to come to a mutually beneficial agreement." It's oversharing to give a pile of details about each of those interviews.
I don't know about that. Something that makes me sick to my stomach is the current only accepted behaviour to react to being laid off by being grateful to such a wonderful company to have given me opportunity to learn and blah, blah, blah. There is so much dishonesty and fake gratefulness around that anything departing from that, including just sharing that you interviewed a lot and only found dead ends, is a black flag.
I get that this is marketing, and that's the game in an employer market. But sh*t, no-one is calling out the fact that maybe the responsibility is not only on the incoming recession, but also how dumb a large portion of the industry has been in trying to ignore as best as possible a freaking war, a pandemic, and flying oil prices, and carried on over-hiring at high wages. I'm grateful mine didn't go in that game and froze hiring very early on.
Maybe it's an emphasis, the way I read it is that you should keep your unpalatable opinions to yourself, because being critical of the system is cause to be rejected by it.
> stomach is the current only accepted behaviour to react to being laid off by being grateful to such a wonderful company to have given me opportunity to learn and blah, blah, blah.
No. You have missed the point.
Nobody wants you to e grateful when you're not. But you do not have to say what you think just because you think it
Just got back into the job market, and every potential employer has expressed gratitude for my level of honesty and transparency.
I'm "weaker" at negotiations since I've laid out my cards on the table upfront. The other side of the coin is companies are less likely to waste my time unnecessarily, or play hardball too much when you appear to roll over so easily.
My take on Hard Truth 6 is to be careful and strategic with your honesty. It may not always be interpreted the way you intended, so be honest but be wise about what you're disclosing.
Honesty really has no place in corporate interactions. The author is way too old to be learning this lesson. The reason you are applying is that you "are passionate about X because of Y" even if you don't give a flying crap about what the org does.
Good thoughts, but (not as a criticism of the author), some of the pain points are at least partially self-inflicted:
To minimize post-layoff loneliness (and not only for that!) make sure you have a life outside of work: the people you like to spend some time with and things you like to do. To minimize money-driven stress of the layoff, build up a cash cushion that can last at least 6 months; with unemployment, vacation time and any severance it can probably be stretched for a year.
And #7, "think whether you want to work for that company after getting an offer" seems off the mark. Sure, reject an offer that is not the best and stretch time on a safety offer until you get a better one. But do not go through the motions of getting an offer with a company you have no interest to work for. If you do not want to work for a company at all, do not apply there. My 2c.
There’s some truth to what you’re saying, but it can be taken too far.
If you have the posture of “I’ll take anything I can get” I think that actually puts you at a disadvantage in an interviewing situation.
In my experience employers can tell who is actually trying to evaluate fit themselves, and who is just saying what they think needs to be said.
I find it’s easier for both parties to make an offer, if they know the counterparty has done their due diligence.
For me when accepting an offer I’m also doing the same, evaluating whether I think the company has actually vetted me properly and has reason to think I will be a good fit.
There is so much mystery in the hiring process, I really need the other party to be doing their half of the work. And that means saying no to opportunities that don’t feel right.
That doesn’t mean I walk away from anything that’s not perfect. It just means I am looking out for reasons to say no, in addition to the reasons to say yes. I think interviewers pick up on that and it helps me get offers.
The problem with going through to the offer stage with companies you do not want to work for is that this is likelier to limit your options rather than increase them.
This is not a very strong prior, but re-applying after rejecting an offer can indicate that you are using the company as a fallback and may bolt as soon as you get a chance.
Being unemployed, I can't support this. Keeping an offer on hold blocks the company from making the offer to someone else who actively needs it. Maybe you meant something else, like a handshake agreement with a manager friend who works there that they'll try to make room for you if you ever want to join.
I disagree with some of this greatly. Some of it is 100% spot on.
1. Getting laid of is usually pretty liberating. Everyone knows the company isn't generally doing well, the air is hot with friction, and you probably know you're working yourself into a corner. Getting laid off has happened to me two and a half times now. The first time was in the 2007 crash, and the company was hemorrhaging money and everyone knew it but didn't want to admit it. The second time I happened to quit the same week the CEO was planning layoffs. He teared up thanking me for saving him from having to fire anyone. The third time was one of the worst work experiences I have ever been in, but I didn't realize it until it was over. I called my wife and was excited, not downtrodden. Every day for the next two weeks was full of lunches and drinks and I had to insist on being allowed to pay every time.
2. This is just good advice. The only things you should spend money on when interviewing are dry cleaning and resume paper. I think my longest stretch was about 9 months, and my wife was forced to go back to work during that time despite just having a baby.
3. Yes and no. Some people don't interview well. Based on the author's other writing, he seems like the kind of person who might not interview well. In my career I think I have a close to 30% offer rate on interviews (but I'm very picky about applying for jobs). Yours may be higher, or much lower.
4. This is just always good advice. Set a bar for yourself, be willing to negotiate, and realize that work environment is about 500x as important as what technology you are using. I once got a job at a perl (yay!) shop where I worked for literally 1 day because the environment was so toxic.
5. Most offers for help come from people who don't know how to help. The author's approach here of direct asks is fantastic. Most will flake on you, but those that follow through are true friends.
6. Yeah this was a bad move. Don't talk about your exes on a first date, and definitely don't bring up the ones that swiped whichever direction the bad one is before your first date.
7. If the economy keeps going the way it is headed, ditch this advice in its entirety. Take that job, grasp it tightly to your breast, and don't let go no matter what happens. The job market in a down economy could be romantically described as falling somewhere between a chop shop and a meat market, and the hiring incentives for managers can be pretty twisted.
8. This has taught me to have a healthy relationship with my career. That post-layoff feeling should be bottled and sold next to the stickers that neophyte programmers put on their macbooks. There's nothing more seductive than confidence, and the clarity that a layoff brings is the best test of confidence there is (up there with a cold sales call, a VC interrogation, etc). If you can internalize a realistic understanding of your own skill level and marketability, you'll be an attractive hire, teammate, leader, etc.
>>It's sad to see people again and again sell their life.
Why? I don't find that sad at all - some people really enjoy their work, and it becomes a big part of their identity. What better way to spend you life than doing something you truly enjoy and provides you an income to be comfortable and take care of your family/friends?
I know a lot of doctors, they have spent their entire lives taking care of people, saving lives and generally doing good things. Most of them have a very, very hard time retiring when the time comes - it is who they are. I know several in their eighties who continue to practice because it brings them joy.
While not an MD myself, if I won the mega-millions tomorrow, and was set for life, I would still write code for someone or something.
I'd still interact with computers in some way shape or form if I were a millionaire, but I also hope that such an amount of money and free time would expand my scope of personal fulfillment to some other unknown areas of life and consciousness beyond IT work.
Ironically, I think your MD example provides the exact sort of comparison that should trigger some critical introspection for most tech workers. Most of us are not exactly saving lives with the time we spend in front of the keyboard.
There is a difference between having passion for your profession and selling your life to one specific company.
If you have passion, you don't need to care where to follow it. But OP seemingly traded a fulfilling privat life with friends for a company with coworkers.
I work to live, and if I quit I would not be lonely at all because I have hobbies and a social life that is intentionally completely separate from work.
But not everyone is the same. Some people derive great value and pleasure from their job.
Luck is vital in the interviewing game, from moment you apply for a position after finding a company, to the multiple rounds of interviewing.
My thought is, don't rush. Keep and spend more time on learning and doing what you wanna do, go deeper on the holes of knowledge (not for the sake of interviewing).
Good things need time and patience. It's the only thing that i can do, and i can't do more about it about the interviewing game.
593 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 346 ms ] threadThis feels like it may be an iceberg. Could you expand more on what "reshaping" you're seeing? Are you referring to the mass layoffs specifically or is there some broader context to this comment?
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.0/process/coding-style.ht...
I interviewed with a quite promising company beginning of December, only to immediately get the written feedback (after the first call) of
"Well I know a lot of SWE in this town and none of them are struggling to find a job - so if you've been looking for X months, surely there's something wrong with you - and anyway, we've already signed a contract with someone else in the 5 days since we last spoke."
(To be fair to them - I had mentioned how frustrating it was to simply get "no" as negative hiring feedback and asked them to elaborate if at all possible)
I take it as a "well, bullet dodged" moment, but I am not going to lie and say it didn't sting.
Don’t do this! You’re inviting feedback from someone who is basically a complete stranger, who has an undisclosed set of “standards” they’re judging you against, and who might not actually be very good at assessing talent. The odds of getting a “false signal” are high.
Sometimes people just genuinely tell you things like "there wasn't enough detail about X on your CV, but we took a chance and called you anyway" - that tells me that I can improve my chances for a callback in the future by adding more detail (if I get that same feedback 2-3 times).
You're right though in that a looooooooot of hiring people also have no clue what they want to see.
I think letting them know you are currently unemployed is a mistake. Frankly your current state of affairs is not their business. You can always tell them that you are ok but looking for a better job. Very simple and understandable. Yes it is a lie but it is the only reasonable option. Telling perspective employer to sod off and not to stick their nose into your internal situation is not going to do you any good. Telling that you are out of job and looking will immediately put you into unfavorable position. Treat yourself as a business in this particular case. Businesses have zero problems lying to each other / their employees for as long as it does not break a law.
Also in this case I really don't mind disclosing - I was laid off because my position was made redundant entirely.
It is absolutely trivial.
>"but you'll also get tons of interview questions about skills and projects and challenges from your current job"
Your last job unless it is 10 years old should provide all of the answers. Any really identifying details should not be asked / answered as the employee is normally under NDA.
Same for references. Reference from "current job" can simply be refused. I can hardly imagine employee going to their boss and asking for a job reference while still working.
Anyways I am independent and run my own company. Maybe I am not up to date about how deep the US employers are able to stick their fingers up that proverbial hole.
These fall perfectly into experience with last job. Does not have to be current. And all those questions you asked are trivial. Also I've never dealt with the recruiters. I have always searched and found perspective companies myself and no they were not Amazon big type. If I could not speak with the owner I would simply walk away - not my kind of place.
My first programming job in Canada - I just simply walked into the office and asked to speak to the owner (I knew it was small 20 person consultancy).
Since 2000 I am on my own but I still find clients and have interviews. Just a different type of interview of course.
For what it's worth, I thought the same. I applied to over 50 companies and not all of them were FAANG by any stretch of the imagination. I'll admit I'm not the best at interviewing, which certainly was a factor. But even as I broadened my search to the "okay" roles, I still had difficulty landing work.
If I didn't have enough money to pay for food/rent, I would take the first offer. Fortunately, I've never been in that situation.
> I applied to over 50 companies and not all of them were FAANG by any stretch of the imagination. I'll admit I'm not the best at interviewing, which certainly was a factor. But even as I broadened my search to the "okay" roles, I still had difficulty landing work.
If you're thinking about the distinction between FAANG and not FAANG, then we are talking about completely different levels of _okay_. I'm talking about non-tech companies, where you'd most likely be working on internal tools or whatever. Maybe you'd be writing crappy Jira/Confleunce/whatever plugins. Or gluing together one internal system to another internal system, etc.
I consider _okay_ to mean a job that pays enough money to cover rent/food.
Go on monster.com (or any other job search site), type in "programmer" (or "<language> programmer" if you only have experience in a single language) and start applying. If you don't recognize the company name or what they do, that's good. If you're looking for a consultancy gig, then you probably want to look out for keywords like "government" or "client". If you're looking for a non-tech company, then you need to google the company name and see what field their in.
If you know Java, you can probably search for "Jira programmer" or "Jira developer" and find a pretty cushy gig writing those. If you know PHP, then search for "wordpress developer". If it's python, search "Django developer" etc.
I've looked mainly on LinkedIn and some smaller job boards, not Monster or Indeed or Dice or any of those.
Another thing is that I'm avoiding complex applications, the ones where you're immediately asked to create an account and once you do they ask you for a ton of information like every job you've had in your life. Are the jobs you're talking about often gated behind these applications?
Most likely, you'll start to recognize the different software companies use to track job applications.
My only experience was helping someone out when they got laid off. They had a mortgage to pay, a new born and a wife that quit her job to look after the new born.
Being picky about job application software wasn't a the top of our list. I think we applied to over 500 ads over the course of a few days, basically every single commutable job. I think from those, there were 20 interviews and 3 offers.
Some of the software automatically scans your CV and populates stuff. If it can't do it properly, restructure your CV until it can. You might need a few different CVs for different software.
I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but you don't sound very serious. Or at least not desperate (which is probably a good thing).
If you're looking for a job full time, you should spend a few hours a day grinding leetcode and a few hours a day filling in those shit applications. Obviously I don't know you or you situation, I have no idea if this is good advice for you or not.
I don't care about the software as such, but so far I'm not desperate enough to provide detailed information about every job I've had since I was a teenager, every reference up front, agree to legal statements, or whatever else they might insist on, knowing I could be fired later on if I get any of it wrong, just to maybe get the first 30 minute phone call from a recruiter. On top of this is the simple logic that any employer that puts up all these barriers is probably not really interested in hiring anyway. More work for less reward, so that my time would be better spent looking for more likely positions.
That said I'm willing to have my mind changed on this. Maybe all of these jobs are actually super eager to hire despite being so hostile to applicants.
Pretty much, around 5 minutes per application.
>provide detailed information about every job I've had since I was a teenager, every reference up front, agree to legal statements, or whatever else they might insist on, knowing I could be fired later on if I get any of it wrong
Either you're completely overthinking it and you can just omit a bunch of stuff, or you're applying to some job that requires security clearance and they use those questions to prescreen. I remember the application for some defense contractor was too painful and we gave up.
But if it's some standard jobvite or whatever form, just fill it in. Only include relevant tech jobs and your university education (if you have a degree) and move on.
If it's really that big a deal for you, shortlist 50 jobs from those job search sites. Then go to /r/slavelabour and pay someone $15 bucks to apply for you (given your CV and email).
> That said I'm willing to have my mind changed on this. Maybe all of these jobs are actually super eager to hire despite being so hostile to applicants.
It's more likely that at some point that bought a license for the applicant tracking software and they'll use it forever. They probably have it on some default settings so it's not the best for tech jobs. That doesn't mean they aren't serious about hiring.
But those job aggregator sites are a bit shit, they'll have listings for jobs that are already filled or no longer available.
These are also the sorts of positions I think people are talking about when they talk about HR being a barrier, filtering on keywords, or how important it is to network around them before applying. So I don't think it's a matter of the company being stuck with software they can't do anything about, instead the hostile and opaque application process mirrors their actual hiring process, or at least I assume so. I'm happy to hear if you have any insight from the recruiting side at these places.
This is the most standard thing ever. The ycombinator job board[0] works the exact same way. No one is going to fire you if you leave out that you worked at Pizza Hut when you were younger. They will fire you if you claim to have worked at Google but never actually did. Or if you claim N years of experience in some technology despite never using it. Just make sure your CV matches what you enter into the software and that you're not lying on your CV, that's it.
> I'm happy to hear if you have any insight from the recruiting side at these places.
I have experience working on the recruiting side of a fairly large company that used Jobvite (which is why I mentioned it, first piece of software I could think of) for their application tracking system. It asked you the same sort of questions, even some really stupid ones like your Myers Briggs personality type, despite me arguing very strongly against it.
Yes, HR would do some filtering, they probably filtered out good candidates and let many bad ones through to the next stage to get filtered by the hiring people. This shouldn't stop you from applying, who cares if you get filtered out by HR at X% of the time? You'll get through 100-X% of the time, and if you apply to a lot of places, that'll be a lot of people looking at your CV. An application should not take you longer than 5-10 minutes, it's not a big investment of time.
> instead the hostile and opaque application process mirrors their actual hiring process, or at least I assume so
Yes, the hiring process will be shit. But it's not intentionally hostile, it's "hostile" because that's the way it's always been and there's too much momentum to change it. I'm certain the Myers Briggs questions turned off many good candidates. I would immediately close a job application if it was asking stuff like that (assuming I wasn't desperate). But the company was genuinely looking to hire good people. I feel like you underestimate how difficult it is to change anything at a large company where tech is a cost center :).
[0] https://www.workatastartup.com/
There are many tech jobs out there that just ask you to send in a resume and cover letter and answer some questions. Saying it's technically possible to get an interview from sending out an unfocused 5-10 minute application to a big corporation using something like Taleo is not a strong argument in itself to do that.
In this past search, I applied to about 50 jobs and had 4 interviews. According to LinkedIn stats, most of those jobs had 30-200+ applicants. The results of those applications were:
My takeaway is that it's a numbers game now. In the past, I was very highly targeted in my searches, but now that the doors are wide open to everyone across the country for many roles, it's about getting someone's eyes on your resume, and that requires a certain level of aggression in applying.I think it's like for successful startups: luck, luck and luck.
edit: And for having been on the hiring side a bit: I know luck's involved, more than people think or - worse - than they want to admit.
I think you can go faster if you use third-party recruiters, as much as I often despise them. Try to pick out one or two individuals within recruiting firms that are not awful. They're out there. Recruiters are given the jobs that corporations need a warm body to fill now.
Yes, you can absolutely always quit that un-ideal job and completely omit it from your resume. I don't see the wrong role as a good reason to turn down a job when you have bills to pay.
My other feedback on this article:
I wish it generally talked about unemployment insurance. It can be a complicated process, and I wonder if the author had any success there.
#1 should is a part of the basic life skill of understanding the difference between coworkers and friends. I do have friends that started as coworkers, and they did a lot more than help with the mechanics of getting laid off. I do agree that it's not a life skill that is taught very well.
If you want to turn coworkers into lasting friends, you need to be proactive and invite them to do things outside of work.
#3, I'm just not sure I agree with it. Getting interviews is an excellent indicator. At the very least it means that your resume is attractive. I don't think it's very common for companies to waste their own employees' time interviewing people for roles they aren't serious about filling.
My rule of thumb is that if you get beyond the recruiter and talk to the hiring manager, the company is serious and intends to fill the role. Maybe they get around to it or maybe not, we all know how priorities can change.
#5 seems like a waste of time. Either you know someone who is a hiring manager or you know someone who can refer you through a company's referral system. I think those are the only two activities that are productive. I wouldn't want to get any of those requests in my LinkedIn Inbox.
Writing open source software is a waste of time with respect to job hunting unless you are looking to build a portfolio. Your time is better used physically applying for jobs (which takes a legitimately solid amount of time).
#6, totally agree with that. The author absolutely overshared, and should have known better. Corporations want to know that you can keep secrets. Transparency is almost never in the best interest of a company.
As I mentioned above, I'd only agree with #7 if you have runway/a spouse earning income.
I'd almost replace #8 with "enjoy being laid off." Spend some days doing activities meant for joy, especially if you've exhausted your job application pipeline for the moment. I'm almost hoping I get laid off, I love not working, and I loved all the stuff I got to do the last time I was laid off. I played two video games the whole way through and read an entire novel, which are things I rarely get through when I'm employed.
Also it pains me a little for you to say that reading one book is a big sign of having lots of free time. Maybe you're not a huge reader but I hope you normally do stuff you enjoy, reading or not, whether you're employed or not, if you don't mind my saying so.
Basically, the fact that I had enough free time to finish a book and do all the things I like to do higher on my list was one of the joys of unemployment.
No.
Or rather, maybe?
I have been fortunate enough that in a couple decades in this industry, including two major downturns, I've never been in a position that I /must/ find a job on a particular timeline to pay the bills. While my life situation helps with this, I do recognize that luck is a major part of it.
As a result, this line in particular fails to resonate with me. If I take a job doing something that makes me miserable, I will be miserable. Maybe I can put up with it for six months, but what's the point? During those six months, between working full time and being miserable, I will not be effective at looking for a long-term role I enjoy. Better to take a personal bridge loan and keep looking for something that works for me.
We're software engineers. If, like me, having someone pay you to build cool shit is about as good as it gets -- hold out for that, don't settle for doing what you "despise" instead.
> Better to take a personal bridge loan
You often won't be able to get a loan without verifiable steady income.
> Maybe I can put up with it for six months, but what's the point?
To bring in income. Pay for living expenses. Pay off debts. Provide for family. Start/increase/replenish savings.
> hold out for that, don't settle for doing what you "despise" instead.
People with families and multiple financial responsibilities beyond their immediate needs often have to do things they "despise", if even/only for a short while.
Your post, while not having anything specifically 'wrong' in it, comes across as a bit privileged. You recognize that luck is a part of it, and you recognize your own life situation helps, but you still tell people to 'hold out' for 'building cool shit'. Not everyone can hold out, for a multitude of reasons.
I think age and life situation play a much bigger part in this than people recognize, and I'll go out and say "especially younger people". You can pay lip service to it, but if you're in your late 20s or early 30s starting a family, your financial obligations and priorities are vastly different from an empty nester or single person in their 50s.
By almost any measure, a software engineer with 20+ years of experience - especially someone who perhaps didn't have kids - should probably have months of years of savings to tap in to to weather a downturn. But I've also known folks with 10-15 years of increasing experience who still struggled financially, and it was usually a mix of having kids and limited forward planning that kept them in a 'paycheck to paycheck' lifestyle - often, not even a terribly extravagant one.
Most of the bad decisions I've made have come during times when I was in very bad financial situations. The stress contributes to poor decision making, and it was often something I wasn't even aware of in my early days. I just thought that's "how it is". Even getting to the point of having 3-4 months of savings seemed outrageous and out of reach to my younger self.
And yes... the black swan of a medical situation can deplete savings enormously quickly. Even relatively small hiccups we've had over the years have ended up taking thousands out of pocket that were unexpected. Having, say, $30k in savings can help you weather a lot of unforeseen setbacks - car issue, housing issues, moving expenses, etc. A medical condition may drain that 'overnight'. There may be loads of billing delays/etc which may drag it out over months, but the 'debt owed' may be immediate.
My wife got sick and within a few days, we're in ER with double pneumonia and she's struggling to breathe (scary). $4k owed. I blacked out from covid shot - ambulanced to ER. Another $4k owed. Older me can weather those costs now. 25 years ago those sorts of expenses would have been crippling. And these are tiny compared to other things that can happen - my family has generally been quite fortunate with respect to health conditions and medical issues over the years. I know others who are far worse off.
Thanks for taking the time to read this post. I decided to spend Christmas break in CDMX[0] by myself in order to reflect not only on the past year, but just how far I've come since I got laid off. This is the result.
Thanks for making all those hours at the café (instead of at a museum or bar or whatever) worthwhile.
[0] I'll be here for a few more days if you'd like to meet up!
So, you wanna share with us what the connotations were? Is it just that the recruiter read "oh, you're failing a lot, you must suck"? Or is there something else more interesting to this?
I'm disappointed that this post is somewhat vague on specifics. But on the one situation that is set up very specifically, we don't get the punchline.
Posting "here's a list of companies that haven't got back to me" (which is possibly implicit in an open spreadsheet sort of post) is likely perceived as a troublemaker.
- what mgkimsal said
- "This employee is applying to really big companies. I'm not sure they know what they are really looking for. This is a mission-driven company, and we want people who want to be here"
- "This person has applied to 30+ places and hasn't landed a job yet? Must not be that great after all"
- "Someone who posts this information publicly has low EQ, I wouldn't want to work with them"
- "Oh someone here is treating our company as if it was a commodity. I don't like them."
- "This person is trying to game interviewing, probably best to steer clear."
What surprises me more: Many people don't think interviewing is a game. They think it is straightforward and "rules-based". I guess those same people also believe PR. :)
Corporate jobs disappeared due to the financial crisis one time and a hostile takeover another time (both of those I was personally happy about). And a couple startups were acquired sooner than expected. There can be upsides, yes, but it can still leave you with months of trying to figure out what to pursue next, and that can be a weight on your mind even when you're making the most of your time off. When you are committed to a full-time job, something you have to do every day, you may dread going to work sometimes or just wish you could hike up a mountain or something, but it helps frame your day and reduce the number of decisions you have to make, so when you don't have that there can be a significant cognitive load trying to decide how to spend your time in a way that others may not understand. "Oh, that's nice, you're consulting, how flexible, lucky you!"
Early in my career I learned about how to come out of the gate blazing fast since when I graduated from college a couple decades ago half of the tech jobs were gone, and I had to work hard for months after graduation just to find a specific kind of application development work I wanted at the time. I was fortunate to find that but many others were not and had to take whatever came their way. But it wasn't easy, and like you said, I found out early that lots of interviews on your calendar isn't necessarily promising, so over the years I've tried to find alternate routes to work by meeting with people inside the company first to find out what it's really like, and how much they want to fill a specific position, etc.
And more important than all the above, I recommend finding a listening ear to share your journey with, someone who will try to understand where you're at! I have some friends who have had the same job for a couple decades and even though they may not relate well, we can still try to share our different lives with each other and it's more helpful than you might think!
Of course I had my friends looking for opportunities and making referrals. One of them had a kind of clunky opportunity for me as an independent contractor for their company. It was a lengthy process to get it done, in part because they didn't really have their own contractor infrastructure so I organized an LLC, got my proper insurance, etc. Of course, I didn't tell me other friends about this opportunity because it wasn't a done deal yet, and I kind of knew the contracting thing was going to be short-lived anyway. Well, it turned out to fall through completely, which wasn't a huge surprise; but I found out that the hiring manager had told all my other friends to stop looking for jobs for me, because I was coming to work for him! So I was back to square one.
Given that you now know what it will be like if you get laid off again, have you changed anything about how you approach your non-work life? Things like non-work friends you hang out with, non-work activities that you do for fun, Etc. Sort of "if I'm laid off again, then I'll fill my days with interviewing and ..."
Glad you're back up and running and have processed the layoff!
Whether you are at risk of getting laid off or not - not having friends outside work is a bad idea.
Not sure exactly what this means but it's pretty common for recruiters to check your timeline and try to work around it. For instance, they'll try to expedite you if you already have offers on the table or relax the timeline so it fits with interviews.
The fact that an employer could speed things up for you if you have active prospects elsewhere is a little insulting because it's the flip side of saying we know we can put you on the backburner because you're unemployed and struggling.
You can say whether you're actively or passive looking, or if you have a firm offer on the table, or if you're especially interested in employers in some particular area if it makes you look good with this employer. Otherwise don't bring your search up and politely deflect questions if you can.
I found the pandemic lonely. I saw less than 1 person a month for the first 14 months of the pandemic. And i find WFH incredibly lonely. I haven't recovered. I'm utterly alone most weeks. I see no one. Even if I go to work, no one is there. I moved cities a year ago and have only 1 friend and 2 acquaintances in the new city. 2 of those 3 are married and I see them maybe once a month, if I'm lucky. The 3rd I haven't seen since August. The pandemic as killed meetup.com. It used to be full of activities. I don't think there is 1/20th of the activities there used to be.
If you need to chat with someone, I'm happy to lend an ear. Contact info is in my profile.
I have found NomadList (nomadlist.com) and NomadSphere (nomadsphere.io) invaluable for meeting up with people when abroad, although usually people who are there to work remotely.
I'd be lost without the friends I made in education settings. This might sound silly but any chance you could swap a meetup group with some sort of class? Art, writing especially something that involves discussion?
[0] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/loneliness...
I met them, I got their numbers and I started asking them to lunch at least once a week (sometimes more). That small, very determined activity just leads to more. You have to do it very consistently.
Hosting a poker night is very similar. It will start small and sometimes not happen, but you have to be relentlessly consistent to get it established.
I've tried to be a little careful still (still haven't gotten Covid as far as I know, I don't know if I'll be asymptomatic or end up in the hospital or something in between), and yet I've gone to several picnics, hikes, board game nights, outdoor hangouts, karaoke, movie nights, trivia, dinners, etc. via Meetup.com this past year.
Also supplemented that with Facebook events and the local forest preserve and local library's posted events.
I still have a core friend group (who I met thanks to Meetup.com many years ago), but several of my other friends have drifted off since the pandemic started (married and started having children), so I started doing meetup more again to compensate.
And almost any sport, appreciate you may not play any, but a group of the same people go to the same thing week in week out. You can even pick something where you can get lessons first then join a club.
Sometimes there are more social sports clubs that aren't really competitive. Here in the UK for example there are social badminton clubs and competitive badminton clubs. You will get a real mix of skill levels at the social clubs, and these might have regular meetups outside of the badminton. The one I'm part of do meals, theatre, outdoor events, etc. together. It depends on the people running it.
- Not going outside every day
- Not keeping yourself fit
- Eating junk food
In my region there is a lot of office only/mostly hybrid (3+ days in the office) jobs, probably for the reason that you mention. Of course when I ask why I need to be in the office people tell me about culture and stuff... But the true reason is probably more along the lines: loneliness, small baby crying at home, apartment not appropriate for remote work, annoying roommates/spouse/during divorce.
Maybe changing jobs right now is not the best idea - so I will not suggest it. I will only suggest to get real human contact, as being on-line and talking on forums/social media does not work (at least in my case).
If you have a chance you may try to find some meetup for startup entrepreneurs, even if you are not interested in startups. I find people there to be really hyped and full of positive energy. Usually there is also a motivational speaker there. YMMV but in my city there are some free and open meetings like this.
- Not exercising
Isn't this the crux of the issue? If OP was getting real human contact, they wouldn’t feel lonely.
This pandemic has really thrown us for a loop. New habits have been formed that are hard to break.
One of the first times I dipped my toe in the social pool in early 2022 was at a tech meetup. A bunch of us who went got COVID. I recovered but was the sickest I’d been in about 20 years. It doesn’t take much to withdraw more.
Friends made over 1 year, 3 months:
Meetup - 1 friend. Had a poor time-to-friend ratio for what I put in, but that's an n=1 and I mostly frequented just one meetup, although I tried like 3. Negative experience overall (for me, ymmv). Friend is great.
Local discord group around a hobby of interest - 2 friends. Many friendly acquaintances. Had to find the right group as a few I tried didn't feel like as-good fits. Positive experience, the friend making process was enjoyable and the friends are great.
Meeting at an intro class for another hobby (a semi social one - need at least one partner) - 2 friends. We were all new at the intro class and it was hard to find people, so we swapped numbers. Got to know each other through the hobby then became friends. Probably would be difficult to replicate intentionally.
Friends of Friends - 1 large group. 5 that I'd call friends and several more that I'd call group-friends or friendly acquaintances.
Friends of Friends are exponential. There's an excellent time to friend ratio, and the people you meet come pre-vetted. But note that some friends may be hesitant to make inter-friend connections even after they know you well, depending on how closed-off their other groups are. It's, of course, also not generally accessible until you have enough of a circle that like/trust you enough that you're getting invites to their other group things.
When I was laid off, it was very comforting to rebuild community with others who were laid off at the same time.
We started a Slack instance where we:
* shared resources with each other
* complained and vented and healed together
* celebrated each other's new jobs
* continued the network for years after
If the company is mid-size or better AND it’s not a sweat shop, take it while you assess your next move.
Don’t make the mistake of staying put, however, unless the team or company aligns with your interests.
Context: I took a break, got married, and started looking for SWE work just when the “great recession” was looming.
It took me six months and some unpopular niche skills just happened to open some opportunities. Just barely.
Personally, I'd love to get to work with Java, after (many) years of C++. Such an amazing technology and ecosystem.
Exhibit A of why not to take your day job too seriously. Be professional — but that’s as far as it goes.
> Come up with a more, uh, positive reason for why you’re interviewing instead of disclosing that you were laid off.
There’s nothing wrong with being laid off. I was, last week. Saw it coming from a mile away. Told my new employer about it.
Here’s the secret for getting a job you’re happy with. Try to have competing offers. I would have had to take over a 60% reduction in salary if I hadn’t had one. But I did, and so it was merely a 37% reduction. I’m very happy with it.
This is an area where I have to give tptacek lots of credit. I sort of shuffled from job to job until he posted this nugget of wisdom, and it’s quite true. None of the points in the article applied to me because of a fundamental shift in mindset. It happened around 7 years ago.
I think the loneliness aspect is intertwined with the reason why most people don’t try to go interview while you already have a job. You see your job as something more. It’s not just a job; it gives your life rhythm.
Maybe so. But in my experience, the way to be happy is not to care so darn much about it. Do a good job. But try to get a better one. And when you’re on the market, try to get multiple.
The recent thread about the engineer who got their offer rescinded from two different YC companies is exhibit B. They mentioned that they stopped looking for new jobs after things seemed to be going well during the pre-offer phase. Don’t do this. You should be doing a breadth-first search of all possible opportunities: talk to as many people as possible, and spend your time weighted by expected outcome.
People spend 8 hours + lunch and commuting every weekday on their job. It's almost 50% of the time you spend conscious during a week. Most people want more out of that than just a chore that needs to be done.
Also: unless you're genuinely curing cancer or flying food to starving African villages or something, 95% of software companies are pretty damn useless and any impact a SWE imagines is basically just a mental fantasy that helps one keep working. No one is genuinely happier because another API is created or some rich person has a better way of managing which products he's selling to other rich people. It's all basically useless and just a way to make money.
The whole "layoffs happen because employees are lazy, and affect lazy employees" is a nice narrative of your a business owner to keep the rank and file "motivated", but it's rarely an accurate portrayal of the situation.
If I choose to refresh myself via mid-day beer, so what? The code doesn't care how long I sit inside an office. It cares how well my brain works.
(..yes, too much beer and it won't work anymore. Everything in moderation.)
It might be that a dev that has a money cushion and is willing and able to relocate can compete on a level others can't because competition would only be localized.
OP was unemployed a year. Time adds up, that's a lot of money.
Luckily my government gives me a full year of unemployment benefits at 2/3rds of my salary besides my savings. Obviously, I don't wish to test my luck regardless, but not everywhere is as cutthroat as the US.
The alternative is to use the money the government doesn't take and save it for your future "unemployment benefit".
I love what I do, but I've found that even still if I let that fact convince me to work more than what is required of me I will eventually feel burnt out and eventually depressed. Maybe this isn't the case for everyone, but it's life outside of work that brings true meaning and purpose to my life. Time with friends and loved ones, going outside into nature and having new experiences, these are all things that make me actually happy. Loving my work just means I'm not sad when I'm at work.
Also, having a job gives you a basic social identity to use to interact with people, and positive cash flow lets you be expansive and outgoing. It's very easy to take this for granted, or assume focusing on work is ultra-materialist, if you don't have a lot of experience going without. I agree that it's healthy to not worry so much about the day-to-day minutiae of a specific job, but this is a lot different from the inevitable decline that comes with not having any job at all.
Just because this is a norm doesn't make it healthy. When your identity is rooted in something that can easily go away, it makes for a weak foundation. Lot of examples of jobs that are relatively short-lived (athletes, military, etc.) can show how difficult transitioning is when your identity is tied to your job.
I think it's unhealthy to have your identity tied to your specific employer, job title and tasks that you do for them. You as a person should not be defined by the tickets in your current sprint.
However not having a profession or any job is much different and worse. Unless you're older and retired, or independently wealthy, then it means you're going to cut back on everything. You won't socialize with other people society deems successful, you won't date, you won't grow a family, you won't travel or do anything other than continue to exist. All parts of your situation will shrink and decline. You are running out the clock toward total destitution.
I'm making this point because it's easy for people who are having a successful career to say, oh, of course I'm not my job, while missing entirely that they see themselves as a person who has a good job and will likely get another good job if their current job ends. They don't mean that they see themselves equally as a software developer or a dishwasher or on the street and it's all the same to them, so sharing the perspective that you are not your job in a discussion about extended unemployment is maybe not very appropriate.
Whether this latter reality is healthy or not, I don't know, but people have identified themselves as successful based on their trade or other social categorization for thousands of years, so at least we can say it's not new.
Will Storr writes about this much better than I can explain it here. But his point is essentially that the healthiest approach is to have your identity tied to many disparate parts of your life so that if one falters, the way you view your status doesn't hinge on that one failure. Just like you stated that "people identified themselves as successful", is a measure of status. If your esteem/status is based on that one domain, you're putting yourself at greater risk. It doesn't matter if a buggy-whip maker was the best tradesman around, he's status is still at risk when cars become popular.
The other part is that I believe research shows it's typically unhealthy to have one's social circle centered around work because those aren't very tight bonds. Again, it's a point to spread your social circle across shared interests and values rather than a job.
In most cases switching from one tech job to another will keep you in the same middle-to-upper-middle class even if you have to take a relatively large pay cut. You can even lose your job without something else lined up and it's not a big problem as long as you're confident you'll find something similar soon.
All of that is at risk with extended unemployment or being forced to indefinitely work for lower pay in a different field. Consider all the life changes someone might have to make if they have to change from being a software developer making $150k to being a rideshare driver making $40k, after six months, a year, or five years. I don't know about buggy-whip makers but probably they'd be okay with losing their jobs if they were guaranteed equal work in the new car factories. What they really dreaded was having to work for less pay in the new factories, or becoming day laborers or similar. This is what motivated the original Luddites.
We probably do disagree on the buggy-whip/factory point. Being a craftsman carries more status than being a cog in a factory. The reason why Henry Ford made $5/day a thing was workers were leaving in droves because the work was miserable and monotonous. High pay compensated for miserable work and lower status. I've known people who go from being "somebody" in a particular field (like the military) to being a "nobody" in a different field (like a factory). Even though they got paid better in the latter, they yearned for the former because of the lost status.
What your replies seem to confirm is how much we as a society base our identities on work, sometimes to the exclusion of so much else.
You took 37% paycut and you’re happy with it? Why?
OP took a job that would provide an income that happened to be 37% less than the one OP had before.
He did take a pay cut. 37% can be felt by anyone earning an income. It's often the decider if you have money left over after living expenses or not.
Let's say you earn 200K. 100k goes away for taxes et al (I am simplifying here), leaving you 100K for expenses. If your living expenses are 60K for rent, food, transportation, fun, family, you can save 40K a year for retirement. Let's say you earn 37% less. That's 126K. 60k goes away for taxes et al (I am simplifying here), leaving you 66K for expenses. If your living expenses are 60K for rent, food, transportation, fun, family, you can save 6K a year for retirement. Your savings just dropped by 85%, putting your retirement in danger.
Not saying OP shouldn't have accepted the offer. But let's not pretend this wasn't a significant pay cut.
There’s a fella on TikTok named Frank Niu. He made $500k at Netflix, and his job was basically to run around fixing things when they broke. It was a nice reminder that the good times can be very good, and the bad times are worth scaling back one’s expectations appropriately. I doubt he’d still be in the $500k bracket if he were still working, but you never know.
Also, don’t scale your living expenses! It’s tempting, but my current employer almost didn’t make me an offer because they assumed I was living at a $400k lifestyle. In reality we were just paying off our house and driving the same old car.
This can be more difficult when you have been part of transforming a company for 20 years instead of job-hopping every few years. When you have advocated for changes and they have been implemented, there are parts of "you" in the company.
Also the CV looks very empty in this case, even when having implemented many interesting things.
Any specific thread that might be particularly enlightening/interesting?
+1 on this. His #1 is exactly why you should not let work, and especially work social events, become the "primary shaper of your life" - they can and will get rid of you anytime they think it might be convenient for them. It may not have anything to do with your skills or productivity, it may be just what someone high above you felt like doing for reasons that have nothing to do with you.
I think that’s the wrong message to take away from this. The author’s problems wouldn’t have been solved by remaining more distant from his job and coworkers - he’d just be lonely all of the time!
The real answer is that you need to cultivate relationships and a life outside of work, too. By all means, become friendly with and get to know your coworkers, but don’t let work be your only source of relationships.
And please... network, network, network! I know not everyone has this opportunity, but if you leave a good lasting impression and make friends with strong coworkers, over time they will get promoted to higher and higher positions making it incredibly easier to find a job when needed.
This is the very same recession we've been talking about :)
Why there isn't this much problem with having to learn yet another JS framework,
get familiarity with database of the month, learn some tool like docker/k8s/ansible/vagrant/blabla or yet another proprietary toolchain like AWS/Azure/GCP
but foundational cs/programming knowledge is top hated thing, that people even call it "discriminatory for people with families" or something like that
Algos is a skill you do not use on the job and companies are extremely picky about you getting the correct answer.
Asking questions that chat GPT can easily answer gives 0 insight into problem solving ability.
How are you going to improve existing codebase / new code if you aren't aware of the foundations, tools and basic primitives?
How many problems could be solved by just usage of z3 if you were aware of it?
How many problems could be solved by applying most popular combinatorial optimization methods/approaches
instead of writing something times, times slower, but eventually hacked enough to make it work?
The insistence on being able to spew out code-first answers to contrived problems during an interview situation is silly gatekeeping, but it makes the people who pass feel good, and that's why it persists.
For those of us with lives, hobbies, etc grinding leetcode is exhausting. Moreover, you can't just grind it. You have to grind it to the point you literally can brain dump answers in an interview.
Interviewers rarely care about your accomplishments. No one cares you did staff eng. at XYZ, managed engineers, have familiarity with all sorts of frameworks, etc. This is the only industry where every time you look for a job you're treated like don't have a resume. I think many (if not most) people are insulted by this because the people in charge are belittling them. I would bet even Knuth would struggle to tackle a modern programming interview. That's a problem.
All that said, sentiment against stack churn is significant and a common theme here on HN.
I don’t understand this assertion, unless “laid off” now means “fired with cause”. People are laid off all the time, for no reason other than the company wants to reduce their labor costs.
Perhaps the author is assuming that the company is also making a judgement about their skills, e.g. that they’re somehow not up to some arbitrary standard? (I think that it is very easy to make this assumption, especially when laid off the first time.)
Anyway, there should be no need to give a potential employer a reason about why you were let go other than the position was eliminated.
Of course someone made a judgement, you just don't know what criteria they used, so it could be anything from "didn't like his face" all the way to "had the highest salary".
Furthermore, how does it help in any way to assume that the reason for the layoff was because of a personal shortcoming? And why should we assume in advance and without evidence that a potential employer won't consider us because of this?
Getting laid off from some places is a badge of honor, IMO.
I think the author has come away with the wrong lesson here.
Many engineers, particularly those that don't pay too much heed to social mores, think they have some God-given right to share details of all their private interactions publicly. Every tech test they do is pushed to GitHub with an accompanying blog post. Every interview has a transcript (somewhat one-sided) published and shared to Twitter. This is typical oafish behaviour displayed by mamy engineers and frankly, it annoys people. It's often considered a red flag when hiring. Understanding when to be discreet is an important skill for any employee.
Lying about why you're looking for work is a bad idea. That small lie will escalate, you'll have to start stringing together more lies, and when you get found out it won't reflect well.
This has nothing to do with radical honesty. I'm not suggesting you air all your dirty laundry during an interview. But don't lie. And don't publish all private interactions because you're a fan of free software. It's not the same thing.
Lots of other situations and questions like that which are strictly speaking none of the employer's business. When given the option between telling the truth, evading the question, enforcing your boundaries or lying the only one that might result in you getting the job (assuming you need a job and wouldn't mind working for a bigot because a paycheck is better than no paycheck) I'd be fine with you lying. That is still problematic, but you don't have any moral responsibility towards your employer if they transgress themselves.
The same goes for questions about unionizing, wanting children, having chronic diseases and so on.
The former is completely standard procedural (do we need to accelerate the process to compete) and competitive (who are we up against).
Leaving aside this particularly bad hypothetical, lying about yourself to get a job probably won't set you up for long-term success. What's the end game of claiming you don't want kids when you really do, after you get the job and then become pregnant? Now you need the job even more and your employer both resents you being pregnant and for having lied to them.
If you're really saying it's okay to lie to employers if you're truly desperate, then sure, why not. If you're actually starving then a lot of things become options, but this isn't really good long-term career advice.
https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/protections-against-emplo...
There is no federal law establishing my rights, so if a company tries to ask about my personal life (wife, kids, etc.) I politely decline to answer, or I answer vague enough that doesn't give them any useful information.
Strictly speaking, its not illegal to ask the question. However, because it is illegal to base hiring decisions on it, asking the question is legally dangerous in two ways:
(1) Asking the question in an employment interview is evidence which can tend to support that you intended to use it in a hiring decision, and
(2) The interviewee answering the question is evidence that you had the information, and thus the opportunity to use it in a hiring decision.
As a result, the usual legal advice is to strictly avoid asking the question: you can’t legally use the response, and by asking it you make yourself unnecessarily vulnerable. The idea that it is illegal to ask the question is probably a consequence of this.
They also tend to ask a lot about things that might sound innocuous, like hobbies.
If I was being stupidly honest, I could talk about my involvement in the furry community. Most furries (~80%) are LGBTQ (versus ~3% to 5% of the base population).
Instead, I make vague allusions to being a gamer. (I play video games less than anyone I know, but it's not zero, so that's still technically true.)
A ruling by the Supreme Court applying a federal statute is binding federal law nationally, it can be overturned either by the Supreme Court itself, or by changing the law that the Court applied, but that’s actually stronger than federal statute law that superficially seems to more directly protect a right but which does not have such a confirming opinion.
Once bitten, twice shy.
Pretending to be LBGTQ friendly is a good PR while changing actual company culture is hard, expensive and takes time. So don't get fooled by PR stunts and changed policies because they will always be eaten by real company culture.
Ah, so sorry, we found a candidate who had more relevant experience than you, but please do keep applying.
The agency that enforces federal anti-discriminatiom law disagrees.
https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/protections-against-emplo....
Lying is one of the worst things you can do, it usually speaks to an issue with integrity, a concern that comes before almost all of them even intelligence, education, aptitude, skills.
Learn the skill of polite deferral, of saying things without saying them, diverting or embellishing a bit - and then only if it's an issue not relevant to the job.
If someone in an interview asks you your 'political orientation' (which obviously they shouldn't do and it would raise a big red flag anyhow - but just as an example) you do not have to be candid, but don't lie. You can say "I have a variety of opinions, I try to keep an open mind" - so long as you are comfortable with it and it's true. You have not lied, but not fully answered the question because it's none of their business.
I also think the OP here has misinterpreted 'transparency and candor'.
Engineers who 'over share' are a bit annoying but then again, you don't have to read their posts - but this is not the issue.
The 'issue' here is the absolutely truthful information that is 'just too much' for an interview setting.
Everyone needs to be honest and candid but not transparent like you're talking to the IRS or your accountant.
Suppose they ask you why you might want to work at the company, and you don't really feel hugely inspired, well, instead of saying literally that, you can find at least something interesting about the situation and allude to it. There's something interesting about every situation. And of course, if it's truly a bad situation just say that politely and assume you won't be working there.
It's ok to ask 'Elephant in the Room' questions especially if they are asked politely, if they can't handle that you don't want to work there.
It's ok to be turned away for something arbitrary or mundane (or any other reason) there will be other opportunities.
Getting turned down can make you very cynical and brings out our worst, even conspiratorial tendencies so try to stay grounded and keep your head on straight, don't be sucked into the vortex of weirdness and 'ultra competitive civility' of getting job shenanigans, it's not real, it's a big of a game, recognise it a such.
Kind of like telling people to 'don't be nervous' on a date, what I'm about to write is super glib but I think it's true: stay true to your basic values and identity and I think it will be easier to be more relaxed and authentic in interviews. The 'game' will pull you towards negative behaviours I have found it's a lot easier not to do them if you literally just decide that you are not going to do so for reasons of morality or values or whatever.
Or "this situation sucks, that's why I'm excited. I want to lead the charge out of the darkness and into the light" or some such self-aggrandizing metaphor. Assuming, of course, you are willing to take a job whose primary function is fixing a broken team.
It is morally wrong to lie. You should not do it
The fact that they do it, when they face different incentives, is not a reason for you to
In that particular situation as far as I'm concerned - and not as far as you are concerned - you are free to lie. Because the alternative is going to end with you not getting the job, no matter how qualified you are.
Did you know that employers frequently ask for your employment history in the form of a resume, but then they’ll contact one or two recent employers to confirm you were employed?
Trust, but verify. It’s a leaky but effective check against con artists.
I don't buy the "you don't want to work for a company that would ask you XYZ anyway" line. Sure, in some cases that may be true, but sometimes someone (that is, a random person on the interview loop, not a "professional interviewer" like a recruiter) will ask or say something they shouldn't, and that doesn't need to reflect poorly on the company (or even on the person; who hasn't said something dumb on occasion?).
If you think a question is inappropriate, politely decline to answer, using whatever verbal finesse you have available to yourself. It takes practice and confidence to do so, but it's the right thing to do.
"What is the name of your spouse?"
"Have you ever been a member of a union?"
"Do you have children?"
"Do you want to have children?"
"Do you have a chronic illness?"
"Have you ever been arrested?"
"Which bathroom would you like to use?"
"How large is your household?"
"Are you the sole breadwinner?"
"What are your hobbies?"
"Do you have pets?"
"What is your current salary?"
And on and on...
Those are bad questions to ask as an employer, and you should probably move on to the next opportunity anyways. Still, faking to have children when you don’t, or the other way around, is worse.
I was mortified at the simple description of that twitter post.
To lump that with honesty is probably unhelpful long term for OP, certainly unhelpful as advice.
Why scrub social media early only to taint it later!?
If a company asks where else you are interviewing an honest but not transparent answer would be something like "I'm exploring other opportunities at various places but don't feel comfortable providing more details." If you were to ask a company who else they are interviewing for the same role, you would expect the same answer. It would probably cause alarm if they actually told you the names of other people they were interviewing!
on the desk was the laptop they wanted me to use, some pens and paper, and a stack of resumes from other people
the interviewer made no mention of the stack as they were leaving or when they came back, and when I asked about it at the end of the interview, they chuckled and changed the subject... to this day I'm wondering if it was some test to see if I threw the other resumes out (didn't get an offer btw)
Alternative theory: since the information on a resume is not exactly sensitive (it's not the same thing as a job application), then someone who doesn't take the opportunity to study them is labeled as incurious
Edit: I think it's the difference between "honesty" and "oversharing". It's being honest to say "I've interviewed with multiple companies and we haven't been able to come to a mutually beneficial agreement." It's oversharing to give a pile of details about each of those interviews.
I get that this is marketing, and that's the game in an employer market. But sh*t, no-one is calling out the fact that maybe the responsibility is not only on the incoming recession, but also how dumb a large portion of the industry has been in trying to ignore as best as possible a freaking war, a pandemic, and flying oil prices, and carried on over-hiring at high wages. I'm grateful mine didn't go in that game and froze hiring very early on.
Maybe it's an emphasis, the way I read it is that you should keep your unpalatable opinions to yourself, because being critical of the system is cause to be rejected by it.
No. You have missed the point.
Nobody wants you to e grateful when you're not. But you do not have to say what you think just because you think it
Just got back into the job market, and every potential employer has expressed gratitude for my level of honesty and transparency.
I'm "weaker" at negotiations since I've laid out my cards on the table upfront. The other side of the coin is companies are less likely to waste my time unnecessarily, or play hardball too much when you appear to roll over so easily.
My take on Hard Truth 6 is to be careful and strategic with your honesty. It may not always be interpreted the way you intended, so be honest but be wise about what you're disclosing.
Honesty really has no place in corporate interactions. The author is way too old to be learning this lesson. The reason you are applying is that you "are passionate about X because of Y" even if you don't give a flying crap about what the org does.
To minimize post-layoff loneliness (and not only for that!) make sure you have a life outside of work: the people you like to spend some time with and things you like to do. To minimize money-driven stress of the layoff, build up a cash cushion that can last at least 6 months; with unemployment, vacation time and any severance it can probably be stretched for a year.
And #7, "think whether you want to work for that company after getting an offer" seems off the mark. Sure, reject an offer that is not the best and stretch time on a safety offer until you get a better one. But do not go through the motions of getting an offer with a company you have no interest to work for. If you do not want to work for a company at all, do not apply there. My 2c.
Strong disagree. In this economy, you regularly want to hip pocket job offers.
If you have the posture of “I’ll take anything I can get” I think that actually puts you at a disadvantage in an interviewing situation.
In my experience employers can tell who is actually trying to evaluate fit themselves, and who is just saying what they think needs to be said.
I find it’s easier for both parties to make an offer, if they know the counterparty has done their due diligence.
For me when accepting an offer I’m also doing the same, evaluating whether I think the company has actually vetted me properly and has reason to think I will be a good fit.
There is so much mystery in the hiring process, I really need the other party to be doing their half of the work. And that means saying no to opportunities that don’t feel right.
That doesn’t mean I walk away from anything that’s not perfect. It just means I am looking out for reasons to say no, in addition to the reasons to say yes. I think interviewers pick up on that and it helps me get offers.
This is not a very strong prior, but re-applying after rejecting an offer can indicate that you are using the company as a fallback and may bolt as soon as you get a chance.
> Hard Truth #2: It’s gonna take longer than you think
I was laid off once and had a new (higher paid) job before gardening-leave was over (two weeks) - OP doesn't say what offers they turned down..
1. Getting laid of is usually pretty liberating. Everyone knows the company isn't generally doing well, the air is hot with friction, and you probably know you're working yourself into a corner. Getting laid off has happened to me two and a half times now. The first time was in the 2007 crash, and the company was hemorrhaging money and everyone knew it but didn't want to admit it. The second time I happened to quit the same week the CEO was planning layoffs. He teared up thanking me for saving him from having to fire anyone. The third time was one of the worst work experiences I have ever been in, but I didn't realize it until it was over. I called my wife and was excited, not downtrodden. Every day for the next two weeks was full of lunches and drinks and I had to insist on being allowed to pay every time.
2. This is just good advice. The only things you should spend money on when interviewing are dry cleaning and resume paper. I think my longest stretch was about 9 months, and my wife was forced to go back to work during that time despite just having a baby.
3. Yes and no. Some people don't interview well. Based on the author's other writing, he seems like the kind of person who might not interview well. In my career I think I have a close to 30% offer rate on interviews (but I'm very picky about applying for jobs). Yours may be higher, or much lower.
4. This is just always good advice. Set a bar for yourself, be willing to negotiate, and realize that work environment is about 500x as important as what technology you are using. I once got a job at a perl (yay!) shop where I worked for literally 1 day because the environment was so toxic.
5. Most offers for help come from people who don't know how to help. The author's approach here of direct asks is fantastic. Most will flake on you, but those that follow through are true friends.
6. Yeah this was a bad move. Don't talk about your exes on a first date, and definitely don't bring up the ones that swiped whichever direction the bad one is before your first date.
7. If the economy keeps going the way it is headed, ditch this advice in its entirety. Take that job, grasp it tightly to your breast, and don't let go no matter what happens. The job market in a down economy could be romantically described as falling somewhere between a chop shop and a meat market, and the hiring incentives for managers can be pretty twisted.
8. This has taught me to have a healthy relationship with my career. That post-layoff feeling should be bottled and sold next to the stickers that neophyte programmers put on their macbooks. There's nothing more seductive than confidence, and the clarity that a layoff brings is the best test of confidence there is (up there with a cold sales call, a VC interrogation, etc). If you can internalize a realistic understanding of your own skill level and marketability, you'll be an attractive hire, teammate, leader, etc.
It's sad to see people again and again sell their life.
Why? I don't find that sad at all - some people really enjoy their work, and it becomes a big part of their identity. What better way to spend you life than doing something you truly enjoy and provides you an income to be comfortable and take care of your family/friends?
I know a lot of doctors, they have spent their entire lives taking care of people, saving lives and generally doing good things. Most of them have a very, very hard time retiring when the time comes - it is who they are. I know several in their eighties who continue to practice because it brings them joy.
While not an MD myself, if I won the mega-millions tomorrow, and was set for life, I would still write code for someone or something.
Ironically, I think your MD example provides the exact sort of comparison that should trigger some critical introspection for most tech workers. Most of us are not exactly saving lives with the time we spend in front of the keyboard.
If you have passion, you don't need to care where to follow it. But OP seemingly traded a fulfilling privat life with friends for a company with coworkers.
But not everyone is the same. Some people derive great value and pleasure from their job.
My thought is, don't rush. Keep and spend more time on learning and doing what you wanna do, go deeper on the holes of knowledge (not for the sake of interviewing).
Good things need time and patience. It's the only thing that i can do, and i can't do more about it about the interviewing game.