I started looking this week. Getting called back at least but haven't even started the leetcode boogey portion of the evening yet so no idea how actively they're actually hiring.
I started looking since our annual bonus was canceled a few days before we were to get it and company leadership is acting gloomy. I’ve heard back from 1/4 messages, having a screen Monday. Seems like some positions are so swamped with applications that they won’t ever get to yours.
Not a single interview so far since a November (albeit I paused looking around the holidays figuring it was out less but didn’t get started again till a bit into January. Going to attempt to pay for a resume rewrite and see if it helps any.
Feed your resume into chat gpt3. Make your resume focus on numbers. Reach out to recruiters and ask for help. Try informal interviews with a corporation you like.
If you have money, find a career coach with a big network.
edit: this is rapidly becoming an interview about my job search and I don't really have the energy for it. I've answered the questions I feel like answering and I'm good for now.
I wonder if the remote work could be part of it. I have the impression many companies have grown weary of remote work since the pandemic.
That being said, I have a similar profile to you and I've been getting nearly no messages from recruiters even if I'm open to on-site work. The market's just difficult right now, keep looking!
This is very surprising. I have a few friends who were laid off and landed jobs in a few weeks, many interviews (although exhausting), similar range of experience as you (~10 years)
I'm old enough that in a reasonable country I could be considering retirement, and switched into this line of work relatively late. I have no degree, in anything. Each of my jobs was in a different stack so I have no obviously apparent expertise.
A lot of reasons that should be reassuring to most of the rest of you don't worry I'm sure everything will be fine :)
Working in totally different tech stacks should be spun as a superpower. You're a polyglot, not wed to one technology, but can quickly and easily get up-to-speed on the best tool for the job!
I recently got laid off in the UK and it was really hard to find something decent. There's jobs out there, but most aren't all that great and the interviews were much harder to come by. I was ghosted by recruiters countless times after being told I would be put forward for certain roles which has never happened to me before...
I've heard of plenty of companies publishing gender and ethnicity breakdowns of employees. I've never heard of anyone doing that for age of employees sadly.
You just have to look at one of those "company pictures," taken at offsites, or whatever.
Lots of smiling young faces. Maybe one or two gray heads, and you often find out they are Principals, in one way or another.
One of the dirty little secrets of tech ageism, is the ones doing it, are often older folks, themselves. IBM has been caught doing it, and the impetus came from their (quite gray) C-Suite.
That could be accounted for by the older folks not being able to attend the meetups as easily, due to family obligations and whatnot.
Especially people in their late 30s to 40s with kids who haven't left yet. I suppose there's really no too old to have kids who are not yet independent, given that a non-negligible percentage of millenials and zoomers will still be living with parents and whatnot
I'm in the US and would love to hear about the UK expefiencd.
What's it like when being laid off in the UK? Do you get guaranteed severance and some breathing room from the stress of rent or mortgage payments? Do you worry about access to high quality Healthcare?
Overall, do you think being in the UK makes you less worried that a layoff will leave you broke and homeless?
It depends on your company, but the statutory minimums are awful.
You get a minimum of 2 week's extra pay if you have over 2 years service, and Job Seekers' Allowance is about 77 quid a week - so imagine living on less than $500 a month.
Healthcare access (via the NHS) is unaffected, you might be able to get free prescriptions too.
But in general it's terrible.
As always in Europe you either want to be an ultra-rich landowning aristocrat (little to no property tax, inheritance tax, etc.) or very poor/unemployed (e.g. a refugee) so you qualify for state housing, etc. - work does not pay. You pay high taxes and then don't qualify for assistance when it matters. The USA is better by far where you can just manage your own savings with your 3-4x higher salary, healthcare is still an issue though.
Chiming in for Germany where unemployment insurance is mandatory and deducted from the salary each month. I personally pay 82 euros per month for 80% over a 1 year period (I think, I haven't checked in a while)
60% (67% if you have at least one kid) of your average net salary over the last 12 month before unemployment. Capped at ~2k in the old states and ~1.8k in the new ones. Paid for a max of 12 month for ages 49 and below after that it gets slightly longer.
> As always in Europe you either want to be an ultra-rich landowning aristocrat (little to no property tax, inheritance tax, etc.) or very poor/unemployed (e.g. a refugee) so you qualify for state housing, etc. - work does not pay.
I just left an inappropriately long comment saying, in effect, actually the same thing.
The US isn't perfect, but if you want to work you're generally able to move up the economic ladder easier from what I've seen. High income taxes combined with consumption taxes make wealth creation via employment almost impossible.
> make wealth creation via employment almost impossible.
Depends on what 'wealth' means here, but you can get a 1% salary in England in your late 20s by contracting in tech and save several grand a month. Put that in shares & buy-to-lets and you'll be very well off by 40 compared to the average person. With the lower cost of living I don't see any issues here... If that's what drives you of course.
> The US isn't perfect, but if you want to work you're generally able to move up the economic ladder easier from what I've seen.
According to recent Nobel prizes in economic (Duflo and Banerjee), moving up the economic ladder has degraded so much in the US that it's currently lagging slightly behind Europe.
I was unemployed in the UK once (early in my career) it was not fun, luckily i was able to move in with my mother and scrape by for a few months.
When my partner became unemployed in the USA i was amazed that she was getting $750 a week and her healthcare plan was $200 a month due to the marketplace subsidy.
Exactly on point, Europe is feudal and always have been. It is actually the reason why USA was "invented", when people who were fed up with the system left to start anew.
I studied, lived and worked in high demand field all my adult life in Europe, am in my mid 30s and have nothing really to show for it. Salaries are lower than USA, the taxes are ridiculous, (progressive up to 50%), reasonably new house prices in reasonable locations are in millions. And health care... lol.. ok - it just about works, but as you can imagine anything public is prone to corruption and lowest passable quality
Seeing USA, the last bastion for people who could make something out of themselves by real work crumbling and crawling to its death is disheartening.
whether the gained wealth from exploitation of people outside of USA allowed more mobility between wealth classes inside of USA - that would be a complicated discussion for me
I was merely pointing out the fact that it was possible to ascent to higher wealth class in USA with regular 'honest work' some years ago, whereas in Europe this is in general impossible due to taxation schemes designed to suck the life out of anyone who decides to work as opposed to being born an 'aristocrat' inheriting money, land etc...
> Salaries are lower than USA, the taxes are ridiculous, (progressive up to 50%), reasonably new house prices in reasonable locations are in millions.
Marginal tax rates in California are also around 50% as well (above or below, depending on income). Houses are certainly in the millions.
But on top of this you get to pay separately for extremely expensive health insurance and education, things that in most countries are very reasonably priced or even "free" (not free since it's paid for by the taxes, but at least you get services in exchange for your taxes, unlike in the US where you pay the taxes and have to pay separately for all the services).
I'm not an expert on this but a quick check online and I found tax brackets for California:
$35,000-$80,000 [25%]
$80,000-$170,000 [28%]
I'm just going to let you know that in Europe (Austria) personal income of 32,076 to 62,080 is taxed at 42% rate above 60k is taxed with 50%. And this does not include social and health insurance that is mandatory...
To give you TLDR of the European experience, you look at the gross salary, multiply by 0.45 and this is the real money you would see landing in your account, .. enjoy .. :)
I'm a contractor so no severance, although I believe severance in the UK works fairly similarly to the US (I just wouldn't know). On mortgages, I'm very worried because in the UK all mortgages are ARMs and our repayments have gone up a ton. But in addition to this so have our energy bills, and expenses generally.
> Do you worry about access to high quality Healthcare?
I don't have private healthcare. Unless you're very rich most people in the UK just put up with the NHS. I'm young and healthy though so almost never need it anyway. In general I don't think any worries about access to healthcare here.
> Overall, do you think being in the UK makes you less worried that a layoff will leave you broke and homeless?
I'll give you a long answer to this because social mobility and the affordability of homes is something I care deeply about and apparently have a controversial opinion on... But the TL;DR would be that I'm more worried about being broke, but less about being homeless than someone in a similar situation to myself living in the US.
Now the long answer...
The UK is weird in that if you're from a background like mine and you want a decent life (a home and family) you're generally better off not working. With the exception of myself the only people I know from my childhood who have their own homes are those without jobs and on benefits. I don't believe this is the same in the US.
In the UK if you work you're unlikely to be able to afford your own home unless you have fairly wealthy parents who can give you money, or a very good job – and if you're from a council estate you're almost guaranteed to have neither.
So I'm not worried about being homeless because the state will give me a home, but I often feel I'm in an impossible situation in terms of moving up the economic ladder via employment. Imo there's no real wealth mobility in the UK because we're taxed so aggressively and progressively on income. In effect the more you try to earn to not be poor the more the state will hold you back to ensure that never happens, but if you're super wealthy already then you're not taxed a penny on what you have while the poor will pay for your public services and pension via income tax and various consumption taxes.
The end result is that it means the best way to be wealthy in the UK is simply to inherit it (in ways that avoid inheritance tax, obviously). Although I would acknowledge starting a business is another viable option as that way you don't need to worry about income tax – but that's obviously not easy and requires a decent amount of luck.
So I think the right answer your question is that it's just different here. If you're poor the state looks after you very well in comparison to the US. I know single mums who have been given £500,000 houses to live in by the state and £30,000 a year to live on (untaxed). But if you're from a background like mine and want to work for a living there isn't a practical path to afford a £500,000 house in your 30s as a single parent – not to mention the luxury of not having to work a single day of your life for that lifestyle.
Speaking purely from a personal perspective, I would I'd feel much more financially secure in the US because the tax system is fairer there. My understand is that in the US you're taxed less for trying to build wealth and I don't believe you have consumption taxes. I think this is generally why people who work hard in the US can end up wealthy, but in the UK similar things don't really happen.
But I would point out that most people in the UK disagree with me on this. Those who claim to care about social mobility the most here are generally the loudest advocates for even higher levels of income tax.
I live in the UK and disagree with almost everything you said.
If you’re not working, sure there are some state benefits but to assume that life on benefits is some sort of ‘easy ride’ is nonsense. Your quality of life will be poor, there will barely be enough money to heat and eat and your “house” will most often be a poor quality council flat. Some accommodation is so bad there have been deaths caused by mould.
It sounds like you may have developed a skewed view of the situation perhaps due to your personal experiences. You should read up on some of the myths about benefits at this website:
Income tax rates for the highest earners are relatively low in the UK compared to other European nations. Denmark has the highest personal income tax rate, at 56%, compared to 45% in the UK.
I do agree there is a problem with inherited wealth in the UK though. Money makes money.
But on your overall point — nope. For the vast majority of people in the UK, all the stats evidence that your life is likely to be way more pleasant if you’re earning.
My guess is you disagree because you don't understand how bad working class jobs pay. In my experience this is generally because I'm talking to someone who is middle class or wealthier and is largely out of touch. Please correct me if I'm wrong though. And no, your dad once being on benefits for a week a decade ago doesn't count.
Here's a real world example for you – my sister is a single mum with no qualifications. Were she to get a job and work her ass off the most she'll realistically make is about £20,000. Some of this will be taxed and she'll no longer receive state benefits. But if you're a single mum on benefits you make around £2,000 a month tax free and have housing provided. The fact you think she can work to afford a house and a better quality of life than this is almost laughable.
But to your point if you're a median earner, say someone who's middle class and you work your ass off, then yes, you'll probably make a bit more – maybe £28,000. But keep in mind you'll have to work every day of your life and struggle for that privilege.
Point is the statistics suggest something that isn't true – that most poor people in the UK are better off working.
To give another example, my girlfriend's mum is a single mum of 5 children. Last year she decided she wanted a part time job because she's getting bored sitting around doing drugs and drinking all day (this is actually what she said). My girlfriend was obviously really happy about this and went with her to the job centre to help her find work for the first time in her life. But guess what happen? The job centre advised her not to get a job because she would be financially worse off for doing so. Unlike the link you provided this isn't some hypothetical calculation based on median UK salaries verse some hypothetical entitlement to state benefits, is a real example of what happens when you're poor. And I could cite you more examples like this from real families I know. So I respectfully I don't think you know what you're talking about here.
And I'm sorry if I'm coming off as defensive, but I need you to understand I feel people like yourself are in part responsible for the crap I have to deal with on daily basis. This single mum I'm citing just this week went to hospital for liver failure. Had she got a job last year this probably wouldn't be happening. And almost all of the kids in my family end up on drugs, in prison or in gangs. In my opinion this is largely because they have no reason to work. It's fucking hard watching people you love in pain constantly and encouraged to fuck their lives up by the state.
I know I won't change your opinion, but I guess just question some of what you read and ask if the statistics are painting a representative picture. Maybe ask why so many people aren't getting jobs and choosing to live on benefits if what you're saying is correct – do you think they're just too stupid to understand that working would be better or something?
But you see, every time without fail I try to have this conversation someone like yourself pops up citing me stats trying to disprove things which I have direct experience with and it's frustrating because I just don't think this this can be resolved until more people suffer and understand what's happening to poor families.
Anyway, to be clear, because I wasn't in my last comment, I actually don't think benefits are generous enough, which might surprise you? The problem we have in the UK is that the majority of our tax gets allocated to boomers in one way or another, mostly via the NHS and pensions. Boomers as the wealthiest generation shouldn't be the largest beneficiary of state support at the cost of young workers. What we should do is keep all of the support currently offered but stop making that dependent on not having a job. What should be conditional is benefits like pensions and free healthcare to those with ...
I find UK recruiters to be the flakiest. At first I figured it was my timezone, but they seem to really just drop prospects that don't get them a sure-fire commission immediately.
Germany. I wasn't exactly laid off, just left in a bad time. Zero applications, just recruiters reaching out, I started 8 processes, 4 are still ongoing, on 2 I got ghosted, but got 2 offers so far which I gotta answer till next week.
EDIT: I got 18 years of experience, web full stack (react/vue/golang/rails/C#/haskell) + devops, if that matters.
Yes! Team Lead has a management component to it. You often handle 1-on-1s, promotions, conflicts resolution, lead hiring processes, act a middleman to other parts of the company, but you still code (unlike a "pure" manager). Tech lead is more of a tech-only role, and there's often a non-coding manager present as well. All IME of course.
Keep in mind that's for team lead (which is "50% IC" I guess). But it's not exactly hard to see around 110k-120k for senior freelancing/consulting positions when you have good experience and great contacts. Also I see some Principal/Staff that make around this, this but those positions are sort of "tailor made" for certain individuals and are often "internal" and hard to apply for.
EDIT: Also the market moved quite a bit recently. A few years ago I wouldn't see this salary range at all. Also notice I'm getting old... Due to my experience/resumé I was also headhunted for principal and CTO positions, so there's that.
You've got an interesting story and a great outlook. Would you be up for a coffee? I would love to chat and share notes with you. I'm also based in Berlin.
Unfortunately not yet! However I did talk with some recruiters that wanted me to work with Clojure and Elixir, despite not having written a single line in them, purely because I knew Haskell.
Which is kinda interesting because years ago I noticed some resistance from companies in hiring Senior/Principal/Staff in languages other than their main.
No, and there are far more disingenuous engagements from recruiters and startup founders. It seems like a perceived 'glut of senior talent' is driving this behavior, at least that is my conclusion.
I was a senior dev at a big tech and got laid off in November. I have applied to hundreds of places. Not a lot of responses. I have been doing interview preps the whole time. It has been very demoralizing and I am thinking of switching careers to something else. I have been considering skilled trades. I like carpentry in particular.
Is the implication “if you did, and you’re having problems passing those tests now, that’s karmic retribution”?
If so, please keep in mind that interviewers at big tech generally have to follow the HR script for interviewing. I have very little leeway as an interviewer in how to conduct the interview. I can select from a narrow group of problems, and I ask each candidate a couple of “soft skills” questions to gauge their level of experience, but the bulk of the interview still relies on their performance on the technical assessment.
As someone with more carpentry experience (paid) than dev experience, but strong interests in both worlds, I’m curious how you would reconcile taking an approximate 50% reduction in comp. Don’t know the numbers for your area but knowing Bay Area salaries, senior devs make 2-2.5x journeyman carpenters.
I did that to work for a non-profit in a field I was a bit interested in. It's okay in the beginning but I soon started to regret the huge paycut. Wouldn't recommend.
As someone who has no carpentry experience but has spent a lot of time on woodworking as a hobby, I absolutely don't look forward to a carpentry job, even if the tech job market goes further south. Jobs take the fun out of your hobby sooner or later, and I have learned that lesson with software development.
I had that early in my software career. I've enjoyed programming since I was a kid, but after getting my first fulltime job I started questioning if I even enjoyed it.
Turned out I was just getting burned out from the feature factory work I was doing. I took a little break and did some fun hobby projects, and I instantly fell in love with programming again. I think making a programming career sustainable requires that we do work we actually enjoy.
A few decades later, I know what I do and don't want in a workplace. For me that means: No corporate gigs, no java, no barnacle coworkers and no jira. Yes to smart coworkers, projects I care about, technically interesting work, small teams, and a culture of responsibility taking and ownership.
Save 50% of your software income and get to a point where you’ll be set for retirement without saving another penny and then you can do what you want as long as you cover your expenses.
As a hobbyist? Not hard at all! If you're in a medium/large city, there's almost certainly one or two glassblowing studios around that have classes. As a career? That's a whole lot harder.
If you aren't a homeowner the facilities are the hard part. Need a large space where you can have a glass furnace and concrete floors that won't get damaged by molten glass. Lampworking is easier to get started in, but still need a place to run a torch (ideally with a vent hood) and store oxygen/propane cylinders.
Definitely go to a glassblowing camp if you are interested. If you have prior experience trying to control a fluid medium, like pottery for example, then that may help. In order to set up your own shop you'll want to be somewhere with low fuel costs.
I worked with one developer who became a master electrician. He was experienced and intelligent but obviously burnt out on software. And he sure seemed happier when I ran into him a couple years after making that career transition.
My uncle who had a nice very senior eng job ago dipped out and walked into a plumber shop saw the help wanted sign in the window and they hired him on the spot. He then did that for 25 years until he retired. He said it was nice that the jobs were short and the outcome was usually very predictable but gross on many occasions.
From what I heard back during the dot com bust bartending was somewhat similar. Perhaps these days it'd be mixology, or attempting to become a sommelier.
I enjoy woodworking because it's something I can do with my hands that has a definite beginning and end, unlike most software which is often never really done. I find the completion of these whole projects very cathartic.
I like the fact that it produces something tangible and (hopefully) long lasting. None of the systems I've set up between 2000-2015 are still alive; so much time and effort lost.
Might be an age thing. I started doing it in my 30s, and we have a diy channel in slack that's pretty active with wood workers. And I know of at least one famous YT wood worker that used to be a developer.
It intersects well with 3d printing and CNC stuff.
I had a colleague leave to become a carpenter, then return after a few years when they realised that it's hard physical work that can be bad for your lungs.
I mean, I have a collection of very old engineering books, including one on Petroleum Refinery Engineering and a Reinforced Concrete Design Handbook printed when text books where $2. But I had no idea this was a "thing" among developers.
Apparently. I went into the Last Bookstore in Los Angeles, found that manual, and... had to have it. Didn't understand why. Mentioned that to the clerk, who said: "You're a software developer, aren't you? A lot of you have that reaction."
"Sorry I missed your comment of many months ago. I no longer build software; I now make furniture out of wood. The hours are long, the pay sucks, and there's always the opportunity to remove my finger with a table saw, but nobody asks me if I can add an RSS feed to a DBMS, so there's that :-)"
Funny story - a good friend who was doing high-end cabinetry lost a finger to a table saw, so he boned up on his coding skills and got a great job in the film FX business.
I've been slowly remodeling my tiny condo. Drywall, plumbing, simple electrical, windows, painting, flooring, etc. Teaching myself most of the stuff just off YouTube. It is a lot of manual labor work which is exhausting and gives me a lot of respect for the trade crafts, but I'm enjoying it quite a bit and slowly accumulating all the tools as well. None of this is rocket science.
In the back of my mind, I think of flipping houses as something to do if I ever get laid off from my tech job. I look at places coming up for sale on Zillow that were obvious flips and they all look like the parts all came straight out of Ikea / HomeDepot (and usually the most ugly stuff to choose from).
Flipping can work but it can be much harder to be reasonably profitable without insane appreciation.
Your best bet is fixers - houses with obvious major issues that everyone is scared of but you know you can fix reasonably cheaply. This can mean buying a $500k house with major foundation damage for $100k because everyone is scared - but you know a whole foundation replacement will only run you $200k.
If it's that bad you need a construction loan, and that is a wholly different line of business, the bank will want to see proof that you have experience and a financial buffer to pull off the project. But if you have both, good on you!
Well your own link states how fixers are not really a good idea, but you want "disasters" and trasform them in "fixers".
And it is not like you can find such disasters easily, nor that you can easily be able to make them into fixers, without years of previous experience.
The whole approach, "everyone is scared but you know ..." is based on the assumption that you know more than anyone else (possibly including many people dealing with this kind of stuff for decades), I doubt that anyone can learn what is needed in this field overnight, by reading a book, and should it be possible, everyone would do it, not just you.
Yeah, that's the whole problem with "make money in real estate" - either it requires (somewhat specialized) knowledge and risk-taking, or you're just gambling on insane appreciation and leveraging that.
Anything that "anyone can do" is going to explode at some point.
Let's put aside for the moment the risk-taking aspect.
The "somewhat specialized" knowledge can be explicited as four main things:
1) years (and I mean years) of experience in the field (to be able to quickly assess the non-evident potentialities of a building)
2) knowing a few good, tested, reliable technicians such as architects/engineers (to be able to get a valid project leveraging on these potentialities)
3) knowing (more than) a few good tested, reliable, capable firms (masons/carpenters/plumbers/electricians/painters/etc.) to actually execute the restoration
4) time to be dedicated to managing the project
If you think that - even if you actually happen to find a "gem" - that you can make money hiring people you find on the internet or on the yellow pages, or that the people involved will manage to do a good work at a fair price by themselves, you won't go very far.
The problem I see is that you need to find the fixer gem, but location matters. Certainly, you can buy a fixer in the middle of Ohio, but who wants to live there? There is just too much surrounding inventory with low desirability.
The thing that works in my eyes is to buy in areas that are extremely desirable, even pay a bit more for it, but very low inventory. That's where the insane appreciation comes in. Popular beach towns are a good example because they are land locked and can also be turned into short term rental properties relatively easy, which increases their perceived value.
It isn't easy to find such places and often requires paying in cash, but it is possible.
And? You're taking something personally and proving my point with that statement.
The millions of people who live there, already live there. That doesn't increase demand. It is a large state, so there is plenty of space to build. Density is centered around three locations and the largeness of the state means that people can expand out to the suburbs.
What you want is somewhere with a high density, inability to add more property and desirable for vacations (like a beach with views). San Francisco was kind of a good example of this for a very long time, until it wasn't. There are other cities on coastlines that fit this model though.
Buy a condo that has dual use (STR), refurb it, flip it.
Yeah, no. Lived in Cleveland for several years, moved overseas to Taiwan and never looked back. I could do a quick canvassing of a dozen of my friends on the top 10 desirable states to live in and Ohio wouldn't even appear a single time.
Keep your head up; as you can imagine places that are actively recruiting are being inundated with resumes, many of which have Amazon, MSFT, Google, etc on them.
March it heats up. Check your resume over. If I can get a job without any big tech you will be fine. Make your resume focus on numbers and maybe have someone review it for free.
- Wrote feature that saved the company $X millions of dollars.
- Automated manual process that saved the company X hours each time they do this process.
- Built a website that served X00,000 customers over the span of Y months.
- Managed X number of people on this project.
Instead of:
- Was responsible for making this software, filling out forms, talking to client, etc.
- I built a website with a database.
- I used X, Y, and Z technologies on this project.
Focus on bullets that show real numbers in metrics that companies care about (saving time, money, gaining customers, number of reports), wherever possible.
The others can be useful too, but shouldn't be what you highlight (list of tech doesn't hurt for hitting buzzwords, though).
I moved to France at 60. For more than 20 years, I have developed software in vb and SQL, don't laugh. Two years ago, I found a job as a freelancer. It seems that my client is happy, month after month the contract is renewed. The daily rate is not among the highest but let me have a good life in France. I don't know how long this will last. The only problem is that I don't have time for my passion, woodworking with manual tools. Conclusion, there, there must be a solution for you as well.
Bear in mind that if you are declaring yourself as an independent contractor but working full time for a single customer for a long time, the tax authorities may consider you are in effect an employee and ask both you and the customer to reimburse employment contributions
Honestly it's not a bad option if you except the work will suck. I did it for a while after getting severance from a tech job. I did a first year carpentry program. We built a house from the ground up for Habitat for Humanity.
After the program I worked in the industry for a while. When you are starting in carpentry it's a lot of grunt work. People won't care if you have any training. After a full day of vacuuming drywall dust I had enough. Quit and landed a programming job.
I still think it was a valuable experience. It shows you value of hard work. If there is time to lean there is time to clean is a very real thing. I was in the best shape of my life. I now have the skills to do most of my own Renos.
I am getting all sorts of confused by some of the responses here. Does woodworking mean building pretty furniture? Whereas carpentry means building big sturdy structures?
I've been doing this stuff for decades. It has become an unbearable career. It's too late for me in life to change it as there are other circumstances that have made certain paths impossible for me to do. I'm screwed. Meanwhile, the uppers keep getting paid more and more while I get tossed. I honestly believe this is my final year on this planet.
>> I honestly believe this is my final year on this planet.
You are obviously an intelligent person who is entertaining some unhealthy thoughts. Many people have felt the way you feel-- it happens. But you need to seek therapy or the council of someone you trust to put your problems in perspective. Your life is precious even if it doesn't feel that way right now.
I don't think you need "therapy", as in professional mental health sessions.
Do share what's up, though. Unhappiness isn't that uncommon. I am not very happy and have been oscillating between "I should quit first thing tomorrow" and "but I have to do the grind while I still can"
I majored in classical music, released 40 records, played to hundreds of thousands of people, produced national US radio shows, recorded bands, tended bars, washed cars, been a cook, built generative music systems and much more.
It is precisely due to my varied experience that I can point this out: the vast majority of startups and tech is dust in the wind.
There's plenty of code already written today that will still be in use long after we're dead. (Well, assuming gpt10 doesn't rewrite it all).
If ephemeral codebases bother you, work on projects that will last longer. Things I expect will outlive us: Chrome, PostgreSQL, SQLite, LLVM, Linux/Windows/MacOS, Unity, Nodejs, Nginx.
I have a few small contributions in chromium and nodejs. There's something really delightful about looking at a strangers' laptop and knowing some of my code is in their machine.
Have you considered working with any third-party recruiters? It seems that going through one is the only way to get the attention of most companies, these days. I would advise not taking the lack of responses personally, because cold applications are, generally coldly, disposed of (a human never passes judgement on them).
FWIW, I found my last two jobs through third party recruiters, and still count them as friends. It's an industry with an oddly-poor reputation, but there are some real gems of people to be found in it.
I’m a product designer. Contract expired, and it seems really hard to find another. LinkedIn shows me most of the roles have 150-250 applicants… Getting silent treatment even for roles where I seem to be 100% perfect match to their requirements, even overqualified :-) Not trying to brag, but realistically I’d estimate my work & experience puts me among top 10% of product designers. But the market seems to be tougher than ever before. Lots of designers better than me in the market.
US, looking for remote. 15+ years experience been looking since early January, and I still don't feel like I have traction. Worst job market for engineers I've seen in a long time. I have hope it'll improve in March when budgets are finalized, but at the same time I'm preparing for it to be a long one. First unemployment in my career, up until now I had employers coming to me.
I suspect the remote aspect is the biggest thing slowing you down. I go in once a month, which is practically a remote job, but those who moved during the pandemic and wouldn't fly in and take a hotel on their expense once a month had to leave
There are 1000 different flavors of mixed home-office working right now, but not that much fully remote
True. I work remotely in a different state from my company's HQ, but I travel to the office for about a week once a quarter. I actually feel safer with this arrangement than if my HQ were local, because everyone around me is slowly getting forced back into the office. First on an as-needed basis, then one mandatory day per week, then three days a week. Most big companies will be back to five mandatory days a week soon enough, it seems.
I'm not so sure, at least I know plenty of people in tech hubs that are in a similar position. Certainly anything that reduces the number of jobs you can accept will limit your opportunities, but I'm not sure being open to in-office would immediately solve the problem.
In the end it doesn't matter. Due to family concerns relocation is not an option, and anything local would be a huge pay cut. I'll go that route if I reach the point where I need to, but I'm holding off for now.
You might have to take a paycut even working remotely. A lot of companies now pay what you'd expect locally rather than in a tech hub. So, if you worked remotely from San Francisco you'd earn more than if you worked remotely from somewhere rural.
> but those who moved during the pandemic and wouldn't fly in and take a hotel on their expense once a month had to leave
...did anybody actually agree to that?
Maybe I'm off base, but requiring employees to pay for mandatory business trips out of pocket seems insane to me. Is that even legal? It's a camouflaged pay cut, from one point of view (probably actually worse when you consider taxes).
That isn't what the OP was saying. These are people who /were/ local office employees, moved away during the pandemic and aren't coming back into the office from time to time to make an appearance on their own dime.
AWS, yes Python no. One of the few programming languages I haven't had cause to learn. I can learn in no time but I have to assume at the moment you've got plenty of applicants who hit that bar. If you do want to talk my e-mail is in my profile.
A better answer might be to try to set up a phone call/email/etc with the other person and then you can back up your claim of 'no time' with real data, like "I have all this other background in networking and operating systems or whatever, and I also already know how to program in languages X,Y, and Z, and wrote these pieces of code at companies A,B, and C, so Python should be much easier for me than someone who just left university and meanwhile I bring all these other things to the table."
Remember: people don't (always) hire resumes. People hire people.
Anecdotally I see very few junior/low level positions open, most jobs seem to be senior+. Salary ranges are all a bit higher than I remember them being 3 years ago. I am still a long way from being scared enough to take something I don't like or that doesn't pay well, still optimistic things will swing back eventually.
i'm curious, from what you can tell, has anyone cared about your voluntary break or is it all the same to them?
i quit/retired about 4 years ago and often wonder if i applied places how much it would be held against me wanting to have control over my life like that.
An 8 month gap is not a big negative as long as the candidate can say something sensible as to why. It's not a long enough time for knowledge to go stale. With a 4 year gap, you would have a much harder time getting interviews.
4 years is a long time, so you should have some explanation, but there is really only one way to find out! No one has asked about why I took 8 months off yet.
Remember that there are many reasons why someone would not get hired despite having top work experience.
I have seen people out of FAANGs with 10+ years of experience sharing their CV after being laid off and some will struggle to get any interview, let alone get a good job, just because the format of said CV was absolutely awful.
If you aren't getting interviews, it's your CV that is the problem.
Adding detail seems like a good idea, a CV is really communicating how well you can boil off the meaningless details and manage upwards. It's more sales than we are taught or intuitively realize.
9/10 resumes I have been seeing are the default auto generated ones from LinkedIn. Sometimes those look alright but the rest are 5+ page monstrosities.
Not a resume expert, but one thing that I think is bad are the multiple page resumes. You should try as hard as you can to make it fit on one page. It's so much easier to get recruiters to read a one page resume.
I wouldn’t call them for interview because I perceive them as out of my budget. Could be true or false depending on the individual but I think it’s also knowing if your Top experience also unintentionally conveys something else that’s turning people away. This is how bubbles pop and it’s likely the fallout will be reduced comp for many of you folks when you land somewhere.
I'm looking for > mid backend folks right now, kotlin + spring boot/micronaut. preferably rhein-main area/Germany or remote in Germany. Just hit me up ;)
Weirdly, a senior dev from my company was recruited by another company and will be changing jobs in a couple weeks. And to be clear, he is not a unicorn type. He's a good senior developer in a common language.
It's hard for me to understand recruiters "fishing in the neighbor's pond" while there are plenty of unemployed, qualified senior devs out there right now.
Yeah, I worried about this, which is why I didn't tell anyone I was interviewing with that I'd been laid-off.
Laid off in August, new job by end of September. That being said, it was much tougher than other times, and I have 10+ years experience in data science (which most candidates in this field won't have). I also interview well, which helped a lot.
I've always assumed this was the stigma, so I've always avoided mentioning it, but during the much more competitive market in 2020-2021, it seemed like big tech types were the only ones wise enough to look past that stigma and appreciate that often, cuts are to business units, not people. My wife was part of a big (31%) layoff at an AI Healthcare company during the earliest round of layoffs, and she had literally hundreds of requests to interview within the first two days of being laid off.
This round of layoffs seems different. If big tech isn't hiring, and they're the only ones wise enough to see through the stigma, that is a possible explanation for why.
It's like those people think there are layoff cooties or something, as if it's a virus that will transfer to their company. It's just a big shakeup of talent finding a new home.
This stigma exists because in past cycles (think 90s') layoffs were performance ranked. We can argue if such metrics are fairly calculated etc, but that often was the reason given.
I don't agree, but I imagine the mindset is "why would I hire someone who didn't make the cut and got laid off when I could poach somebody else that did make the cut at their company."
Sure there's plenty? Some reqs are ridiculously detailed and specific. Oh you have Python 3.10.7 installed, sorry we can't hire you we use 3.10.6 here. Next! Oh we want someone with 4 years experience, you only have 3 yrs 11 months call back later. Next!
Laid off from a US remote backend/data role in a large, FAANG-adjacent tech company in early January. I have always had a high callback rate with 20+ years of experience and a CS degree from a tier 1 university. This time, my only callbacks were through internal referrals from my network or introductions made through recruiters. I ended up with two offers by the end of January, one from a growing startup and the other from a mid-market company with a conservative business model. Given the slowdown in the market, I'm thankful to have found something so quickly.
My take is that this is not nearly as bad as the dotcom crash in the early 2000s, but the red hot tech market of 2021 where companies were hiring as fast as they could with incredible comp packages is gone. There are still a good number of roles out there, but companies are being more careful in their hiring and they are not trying to compete with (the no longer hiring) FAANGs when it comes to compensation.
> I ended up with two offers by the end of January, one from a growing startup and the other from a mid-market company with a conservative business model. Given the slowdown in the market, I'm thankful to have found something so quickly.
Call me crazy, but I went with the startup. It's been a while since I felt like my work had any real impact on the business and I thought it could at this startup, so I'm taking the risk.
Similar situation, although I’ve been focusing on other things since I don’t desperately need a job yet. I think my interview skills are fine but I’ve had a hard time getting interviews. I’ve been able to mostly enjoy the time off but there have been periods of stress as well.
It’s helpful to read stories like yours and feel less isolated. Good luck.
Firstly, I'm really sorry to everyone who has been laid off. It's such an awful experience, and I'm sorry you're going through it. You're not alone, and everyone is cheering for you! Take care of yourself. You'll get through this.
The macro environment looks to be improving, and companies are mostly doing this to put downward pressures on salaries or because they overzealously hired during the pandemic. There are lots of things being built right now that need to be scaled.
I hope this doesn't come off tonally bad - I'm able to contract to hire a few (3-5) folks. I'm building an at-home Hollywood studio, and I'm looking for remote engineers with the following skills:
- Rust/Actix for backend, web services (and a real time desktop app we've yet to launch). This is my #1 need.
- Unreal Engine engineers, preferably with animation and C++ experience. This will help us tremendously. Longer term we'd like to explore Godot, but that's less immediate - more Q3/4.
- ML, especially with generative media experience. We've got a good sized team, but we're always looking to expand it. Experience with audio, images, LLMs/NLP, video a plus.
I'm financing this myself, and we have considerable runway financed from my last exit. There will be equity and full time offers extended if you're interested in sticking with us.
We're hiring at our company. We've had a lot of people come through from the recent waves of layoffs, and usually so far there has been a mix of too high expectations, remote work mismatches as well as just lots of people not making the bar (we are a small company).
Still on the lookout for senior rust engineers who want to work at a company that's remote-first with a minimal-meetings culture.
In general, I'm curious if people replying to this thread have had success with applying to HN "Who's Hiring?" listings. At my previous job, at a small company (~50 total employees), posting in those threads was by far our best recruiting tool. While we filtered out a lot of uninspiring resumes, we also responded quickly to people who seemed like a reasonable match.
If I were looking, after exhausting personal contacts from previous employment, that's where I would head next.
I've had the best response rate from the Who's Hiring thread, had about seven phone screens and two or three full interview courses (from contacting in regards to ~10 positions from 2018 to 2020). I haven't applied anywhere since Covid began though so not sure if recent trends are different.
Interesting how companies have trouble hiring for hyper specific tech that they might abandon in a few years. Then what happens to these "rust engineers", do they get laidoff for the next hiring of "X engineers".
As someone who did this for "low-latency min-allocation Java", the answer is that I have the need for this X now but I'm confident they can adapt to whatever comes later. The truth is that anyone on my team can become proficient in this given time, but I'd rather get someone who can juice the machine by showing up with existing knowledge and we'll all get ahead faster with them. I wouldn't fire someone in order to get this person for various reasons (some obvious, some not).
> rather get someone who can juice the machine by showing up with existing knowledge
This doesn't feel like a sustainable way to build engineering org. You only get N chances for such 'juicing', what do you do when you need to juice but don't have open headcount. You have to come up with a strategy for that anyways, so why not implement ' want juice but no headcount' strategy and expand your hiring pool.
I've also found that people who sell themselves as "Rust/SAP/Java engineer" seem to have a huge bias against anything else which makes sense since they've built their careers selling themselves as experts in a particular niche.
We're a small prop shop. I don't need to do sustainable in the way you're thinking. And I think we might be speaking at cross purposes. I want someone with a skillset. I'm going to hire them for that skillset. That doesn't mean they only have that skillset but that's the thing that provides utility.
Some part of the answer here is that we aren't a company that only works on our own products or research - we have a bunch of client work as well. But yes, "low-level" language could be used here as well.
If you have another way to get in contact other than telegram let me know. I’m not looking, but I’m a senior rust engineer and have others in my network who may be interested.
This is the impression that I'm getting from a lot of these posts and what I've heard and experienced on my job hunt. I'm seeing plenty of "I was laid off from Meta/Google..." etc posts and can't help but wonder what the comp was. Maybe the big names on resumes look like high price tags these days?
That's why I think the hiring freeze that took place at FAANG is the right approach. Companies should not play with people, and it reflects poorly on the decision makers.
Seems like they wanted to participate in the copycat layoffs but didn't have enough staff they could let go (sorry for the joke in bad taste).
But seriously now: this only goes to show how those layoffs are about companies fucking up, rather than about people. Laying off people who just got hired is amateur hour.
Laid off Jan 18th from Microsoft, not really the unicorn type I would say but well above average in my field (imo)
Applied to a couple positions ~5-6 and got a couple automated rejections, no interviews or initial calls through this process. I think not having a degree makes it difficult to get past the initial screening
About 2-3 recruiter messages per day on linkedin. I responded to around 10 or so, of which 7 I had initial interviews with the company after my resume was passed up. Had 2 rejections and 3 offers, only 1 of which was under my current salary. I interviewed for mostly 100% remote, I think only 1 company of the ones I was looking at required 2-3 days in office
Serious question for the folks who are not getting many callbacks. Are you looking for remote-only work, or are you looking at both remote and on-site opportunities?
My experience trying to set up my next C2C contract is remote is utterly dead and every posting has like 500 to 1500 applicants, whereas the locals are mostly hybrid (like you will attend weekly team meetings live in person) and locals are seeking me out.
I have seen weird verbiage for remote work at big companies where they post a senior level job description with an amazing shopping list of requirements and nice-to-haves but its a "junior developer" job title and pay. Which is an interesting way to handle wage deflation. Sometimes the desired shopping list of technologies is so immense I can't imagine what the role would be doing day to day, the entire technology stack at a small startup is possible but the entire technology stack at a huge multinational is, well, very huge!
As such I've pretty much stopped trying for remote. Maybe the market will be better later.
My situation is kind of different. DevOps guy with 10+ years of experience. I've been fully remote for the past seven years, but the past five years I haven't had any choice but to be fully remote because I am staying with my family in SE Asia. Since I'm not in a position to move at the moment, I can only take remote roles.
I was laid off in November. I've applied to dozens, probably hundreds of jobs. I've had two interviews (one bigtechco) and a YC startup. Both did not work out as they went with more senior candidates. I decided to take a different approach and tailor my resume to each job and narrow the types of jobs I applied too. This has led to an increase in recruiter calls and I'm setting up interviews now.
However it does seem there is still a lot of flux, especially with larger companies who are still trying to allocate headcount. I've had calls with Google that were basically like: "we're interested, but we don't know HC yet, let's circle back in 3 weeks".
Gotten fooled by this at least twice now, beware - companies with these “roles” will take you through their entire 5 week interview funnel and drop you at the very last stage if you’re not 10x enough to be worth pulling head count out of thin air. What a waste of time.
Always try and find out if the role they’re hiring for is an actual role they have a vested interest in filling and not just a generic “statement of interest”.
‘09 sucked. I had to go from a decently paid jr dev to doing crap few months contracts for tiny (but demanding) local companies for over a year until I found a good company to escape to
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 358 ms ] threadIf you have money, find a career coach with a big network.
edit: this is rapidly becoming an interview about my job search and I don't really have the energy for it. I've answered the questions I feel like answering and I'm good for now.
That being said, I have a similar profile to you and I've been getting nearly no messages from recruiters even if I'm open to on-site work. The market's just difficult right now, keep looking!
Why do you think you're not getting responses?
A lot of reasons that should be reassuring to most of the rest of you don't worry I'm sure everything will be fine :)
It was quite jarring, for me, as I had been quite sought-after, before (Which was why I had the job I had, at a marquee corporation).
Turns out out, it was because of my age.
Lot of these laid off folks, are probably gonna encounter the same thing.
What do you mean? Are you young and they were interested? Or a senior level developer who was older and they were interested?
The ageism in tech is pervasive. People seldom even bother hiding it; even though it's just as illegal as sexism or racism.
Lots of smiling young faces. Maybe one or two gray heads, and you often find out they are Principals, in one way or another.
One of the dirty little secrets of tech ageism, is the ones doing it, are often older folks, themselves. IBM has been caught doing it, and the impetus came from their (quite gray) C-Suite.
Especially people in their late 30s to 40s with kids who haven't left yet. I suppose there's really no too old to have kids who are not yet independent, given that a non-negligible percentage of millenials and zoomers will still be living with parents and whatnot
What's it like when being laid off in the UK? Do you get guaranteed severance and some breathing room from the stress of rent or mortgage payments? Do you worry about access to high quality Healthcare?
Overall, do you think being in the UK makes you less worried that a layoff will leave you broke and homeless?
You get a minimum of 2 week's extra pay if you have over 2 years service, and Job Seekers' Allowance is about 77 quid a week - so imagine living on less than $500 a month.
Healthcare access (via the NHS) is unaffected, you might be able to get free prescriptions too.
But in general it's terrible.
As always in Europe you either want to be an ultra-rich landowning aristocrat (little to no property tax, inheritance tax, etc.) or very poor/unemployed (e.g. a refugee) so you qualify for state housing, etc. - work does not pay. You pay high taxes and then don't qualify for assistance when it matters. The USA is better by far where you can just manage your own savings with your 3-4x higher salary, healthcare is still an issue though.
First of all you get around 1kish a month no questions asked, more if you have bills etc. you can prove you need to pay
and if you opted into "unemployment insurance" while employed, you'd be getting 60-80% of your salary for the next 12 months
this insurance costs around 100e a year to opt into
I just left an inappropriately long comment saying, in effect, actually the same thing.
The US isn't perfect, but if you want to work you're generally able to move up the economic ladder easier from what I've seen. High income taxes combined with consumption taxes make wealth creation via employment almost impossible.
Depends on what 'wealth' means here, but you can get a 1% salary in England in your late 20s by contracting in tech and save several grand a month. Put that in shares & buy-to-lets and you'll be very well off by 40 compared to the average person. With the lower cost of living I don't see any issues here... If that's what drives you of course.
According to recent Nobel prizes in economic (Duflo and Banerjee), moving up the economic ladder has degraded so much in the US that it's currently lagging slightly behind Europe.
Their study dates back to ~2018, though.
When my partner became unemployed in the USA i was amazed that she was getting $750 a week and her healthcare plan was $200 a month due to the marketplace subsidy.
I studied, lived and worked in high demand field all my adult life in Europe, am in my mid 30s and have nothing really to show for it. Salaries are lower than USA, the taxes are ridiculous, (progressive up to 50%), reasonably new house prices in reasonable locations are in millions. And health care... lol.. ok - it just about works, but as you can imagine anything public is prone to corruption and lowest passable quality
Seeing USA, the last bastion for people who could make something out of themselves by real work crumbling and crawling to its death is disheartening.
I was merely pointing out the fact that it was possible to ascent to higher wealth class in USA with regular 'honest work' some years ago, whereas in Europe this is in general impossible due to taxation schemes designed to suck the life out of anyone who decides to work as opposed to being born an 'aristocrat' inheriting money, land etc...
Marginal tax rates in California are also around 50% as well (above or below, depending on income). Houses are certainly in the millions.
But on top of this you get to pay separately for extremely expensive health insurance and education, things that in most countries are very reasonably priced or even "free" (not free since it's paid for by the taxes, but at least you get services in exchange for your taxes, unlike in the US where you pay the taxes and have to pay separately for all the services).
$35,000-$80,000 [25%] $80,000-$170,000 [28%]
I'm just going to let you know that in Europe (Austria) personal income of 32,076 to 62,080 is taxed at 42% rate above 60k is taxed with 50%. And this does not include social and health insurance that is mandatory...
To give you TLDR of the European experience, you look at the gross salary, multiply by 0.45 and this is the real money you would see landing in your account, .. enjoy .. :)
Have you ever spoken to a (non-white) refugee in Europe?
> Do you worry about access to high quality Healthcare?
I don't have private healthcare. Unless you're very rich most people in the UK just put up with the NHS. I'm young and healthy though so almost never need it anyway. In general I don't think any worries about access to healthcare here.
> Overall, do you think being in the UK makes you less worried that a layoff will leave you broke and homeless?
I'll give you a long answer to this because social mobility and the affordability of homes is something I care deeply about and apparently have a controversial opinion on... But the TL;DR would be that I'm more worried about being broke, but less about being homeless than someone in a similar situation to myself living in the US.
Now the long answer...
The UK is weird in that if you're from a background like mine and you want a decent life (a home and family) you're generally better off not working. With the exception of myself the only people I know from my childhood who have their own homes are those without jobs and on benefits. I don't believe this is the same in the US.
In the UK if you work you're unlikely to be able to afford your own home unless you have fairly wealthy parents who can give you money, or a very good job – and if you're from a council estate you're almost guaranteed to have neither.
So I'm not worried about being homeless because the state will give me a home, but I often feel I'm in an impossible situation in terms of moving up the economic ladder via employment. Imo there's no real wealth mobility in the UK because we're taxed so aggressively and progressively on income. In effect the more you try to earn to not be poor the more the state will hold you back to ensure that never happens, but if you're super wealthy already then you're not taxed a penny on what you have while the poor will pay for your public services and pension via income tax and various consumption taxes.
The end result is that it means the best way to be wealthy in the UK is simply to inherit it (in ways that avoid inheritance tax, obviously). Although I would acknowledge starting a business is another viable option as that way you don't need to worry about income tax – but that's obviously not easy and requires a decent amount of luck.
So I think the right answer your question is that it's just different here. If you're poor the state looks after you very well in comparison to the US. I know single mums who have been given £500,000 houses to live in by the state and £30,000 a year to live on (untaxed). But if you're from a background like mine and want to work for a living there isn't a practical path to afford a £500,000 house in your 30s as a single parent – not to mention the luxury of not having to work a single day of your life for that lifestyle.
Speaking purely from a personal perspective, I would I'd feel much more financially secure in the US because the tax system is fairer there. My understand is that in the US you're taxed less for trying to build wealth and I don't believe you have consumption taxes. I think this is generally why people who work hard in the US can end up wealthy, but in the UK similar things don't really happen.
But I would point out that most people in the UK disagree with me on this. Those who claim to care about social mobility the most here are generally the loudest advocates for even higher levels of income tax.
If you’re not working, sure there are some state benefits but to assume that life on benefits is some sort of ‘easy ride’ is nonsense. Your quality of life will be poor, there will barely be enough money to heat and eat and your “house” will most often be a poor quality council flat. Some accommodation is so bad there have been deaths caused by mould.
It sounds like you may have developed a skewed view of the situation perhaps due to your personal experiences. You should read up on some of the myths about benefits at this website:
https://www.poverty.ac.uk/editorial/exposing-benefit-‘myths’
Income tax rates for the highest earners are relatively low in the UK compared to other European nations. Denmark has the highest personal income tax rate, at 56%, compared to 45% in the UK.
I do agree there is a problem with inherited wealth in the UK though. Money makes money.
But on your overall point — nope. For the vast majority of people in the UK, all the stats evidence that your life is likely to be way more pleasant if you’re earning.
Here's a real world example for you – my sister is a single mum with no qualifications. Were she to get a job and work her ass off the most she'll realistically make is about £20,000. Some of this will be taxed and she'll no longer receive state benefits. But if you're a single mum on benefits you make around £2,000 a month tax free and have housing provided. The fact you think she can work to afford a house and a better quality of life than this is almost laughable.
But to your point if you're a median earner, say someone who's middle class and you work your ass off, then yes, you'll probably make a bit more – maybe £28,000. But keep in mind you'll have to work every day of your life and struggle for that privilege.
Point is the statistics suggest something that isn't true – that most poor people in the UK are better off working.
To give another example, my girlfriend's mum is a single mum of 5 children. Last year she decided she wanted a part time job because she's getting bored sitting around doing drugs and drinking all day (this is actually what she said). My girlfriend was obviously really happy about this and went with her to the job centre to help her find work for the first time in her life. But guess what happen? The job centre advised her not to get a job because she would be financially worse off for doing so. Unlike the link you provided this isn't some hypothetical calculation based on median UK salaries verse some hypothetical entitlement to state benefits, is a real example of what happens when you're poor. And I could cite you more examples like this from real families I know. So I respectfully I don't think you know what you're talking about here.
And I'm sorry if I'm coming off as defensive, but I need you to understand I feel people like yourself are in part responsible for the crap I have to deal with on daily basis. This single mum I'm citing just this week went to hospital for liver failure. Had she got a job last year this probably wouldn't be happening. And almost all of the kids in my family end up on drugs, in prison or in gangs. In my opinion this is largely because they have no reason to work. It's fucking hard watching people you love in pain constantly and encouraged to fuck their lives up by the state.
I know I won't change your opinion, but I guess just question some of what you read and ask if the statistics are painting a representative picture. Maybe ask why so many people aren't getting jobs and choosing to live on benefits if what you're saying is correct – do you think they're just too stupid to understand that working would be better or something?
But you see, every time without fail I try to have this conversation someone like yourself pops up citing me stats trying to disprove things which I have direct experience with and it's frustrating because I just don't think this this can be resolved until more people suffer and understand what's happening to poor families.
Anyway, to be clear, because I wasn't in my last comment, I actually don't think benefits are generous enough, which might surprise you? The problem we have in the UK is that the majority of our tax gets allocated to boomers in one way or another, mostly via the NHS and pensions. Boomers as the wealthiest generation shouldn't be the largest beneficiary of state support at the cost of young workers. What we should do is keep all of the support currently offered but stop making that dependent on not having a job. What should be conditional is benefits like pensions and free healthcare to those with ...
Your experience is your experience, all I can say is mine is different and almost certainly less relevant to this thread.
https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/benefits/help-if-on-a-low-...
The single parent on 30k presumably is either disabled or has a disabled child?
Good luck with it
- high guaranteed severance (~3-5 months of salary), then benefits that quickly decrease from pretty good to rather bad for 1.5 years;
- lower severance (1-2 months of salary), then high benefits for one year (nearly full pay), then low benefits for a few months.
In either case, you get ~1 year of the same health care coverage as you had before layoff, then you get downgraded to cheap health care coverage.
Still highly stressful, though.
EDIT: I got 18 years of experience, web full stack (react/vue/golang/rails/C#/haskell) + devops, if that matters.
Are there companies paying for ICs in that range?
EDIT: Also the market moved quite a bit recently. A few years ago I wouldn't see this salary range at all. Also notice I'm getting old... Due to my experience/resumé I was also headhunted for principal and CTO positions, so there's that.
Which is kinda interesting because years ago I noticed some resistance from companies in hiring Senior/Principal/Staff in languages other than their main.
If so, please keep in mind that interviewers at big tech generally have to follow the HR script for interviewing. I have very little leeway as an interviewer in how to conduct the interview. I can select from a narrow group of problems, and I ask each candidate a couple of “soft skills” questions to gauge their level of experience, but the bulk of the interview still relies on their performance on the technical assessment.
Turned out I was just getting burned out from the feature factory work I was doing. I took a little break and did some fun hobby projects, and I instantly fell in love with programming again. I think making a programming career sustainable requires that we do work we actually enjoy.
A few decades later, I know what I do and don't want in a workplace. For me that means: No corporate gigs, no java, no barnacle coworkers and no jira. Yes to smart coworkers, projects I care about, technically interesting work, small teams, and a culture of responsibility taking and ownership.
The "eventually" part is a nod towards retirement and then joking not having a choice.
huh? TIL.
Most devs I know live in condos and have no chance of having a place to do woodworking.
Maybe it's a regional thing.
It intersects well with 3d printing and CNC stuff.
(mmmm 1910 manual on steel production.)
It's a copy of this: https://www.forgottenbooks.com/en/books/CompositionandHeatTr...
Mine is a dark red hardback, printed by McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1911.
I mean, I have a collection of very old engineering books, including one on Petroleum Refinery Engineering and a Reinforced Concrete Design Handbook printed when text books where $2. But I had no idea this was a "thing" among developers.
So, very very anecdotally: yep it's a thing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24541964
In the back of my mind, I think of flipping houses as something to do if I ever get laid off from my tech job. I look at places coming up for sale on Zillow that were obvious flips and they all look like the parts all came straight out of Ikea / HomeDepot (and usually the most ugly stuff to choose from).
Your best bet is fixers - houses with obvious major issues that everyone is scared of but you know you can fix reasonably cheaply. This can mean buying a $500k house with major foundation damage for $100k because everyone is scared - but you know a whole foundation replacement will only run you $200k.
https://johntreed.com/products/fixers
And it is not like you can find such disasters easily, nor that you can easily be able to make them into fixers, without years of previous experience.
The whole approach, "everyone is scared but you know ..." is based on the assumption that you know more than anyone else (possibly including many people dealing with this kind of stuff for decades), I doubt that anyone can learn what is needed in this field overnight, by reading a book, and should it be possible, everyone would do it, not just you.
Anything that "anyone can do" is going to explode at some point.
keep assets instead of cash and you'll be a genius
The "somewhat specialized" knowledge can be explicited as four main things:
1) years (and I mean years) of experience in the field (to be able to quickly assess the non-evident potentialities of a building)
2) knowing a few good, tested, reliable technicians such as architects/engineers (to be able to get a valid project leveraging on these potentialities)
3) knowing (more than) a few good tested, reliable, capable firms (masons/carpenters/plumbers/electricians/painters/etc.) to actually execute the restoration
4) time to be dedicated to managing the project
If you think that - even if you actually happen to find a "gem" - that you can make money hiring people you find on the internet or on the yellow pages, or that the people involved will manage to do a good work at a fair price by themselves, you won't go very far.
The problem I see is that you need to find the fixer gem, but location matters. Certainly, you can buy a fixer in the middle of Ohio, but who wants to live there? There is just too much surrounding inventory with low desirability.
The thing that works in my eyes is to buy in areas that are extremely desirable, even pay a bit more for it, but very low inventory. That's where the insane appreciation comes in. Popular beach towns are a good example because they are land locked and can also be turned into short term rental properties relatively easy, which increases their perceived value.
It isn't easy to find such places and often requires paying in cash, but it is possible.
Millions of people. It's the seventh largest state in the USA, is home to three major cities and many large multinational companies.
The millions of people who live there, already live there. That doesn't increase demand. It is a large state, so there is plenty of space to build. Density is centered around three locations and the largeness of the state means that people can expand out to the suburbs.
What you want is somewhere with a high density, inability to add more property and desirable for vacations (like a beach with views). San Francisco was kind of a good example of this for a very long time, until it wasn't. There are other cities on coastlines that fit this model though.
Buy a condo that has dual use (STR), refurb it, flip it.
Has your network been helpful?
- Automated manual process that saved the company X hours each time they do this process.
- Built a website that served X00,000 customers over the span of Y months.
- Managed X number of people on this project.
Instead of:
- Was responsible for making this software, filling out forms, talking to client, etc.
- I built a website with a database.
- I used X, Y, and Z technologies on this project.
Focus on bullets that show real numbers in metrics that companies care about (saving time, money, gaining customers, number of reports), wherever possible.
The others can be useful too, but shouldn't be what you highlight (list of tech doesn't hurt for hitting buzzwords, though).
After the program I worked in the industry for a while. When you are starting in carpentry it's a lot of grunt work. People won't care if you have any training. After a full day of vacuuming drywall dust I had enough. Quit and landed a programming job.
I still think it was a valuable experience. It shows you value of hard work. If there is time to lean there is time to clean is a very real thing. I was in the best shape of my life. I now have the skills to do most of my own Renos.
You are obviously an intelligent person who is entertaining some unhealthy thoughts. Many people have felt the way you feel-- it happens. But you need to seek therapy or the council of someone you trust to put your problems in perspective. Your life is precious even if it doesn't feel that way right now.
Do share what's up, though. Unhappiness isn't that uncommon. I am not very happy and have been oscillating between "I should quit first thing tomorrow" and "but I have to do the grind while I still can"
It is precisely due to my varied experience that I can point this out: the vast majority of startups and tech is dust in the wind.
If ephemeral codebases bother you, work on projects that will last longer. Things I expect will outlive us: Chrome, PostgreSQL, SQLite, LLVM, Linux/Windows/MacOS, Unity, Nodejs, Nginx.
I have a few small contributions in chromium and nodejs. There's something really delightful about looking at a strangers' laptop and knowing some of my code is in their machine.
FWIW, I found my last two jobs through third party recruiters, and still count them as friends. It's an industry with an oddly-poor reputation, but there are some real gems of people to be found in it.
There are 1000 different flavors of mixed home-office working right now, but not that much fully remote
In the end it doesn't matter. Due to family concerns relocation is not an option, and anything local would be a huge pay cut. I'll go that route if I reach the point where I need to, but I'm holding off for now.
(Asking for a friend)
Then negotiate the definition of "regular" with your comp.
...did anybody actually agree to that?
Maybe I'm off base, but requiring employees to pay for mandatory business trips out of pocket seems insane to me. Is that even legal? It's a camouflaged pay cut, from one point of view (probably actually worse when you consider taxes).
I'm curious how others feel.
Remember: people don't (always) hire resumes. People hire people.
10 applications, 2 rejections, 1 initial phone screen
Anecdotally I see very few junior/low level positions open, most jobs seem to be senior+. Salary ranges are all a bit higher than I remember them being 3 years ago. I am still a long way from being scared enough to take something I don't like or that doesn't pay well, still optimistic things will swing back eventually.
i quit/retired about 4 years ago and often wonder if i applied places how much it would be held against me wanting to have control over my life like that.
Who would hire an employee they can't fully own.
I have seen people out of FAANGs with 10+ years of experience sharing their CV after being laid off and some will struggle to get any interview, let alone get a good job, just because the format of said CV was absolutely awful.
If you aren't getting interviews, it's your CV that is the problem.
You are selling your time.
Good luck to everyone else.
It's hard for me to understand recruiters "fishing in the neighbor's pond" while there are plenty of unemployed, qualified senior devs out there right now.
Laid off in August, new job by end of September. That being said, it was much tougher than other times, and I have 10+ years experience in data science (which most candidates in this field won't have). I also interview well, which helped a lot.
This round of layoffs seems different. If big tech isn't hiring, and they're the only ones wise enough to see through the stigma, that is a possible explanation for why.
Or how about the time a clueless recruiter asked DHH how many years of Rails experience he had and he replied "all of them."
My take is that this is not nearly as bad as the dotcom crash in the early 2000s, but the red hot tech market of 2021 where companies were hiring as fast as they could with incredible comp packages is gone. There are still a good number of roles out there, but companies are being more careful in their hiring and they are not trying to compete with (the no longer hiring) FAANGs when it comes to compensation.
Which one offer did you take?
It’s helpful to read stories like yours and feel less isolated. Good luck.
The macro environment looks to be improving, and companies are mostly doing this to put downward pressures on salaries or because they overzealously hired during the pandemic. There are lots of things being built right now that need to be scaled.
I hope this doesn't come off tonally bad - I'm able to contract to hire a few (3-5) folks. I'm building an at-home Hollywood studio, and I'm looking for remote engineers with the following skills:
- Rust/Actix for backend, web services (and a real time desktop app we've yet to launch). This is my #1 need.
- Unreal Engine engineers, preferably with animation and C++ experience. This will help us tremendously. Longer term we'd like to explore Godot, but that's less immediate - more Q3/4.
- ML, especially with generative media experience. We've got a good sized team, but we're always looking to expand it. Experience with audio, images, LLMs/NLP, video a plus.
I'm financing this myself, and we have considerable runway financed from my last exit. There will be equity and full time offers extended if you're interested in sticking with us.
Still on the lookout for senior rust engineers who want to work at a company that's remote-first with a minimal-meetings culture.
You can message me on telegram @jommi for info
If I were looking, after exhausting personal contacts from previous employment, that's where I would head next.
I've been on both sides of using HN to find work. It's just sooo good.
Interesting how companies have trouble hiring for hyper specific tech that they might abandon in a few years. Then what happens to these "rust engineers", do they get laidoff for the next hiring of "X engineers".
A rust engineer that knows why the borrow checker exists and can safely do unsafe operations likely will do fine in C,C++, Go, Java and many others.
This doesn't feel like a sustainable way to build engineering org. You only get N chances for such 'juicing', what do you do when you need to juice but don't have open headcount. You have to come up with a strategy for that anyways, so why not implement ' want juice but no headcount' strategy and expand your hiring pool.
I've also found that people who sell themselves as "Rust/SAP/Java engineer" seem to have a huge bias against anything else which makes sense since they've built their careers selling themselves as experts in a particular niche.
If I decided to jump ship now and join a financial company in which I can guarantee quick offer due to networking I feel I'm risking exactly that.
It feels like a wave, if you jump to another industry you may risk to catch the wave when it comes. Specifically financial seems to just start now?
But seriously now: this only goes to show how those layoffs are about companies fucking up, rather than about people. Laying off people who just got hired is amateur hour.
Applied to a couple positions ~5-6 and got a couple automated rejections, no interviews or initial calls through this process. I think not having a degree makes it difficult to get past the initial screening
About 2-3 recruiter messages per day on linkedin. I responded to around 10 or so, of which 7 I had initial interviews with the company after my resume was passed up. Had 2 rejections and 3 offers, only 1 of which was under my current salary. I interviewed for mostly 100% remote, I think only 1 company of the ones I was looking at required 2-3 days in office
I have seen weird verbiage for remote work at big companies where they post a senior level job description with an amazing shopping list of requirements and nice-to-haves but its a "junior developer" job title and pay. Which is an interesting way to handle wage deflation. Sometimes the desired shopping list of technologies is so immense I can't imagine what the role would be doing day to day, the entire technology stack at a small startup is possible but the entire technology stack at a huge multinational is, well, very huge!
As such I've pretty much stopped trying for remote. Maybe the market will be better later.
However it does seem there is still a lot of flux, especially with larger companies who are still trying to allocate headcount. I've had calls with Google that were basically like: "we're interested, but we don't know HC yet, let's circle back in 3 weeks".
It's always been like this. Most businesses have permanently listed "openings" that don't necessarily mean they're hiring.
Always try and find out if the role they’re hiring for is an actual role they have a vested interest in filling and not just a generic “statement of interest”.