Ask HN: How is your job search going?
I’ve been pretty depressed trying to find a job recently, so I’m wondering how it’s going for you guys. Wanna share your success story? Or are you struggling too and need to vent? This is the place.
Who is hiring? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42575537
Who wants to be hired? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42575535
Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42575536
54 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadI've applied to about 5 jobs on Upwork and the clients still haven't even hired anyone.
The year is just starting, hopeful still.
I've been looking for over a year and there have been extremely few internal postings around my level/role. External postings in my area seem to be mostly garbage, both in the sense that they aren't actually hiring and also the ones who are have terrible culture or pay.
Over the past year, I've probably interviewed for 6 internal roles, most in the past 6 months. I've declined 2 of the postions due their team being even worse than my current one. I have one that I did well on and could result in a double promotion. I should find out about that soon, but I'm really not hopeful. I'm surprised they even took me as a candidate given I'm 2 grades below it.
It seems like it's picking up internally at least. Maybe that will translate to more external jobs next.
What's your criteria to determine that? Is it just insider knowledge from those departments or do you systematically go over a checklist?
One interview was supposed to be for a dev role. It turns out it was for a test automation engineer for a testing only team on a program. I've seen how those testing only teams get treated in my org when you have a whole program throwing code at you to test. You obviously aren't doing TDD, and good luck getting good requirements or access to the business SMEs. Hard pass.
Another was for a dev role for Python and some work for a new Angular UI. I got into the interview and they're talking about Go... which wasn't listed anywhere in the posting. And that Angular work... it's going to be React. Their explaination was that they just didn't update the posting (lazy fuck, wasting everyone's time and the company's money). Then they went on to tell me they didn't really have tests and they aren't thinking about using a CMS for the UI. So they can't even create a valid posting and just shrug at common best practices that are missing. This isn't a startup but a mature company in a regulated industry. Decline.
Secured interviews with Facebook, Databricks, Snowflake, and Stripe (3 referrals, 1 recruiter reach out).
Bombed the FB phone screen due to nerves/first interview of the cycle. Completed the remaining three loops by December, and got offers from Databricks and Snowflake (Stripe went on two week holiday break and hasn’t gotten back to me yet).
Accepted the Databricks offer!
Happy to talk about practice/process (within the limits of the interview NDAs)!
I have a recruiter pestering me from them. I'm open to Meta but not commuting. If their SF office is open though I'd consider an on-site role.
The NDAs covered anything internal discussed during the hiring loop.
We all know that society is propped up by people going to work and doing nothing much of value. But now the do-nothingness pervades even the recruiting stage. It's such an empty faff. WTF are they doing? Why bother? I guess automation makes it cost-free to churn out bullshit job posts and waste our time endlessly; there's no human cost to the perpetrators.
It really does make you wonder about the collapse of our society.
I don't disagree that there are lots of companies out there doing essentially pointless work and paying high salaries to people who do very little all day. Mostly in the B2B space. But is it accurate to say society itself is propped up by these roles?
It took a fair bit of prep to get back into things - especially when it comes to system design interviews - but otherwise everything went fine. Really enjoyed how some companies are trying non-leetcode approaches lately like code review and debugging sessions.
I'm reading people who have been continually employed taking forever to find jobs.
I was definitely nervous about the time off being an issue. The usual stream of recruiter emails had pretty much dried up by the time I started looking for work, and I was fully expecting the search to take forever. It wasn’t an issue at all in the end - no one brought up the gap during interviews. I mentioned it in passing a few times when talking about why I left my previous job and mostly just got “dang that sounds like fun” from people. That being said, I have no idea if I would have gotten more responses to my initial inquiries without the gap on my resume.
Now one third of them being remote-friendly isn't the worst stat in the world to hear. I was worried it would be far lower (at least in the Northeast). Was it much higher before?
But realistically these contacts have little chance to materialize into a solid, well-paying job.
Doesn't help the fact that I have been in the US for a little bit more than a year and half, so building a network is pretty hard. Attended a hackathon, won 2nd prize with my team and tried to leverage something from there but no luck at all.
Makes me feel that I might be missing something but no idea what's wrong with my profile. (I don't need sponsorship too).
1. I have a personal website + blog + YouTube and do some SEO & marketing there.
2. I often connect or interact with technical founders on LinkedIn and end up on good terms.
3. My existing network.
So from the 6 clients that I worked with, 3 reached out to me first.
In 2023, I did work with 2 clients (but long engagements) which found me through monthly YC posts.
You put in good effort. And I'm glad it has been going well.
While I'm really grateful for having an income, I wouldn't want to do this for more than 2 years. Hopefully they either give me a project that's peaks my interest more or I find a different positions (hey Rust companies!)
The usual disclaimers apply about losing money etc etc… but apart from the job situation I’ve been getting more and more disillusioned my the tech industry, or rather, big tech and all the crap that has infected what seems like every tech company.
I don’t have any recommendations apart from, explore alternate source of income, I’m working, apart from trading on at Etsy shop and some electronic projects.
It’s also been a good time (since Medicaid is better than any other health insurance) to work on my mental health as well. It is hard to find motivation to do anything when I’m looking at over a decade of experience that I have now being almost worthless…
I'm getting a good amount of interviews for developer and data engineering positions, but the competition is tough. Many positions have seen a 5x increase in candidates since the same time last year, according to my interviewers.
However, I'm hopefully getting an offer as a data platform engineer soon. The department leader has ranked me as their first choice, so unless the higher-ups complain... Knock on wood.
Overall, living conditions are definitely a bit worse than in previous years. The main signs are that people's incomes have dropped, job opportunities have become fewer, and expectations have worsened. For the IT industry, there are more 996 companies. The Chinese people are very hard-working, so at the moment this doesn't cause serious social problems. But the uneven distribution of wealth will worsen, and people at the bottom will have a harder time.
Regarding Evergrande, there are a lot of people who can't get their houses because of this, even though they have paid for them. The government has also made some efforts to try its best to have these houses finally delivered. Houses are very expensive, so this is a very hard time for them.
Regarding ai, the ai-related industries in China are developing very rapidly and there are more job opportunities. For example, Xiaomi Group is recruiting deepseek employees with a salary of 10 million RMB per year. However, due to the uncertainty of ai companies, the high threshold and the large number of unemployed people, it is not easy to find an ai related job.
Senseless investments and exits and high salaries moved to AI and they're hard to find in normal startups. I have two active contracts totalling more than 0.4M€ and I've been working 70+h weeks from how much work there is.
I also fear things will get worse at some point, so it's better to make the most of it.
If I had more free time or downtime from work, I would work on building some products.
After 6 months of what felt like lying on a resume to compete with children I gave up. Then Raytheon contacted me to do geospatial engineering. That was going to be a very long drive through very heavy traffic. While I was waiting on security clearance validation a different group reached to me with a work from home position for a little less money doing enterprise API management.
Shortly after taking that job I made a promise to myself that I would never take a JavaScript job again. I still write JavaScript/TypeScript applications for personal use though. I have since been promoted twice and enjoy the work much more even though I really like writing JavaScript. I am not around a bunch of pretenders afraid to touch a keyboard without two or more ridiculously massive frameworks telling them exactly how to proceed.
My best recommendation is if you cannot find employment doing what you know or don’t like what you are doing try something wildly different.
- If you're using the new "AI Tools" to auto-apply, especially if there are additional questions asked in the application that you use AI to auto-fill - it's relatively easy to spot, and is an immediate disqualifier for me. (fwiw - it may seem like it's providing good/unique answers, but if you get 100 applications from people using ~similar tools, guess what, many of the answers are ~similar or follow the same format)
Sure - AI is increasingly more a part of all our workflows these days, but I'm still hiring a human and so want to hear from the human.
- Speaking of applications with additional questions on them - if the application has those questions, answer them! The more thoughtful, the better. Why half-ass the first step of the interview process?
- There are hundreds of applicants for every job, plain and simple - a resume is not enough. Everyone has experience, and education, and skills, and it all just blends together. You need to stand out. Whether thats your GitHub contributions, a link to a personal website with writings or projects, personal side-projects or cool hobby hacks you've worked on - you need to have something you can point to and standout.
When I get several hundred applications for a role - I can quickly narrow down to a top 5% or fewer just by those that put in effort and had something to showcase.
Hopefully some helpful suggestions to someone.
This one is part of the crux of the woes, IMHO: everyone wants life story, heartfelt, detailed but not too detailed answers to everything. So, let's say roughly 30-60 minutes per application. But, after the candidate completes this okcupid-ish application, then crickets. Multiply that times 10 or 20 applications and the burnout is real. Burnout isn't just "well, job searching sucks" it also cuts into the compassion budget left for future applications, reducing the amount of enthusiasm offered for all these cover letters and "gorsh, I really want to work with your unicorn organization!!1"
So, let's turn this back around: for those top 5% or whatever, do YOU reply to say "thank you, but no" or do you just delete the email and go back to whatever else you do all day?
I thought getting a web developer job in London should be easy because like everyone needs a web developer, right? But it's shocking to see rejections after rejections just at a resume level, even for a position in a company in a similar business analytics domain :-(.
Full stack web development, native mobile apps. Tech lead/architect.