Ask HN: How's your job search going in this current economy?
Would love to hear from the folks who have been looking for a new role.
What strategies are they using to find a new role and how much success have they had in terms of landing an interview
190 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] threadShort answer: No.
Long answer: No, and it's wild you think this might be the case.
I personally believe, at-present, it is unethical to not utilize LLM systems for underserved legal and medical populations. Here in the US, that is at least a small majority. To not be personally accessing these systems already will cost you thou$and$.
I don't know about that, companies were imploding left and right overnight. Stocks losing 99% of "value" etc.
With that said, this is the worse I've seen since that time, but really can't say it's worse than dot com meltdown.
I have been barely able to land an interview where as in 2022 I remember the situation was very different
At least for senior data leadership roles, I’ve hit a lot of JDs that were clearly written for one person (either internally, or the random Meta/Google/whatever layoff that this company is sure will take a 75% salary cut for). Networking has been really invaluable. ATS systems seem slightly more inscrutable than when I was looking two years ago (wonder if there’s some weird effect from LLM-enabled resume spam).
I dunno, it’s not horrible, but it’s definitely worse right now than I remember it in the last five or six years.
Agreed, and I feel this is happening across job families - JDs seem much more domain-specific, especially around ML/AI. I don’t remember it being like this. Yes, there is absolutely a distinction between someone working Eng in payments vs infra vs ML, but I remember those being nice-to-haves, not requisites.
Orgs that are still trying to put together their first functional data warehouse, or who haven’t even built an analytics environment yet, seem convinced that they need someone to come in and build models day one. It’s weird out there.
I get a lot of 3rd party recruiters that seem to follow a similar MO: the recruiters are all people with south Asian names, calling from US numbers (I'm in Canada), with a vague job description, they want to hire me hourly, and they are cagey about the company that they are hiring me for. They ask for my CV, my work status, and what "project" I was on. They don't really seem to consider getting hired full time, they only talk about contract work. I have never progressed with them beyond giving them my CV and an authorisation to "represent" me (letting them act as a middle man).
I've heard of scams where fake recruiters use real peoples' names and résumés to get hired at remote jobs, then substitute in their own Indian or other non-American worker.
So be very cautious and protect yourself from scams, but from what you describe they sound like the type of recruiters who got me where I am after six very happy and stress free years (UX Engineer).
The Indian recruiting firm were a 2ndary / sub contracted firm by the recruiting firm who had the contract with my employer to find a UX Engineer. It was fishy indeed especially saying I wasn't going to get paid for 30 days yet I forced them to pay me in two weeks for the first check to soothe my worries.
Overall if they are contacting you and only asking normal questions and not ones that ring of scam they could be like the Indian firm and they are fishing for the best candidates to send to their client..the primary contractor.
other than AI support to write your job descriptions and cover letter i don't see anything useful
I leetcode daily and have a system design study group. I'm honest in interviews, whether that be about a bad decision I've made or a good one. If an interviewer doesn't want me after I've been honest with them, it probably wasn't a good fit anyway.
got laid off again in May and took a break until September, which of course seemed to be the worst time for my industry. calls were extremely slow in September but I still got a few. got a more typical recruiter reach out in October. More early rejections than last time (i.e. past a recruiter call but not past the first team call), but IDK if that's more on my roles (I am being pickier than last time) or the current state.
I did get a LOT more auto rejects than before. I feel like I applied to more roles this time despite a narrower selection, so I don't know if that's simply a more representative result compared to last year or not.
I seem close to an offer I'll take but I have 3 other interviews to go for if it falls through. so, hopefully it ends with 2 months of job searching, which is about as good as last time. I took a break since I got laid off twice in 12 months and didn't want to rush to a new role like last time, but I probably would have accelerated my options if I knew it would get this bad this quickly.
Surviving only thanks to a food pantry and a house I bought for 30k$ in East Cleveland. Doing some upwork and garden work so that I can pay for utilities and taxes.
I haven’t extensively tapped my network for referrals, but I get a bad vibe from those, too. I’ve hit up about six folks and they all came back empty - no opportunities, even though they’d like to work with me again.
The only success I’ve heard is from folks grinding it out and playing the numbers game. It’s an employer’s market.
Edit: some data: Seven months, dozens of applications, four interviews. Two interviews were from applications, one from a recruiter cold-call, and one from networking. Applications to interview was about 4 months. Three were EM positions, one was senior engineer. Got through all rounds and was rejected at the end.
Fun fact: I have a canary in my resume that will normally raise a clarifying question during an interview. One of ~20 interviewers caught it. Hard to put effort into a resume when few people seem to read it.
So strange to go from too many jobs to even begin considering to nothing at all.
If someone brings it up, I’ll know they read through my resume. If they don’t bring it up, it may mean nothing. The former is a green flag, to me.
I’d suggest something more innocuous sounding, though. “Level 3 pencil twirler” or something that would elicit some conversation.
This was my exact experience. I’ve been out of work for a year and I’m more jaded than ever.
I finally got a job through what I assume was nepotism. It was the worst interview I’ve done lately, awkward, because I didn’t have any experience in the particular tech stack, but I got the offer.
What pissed me off were companies ghosting after doing the full set of rounds onsite. At one point, I was interviewing for a position a third party recruiter contacted me about. It wasn’t great, but it would pay the bill and I was desperate. It seemed like a decent fit given my last experience too. I got all the way to the final round which I had to travel hours for. At the end of the internet, one of the people even said “I imagine you’ll be hearing from us soon”. But they just ghosted me. Hell they ghosted the recruiter, who a couple weeks later was calling me asking if I had heard anything because they weren’t talking to him. If a company ghosts after an initial round or two, ok, whatever, but if I go the full distance and you don’t have the respect to even give me a yes or no, fuck you.
I'm still early in my career despite rising rapidly, so I've never had a job search that wasn't "just" a numbers game. But it's given me reasonable success, and something I've always wondered is: instead of painstakingly cultivating your resume for each job posting you come across, why not just write 1 accurate one and put that effort into, say, finding and applying to 10 positions per day for a few months?
Maybe the only reason people don't do this is the obvious one: It's really hard to find 900 open positions to apply to without moving cities unless you live in like, Los Angeles or something.
ChatGPT can generate a custom resume and cover letter for each position you apply to that's hard to distinguish from the real thing. This makes all 100-1000+ applications look like rock stars.
How does a recruiter filter through all of that? How does a hiring manager?
No, seriously, you make a good point. The idea of ha resume is fundamentally to de-risk the applicant; in a world where good writing no longer transmits that signal, you probably need to find new tactics to get that info across.
Agency Recruiters have a list of people that they know and trust, and if you keep the recruiters in the loop periodically, then they'll remember you and bat for you when the time comes.
If recruiters are getting swamped with AI generated resumes they can't trust then I'm pretty sure their instinct will be to get on the phone and call people they know and trust.
I’m probably doing something wrong. I’ve likely made 50 applications at this point. 10-15 were earlier on and went well; I had around 5 roles to interview for and 3 went to final stages. One was a no, the other took too long, and the other was an offer. Things seemed to be going alright and the offer wasn’t great, so I kept at it.
Of the 30ish applications since, I’ve had 6 responses. 3 no, one bad interview, and two upcoming interviews I don’t feel too confident in. I’m well suited to everything I apply to, but sometimes you can just feel it. I don’t think these companies will see me as a good fit.
I’m about to ramp it up quite a bit and apply more and more often. Unfortunately I’ve been in the midst of a big move, so finding time to sit and focus on job searching hasn’t been easy. Fortunately, I’m done moving. Here’s hoping it goes well.
I'm using my network too, but most of them are at the Big Tech employer which isn't super useful since I want to branch out!
Anyway, for what it's worth, I've heard it is increasingly difficult for experienced devs to get jobs now. I know that my team has more or less had a hiring freeze for about 18 months now, even though the company is doing better than ever.
Based on nothing more than headlines I've read, it seems the CEO class got spooked about the economy last year and hasn't eased up yet. It doesn't help that interest rates are high, which typically bodes poorly for tech(despite megatech having plenty of cash right now due to a number of factors, along with debt held at mostly low, fixed rates). Many, many smart folks thought the economy would have died last year. My guess is that we are largely avoiding it thanks to near-record levels of debt-based federal spending(govt debt more or less becomes an asset to private sector). If high rates force the feds to cut spending(unlikely, given war and going into an election year), I think we'll see things cool quickly, but barring that I'm not so sure the economy is going to crash anytime soon. Some sectors, yes.
Then economy was “definitely a recession coming” for like 12 months. I think people are waiting for a rate cut to unclench their sphincter and start hiring again.
That, and likely it all got a bit over the top anyway. When you have Meta product managers with TikTok videos about how cushy their job is, you know there was a bubble.
I've been back in the job market since the beginning of the year. I've probably sent out well over a hundred resumes (definitely over this number since I was keeping track until recently). I had a brief respite when I picked up a temp contract but that only lasted about a month.
I mostly get just rejections. I have over 15 years of experience. I literally know how to build out every part of a normal web/api stack.
I even have an active ongoing project I've run for 13 years and have scaled to support a couple million requests a day.
Nothing seems to matter.
I have maybe managed to get one actual call a week for the last year where I actually speak to someone from the company. And even then, it's been one "thanks for playing" response email after another.
I honestly don't know what to do. I've never had a problem at least getting interviews to the point where I'm at least in the consideration process.
I need help.
I revised my resume a few times and that hasn't helped. I've gotten more involved with LinkedIn and I get more noise but still low results.
I'm basically getting very desperate.
There's 5 links on your HN profile:
* One to your personal website that is just "work in progress" and nothing more
* One to your defunct twitter where you didn't appear to have many followers or did much of note
* One that just returns an opaque blob of json which I'm not sure how I'm meant to interpret
* One that seems like an intriguing project that seems pretty trivial on the surface but I'm willing to be convinced is more substantial but with a plus feature "coming soon" for I don't know how long and a twitter account with 12 followers
* One to a github project that you haven't touched in 9 years, also with a bunch of things you've been meaning to work on for a while but clearly haven't.
I'm willing to be disabused of this notion but my instinct via this gestalt is that you're someone who likes to overpromise and underdeliver. My question would be, what have you been doing in the last 9 months if you haven't had time to polish these bits of your public surface area?
That's probably an unfair judgement from me and in a hotter hiring environment, I'd be willing to bring you in so you could disabuse me of my prejudice and I could be pleasantly surprised but it's much easier now to filter based on trivial gut feel like this and you should be more conscious of the digital image you're putting out into the world because HMs won't bother telling you this stuff because it's an awkward conversation with no gain on their end.
Do you all actually dive deep on every resume?
We don't do coding challenges during the interview, so I want to see you can actually write code.
But make it something useful, I don't really care to see you know how to press the "Fork" button or +1 a bug report.
`https://jsonip.com/mortalcombat` `mortalcombat({"ip":"2601:645:4001:1b57:5832:dcb9:c236:59e4"});`
There's no parsing happening. If you are talking about something else, I'd love to know about whatever it is.
geuis.com/.git/config
Don't advertise you are looking for a job (recruiters don't like to hire people looking for a job, that means they can't find a job and are inferior to people already employed). Instead, frame yourself as employed and happy.
Message recruiters and let them know you're passively looking at opportunities in the market and wonder what they are looking for.
Beef up the LinkedIn with some recommendations, skills, etc.
Your personal site can use some updates.. get a headshot/basic whois/bio on it pointing to your LinkedIn/Github/Email and a rundown of some of your projects.
Ageism could be part of the problem as well. A clean shave/haircut/dye wouldn't hurt.
There seem to be a lot of open positions, but I suspect not compared to the number of folks on the market. Big tech just dumped a bunch of folks. “Regular tech” seems to be doing fine.
If only. It can take a week just to go from recruiter call to the first hiring manager talk. that gauntlet of 4-6 weeks of interviews is what makes me dread the interviewing time the most.
well, 2nd fastest. My fastest would be my first role if you count "reply back starts the process", since the process was 3 weeks. The problem was they took 6 weeks to reply back (and yes, applying in December is rough. one reason not to graduate in fall semester I guess), so it cancels out. Take that one as you may.
> Frankly I think the process is so long because a company doesn't want to hire new people/a replacement
to give some generosity: a bad fit SWE can certainly do a lot of damage to a codebase and overall team morale, even if kicked out in 3 months. That plus the higher pay compared to other industries makes me understand some scrutiny. those 3 months are still ~30-50k+ just to "test" someone on the field.
But I do agree at some point in your career that it shouldn't take 5 interviews to see if someone is BS'ing their resume (that's what background checks and references are for) nor has "1 years of experience 10 times". I can only see more than 3 interviews (or 2 + recruiter call) being necessary if they are considering you for multiple roles (which you hopefully agreed to, either in applications or in the recruiter call). recruiter call -> technical/leadership evaluation -> soft question/culture fit (this can be 2nd if you want).
I think that the low hire rate comes down to more competition, plus some larger companies maybe have zombie hiring processes where the effort to hire someone continues, but if they find someone the funding disappears.
I've been trying to supplement with consulting, but I don't have any experience selling myself in that way so progress has been slow. In the meantime I am looking ay it as a good investment to get some experience on that front.
I'm curious why you're asking though? Wanting to switch and testing the water? Looking yourself and having a hard time?
I touched up the resume a little bit but otherwise I'm not doing anything a whole lot differently. I was almost allowing myself to quit this ass job if I instead got some vendor certs, but I'm increasingly concerned that a decent job market might years away, not months, so the suffering continues. :)
DevOps/Software Engineer with 20+ years experience. ~100 applications this year, a good number of interviews, but no offers yet. (2.5 calls this week scheduled)
It seems I either get:
- proto-startups with ~5 people and no concrete revenue stream, or
- 5k-person enterprises who want someone with a very specific skillset
Both are fine, but they're picky... as am I, so I'm doing my own consulting for a bit.
What happened to startups? What happened to the thousands of 50-300 person companies who need tech work done? The other day a headhunter called me... because they were bored! Rather different from last year when they were juggling 4-5 excited companies in front of me.
Given my experience, I'll be giving a "Fast Developer/Startup" class to a number of companies. That'll turn into a day-long workshop that will be very valuable :)
Strategies:
- DON'T TAKE IT PERSONALLY
- find roles on e.g. LinkedIn, but _never_ do "fast apply": go to the company's site and apply directly
- use a "highlight positives/negatives" tool to draw certain words in a web page different colors. By interactively seeing a mass of green (or orange) you can quickly make a YES or NO decision on a role. I adore the Chrome plugin Highlight This -- https://highlightthis.net/
- apply for jobs on a schedule (e.g. Mon-Wed-Fri), don't just struggle for hours at a time, it's soul-sucking.
- do Studying (job-related tech) interspersed with Fun Programming (generative art!) -- have fun!
- take care of your health and family, go outside and take walks
- DON'T TAKE IT PERSONALLY
I’m also probably going to look for a job soon. Do you think that being very skilled in a niche could help if there is work in that niche or would you think that even those jobs are gone?
20+ years exp, from greenfield building to managing and improving existing things, physical, cloud, hybrid, virtual, breadth of technologies touched and used. Been looking for 3 months now, and its just been a shitshow