Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?
I am assuming the market must be saturated with people seeking tech jobs. Is it difficult to get interviews? How have you been since you got laid off? I interviewed for 1.5 months (!!!) for AWS for a senior position, went through all the stages through the end. Then silence. I kept emailing the recruiters responsible for my interview, I kept getting out-of-office replies. Then I contacted some higher ups I found, told me they assigned my interview to other recruiters. No replies from them though. I have emailed them a bunch of times including the higher up. Then the news about Amazon layoffs got out; I presume they all got fired? What a gigantic waste of time. Tons of stress for 2-3 months for nothing. That is just Amazon being Amazon. When they interviewed me the first time, the interviewer didn't show to work, so they asked another guy to interview me, he ended interviewing me in a language he didn't knew, to a position using another language entirely, the whole thing was a farce. Some years later Amazon recruiters contacted me, asked me to go interview in person. Then during the interview in their offices, they literally forgot me for several hours in a random room of the building, the employees left at the end of shift, and left me alone in the floor with nobody in it, and I had no idea where the exit was. I really need a job and been applying to lots of companies, but I won't apply to Amazon again. Over a video call, the interviewer asked a coding question and immediately put on headphones and I am sure was listening to music. There was no dialogue and I had to use visual cues to get his attention. I coded using C++ and pass by reference. He had never seen it in his life. He refused to believe modification on a reference would modify the value in the calling function!
I hoping he would be willing to discuss or run the code, this was a total let down. Note: I have 2+ decades of coding experience You've got to be kidding... that's literally what references are for. Insane. We don't teach pass by reference these days. Anyone you find in the real world under ~30 years old may not even be aware that you can pass a reference and modify it directly without having to make a method return a value. It's super cool to have someone explain to you side effects yet you show them a method with a null return and run it for them showing that the value has changed and they are mesmerized. This is false and ageist. I got a computer engineering degree at a non elite state school very recently and this was covered in the first c++ and c classes. For that matter c# has an “out” variable that mimics this functionality, and the intro Java class covered primitive types vs. reference types. While reference types in Java aren’t the exact same thing, they do allow a void function to modify the state of the caller by modifying a parameter passed to the function. I doubt that you can make an absolute "this is false and ageist" statement in any context, but here on HN, I would have at least expected you to supply information on what location in the world and level of institutional schooling you have. Here in north-west EU C and C++ haven't been a part of the core curriculum for over 25 years (unless you do embedded work), and code with side-effects in desktop-class systems has been frowned upon for nearly as long due to the need for more cookie-cutter engineers to fill positions and write code that might still be OOP but has to be almost as side-effect free as functional code. Basic/core languages are still (last time I checked when doing guest lectures ~ 6mo ago) Java, C#, Python and the mixed bag that is web languages. This is also influenced by the core program required to be an accredited institution and the large amount of consultancies people end up working at straight out of college/school/uni. This even still happens in infrastructure-centric programs where you do lean a bit about TCP/IP and OSI layers, but then essentially get dumped into Juniper/Cisco/vmware/microsoft school which almost always gets them vendor-locked and unaware of the actual concepts and abstractions they implement. So no, not knowing the difference between passing references or values, or pointers and dereferencing them is not as strange as you seem to think it is. It is not a piece of knowledge or experience that is seen as valuable enough by the people that create the curriculum or the companies that employ the largest quantities of inexperienced workers in this part of the world. The core project for my compilers course in Germany in 2016 was about writing a C compiler in C++. I didn't do my intro courses at that university, but the professor clearly assumed all the students were already familiar with the language. A lot of people seem to underestimate the prevalence of C/C++. I've had people tell me that C/C++ is completely dead and the future is machine learning entirely written in Python, but the machine learning models they're using still usually have parts hand-tuned in C/C++, or even assembly. I work at a fairly large Python shop and we have some real performance problems with Python. Most real world software will use many core libraries implemented in C/C++ for doing the heavy lifting. Just the FFI and creating all those Python objects makes it slow. Python is a great language for prototyping and/or usage as a glue code. Personally, I am more inclined to use Go for anything quick and performant. If Carbon language becomes a reality, I would bet on that since it allows seamless interoperability with C++ (and there is a large existing eco system). Else, time to learn Rust. There isn't even a compilers course here, unless you go for a science masters. This likely got shaped this way due to the lack of interest and a push from industry to deliver more 'ready to use' engineers. I went to a small Wisconsin state school, grad with a BS in CS in 2009. We learned C, operating systems, and had a compiler class. Definitely not useful in my day job, but it was fundamental in my understanding of programming languages and computing. Can’t believe there would be a CS program out there that would skip this. I do know there are programs out there that focus on different aspects though, and not surprised they would be geared to make people more job ready. We actually didn’t really learn about unit testing, and such, so it’s a balance. I'm a PM and I ended up graduating with an econ BA instead of a CS degree, but I took a few intro CS classes at UCLA in...2011/2012. Intro to Programming 1 and 2 were taught in C++. Can't remember which one taught pass by reference, but it was definitely in one of those two. Third class I took was Intro to Systems or something like that. The whole class was C and x86 ASM. Lots of binary operations in that one, used K&R a fair amount in that class (also learned debugging assembly in GDB and some other "low-level"-ish stuff). Just looked it up, can't say 100% it's still C++, but the syllabus looks about the same as I remember for both class. It gets to pointers by week 7, and then in the second class goes deeper: * https://web.cs.ucla.edu/classes/spring22/cs31/syllabus.html#... * https://web.cs.ucla.edu/classes/spring22/cs32/syllabus.html#... And again, I didn't even get a CS degree. This was all lower-div CS work at a public university, and I'm not even a career engineer. > So no, not knowing the difference between passing references or values, or pointers and dereferencing them is not as strange as you seem to think it is. It is not a piece of knowledge or experience that is seen as valuable enough by the people that create the curriculum or the companies that employ the largest quantities of inexperienced workers in this part of the world. This attitude is why you're getting flak in this thread. Your claim that "We don't teach pass by reference these days" was too absolute, and not accurate for a ton of people. Then someone came back and told you that, and you told them that their claim was too absolute. I'll also say that it's something that was absolutely valued around the orgs I worked in at Microsoft (Azure, DevDiv, Windows, very roughly bottom half of the stack teams). If not C/C++ pointers, than __absolutely__ passing by reference in C#. Point being: __knowing__ about pointers, passing by ref vs. value, etc. is not as strange as __you__ seem to think it is. I never stated my own position on this piece of knowledge, so no, __I__ did not have anything to do with your point. C and C++ (and Assembly and compilers) are not part of the standard college software engineering curriculum here. Your opinion on that doesn't matter (just like mine doesn't matter) because it is a verifiable fact. And as such, it is also not strange to not see this bit of knowledge being prevalent. K&R isn't used much except if you are either taking the purely theoretical CS degree courses or if you tack them on to the normal required courses. Even the Gang of Four is only mentioned in passing when talking about patterns. You __could__ argue if this is foundational knowledge, and if so, you __could__ argue that therefore the curriculum is in need of adjustment. But I didn't. Regarding what this was all about (WrtCdEvrydy's comment), he might be talking out of the wrong hole, or he might be in a similar location as I am where this is how it works and that might be different from where you are. My 2014 undergraduate degree from an engineering school on the east coast included two required tracks, one for data structures/algorithms taught in Java and a computer systemsey track that taught C, Linux, and some operating system essentials. I think an operating systems course, or something approaching it, is a pretty standard piece of good CS curriculums in the US still from talking with other folks I've worked with. And I live/work very far from where I got my degree. EDIT: in the US, not in the CS, lol UK here, graduated BSc Software Engineering in 2012, and the primary language was C++ (though we used Java in some modules). C# also has “ref” arguments. The difference is that out arguments are required to be assigned during the execution of the method while ref arguments don’t have to be set. What are you on about? Java, Python, Ruby, C#, JavaScript, most languages used to day have reference semantics for objects. I don't think any of the languages you mentioned support true pass-by-reference. (maybe C# and Java, but it's not common) I've heard what you're describing as "pass-by-value-reference" Go, however, supports pass-by-reference which allows you to write a function like this: Sure, you can't have the same code for Python, for instance, even if it was using objects, but you can have the same effect using a hack by copying the __dict__ from one object to another. However, you are still passing the object to a function by reference because the function can mutate the object and the object that the callee passed will also be mutated the same way, i.e. mutable objects are passed by reference, and values are passed as values. Which is how python, javascript, Java and the rest work. Obviously, you don't get to change what the reference is pointing to in most of these languages, but you can change the value that is being pointed to. I don't believe this. Almost all mainstream languages use pass-by-reference by default. Java, python, javascript all pass objects by reference. Passing a reference is semantically different from passing by reference (the latter being a functionality of the language); doing the former (behind the scenes) doesn't imply that the language supports the latter (if one wants to be rigorous, not even C supports pass by reference). The canonical example is a function that swaps the variables passed to a function: ¹=at least, last time I've checked, which was long ago :) ²=funny to think that at least in Python, one can mess with the global register of the variables, and actually accomplish that I understand it is semantically different, but the interviewer should not be surprised you can change a variable in a function without returning it, which is the context of this thread. It's syntactic sugar for pointers. In python it actually depends on the data type! That example actually holds with what the parent comment said. You aren't trying to modify d exactly, you're modifying d's contents. My understanding of what's going on with python is it passes by reference (hence what your code does), but if the data type is immutable any modification results in a new instance being created in the scope of the function, and the object passed in is not modified. Which mostly looks like pass-by-value behaviour. I guess my understanding could be technically wrong in some way, but it seems to reflect what happens. The issue is that Python passes references by value, so you cannot overwrite what the arguments of a function reference from the perspective of the caller. However, if you pass something like a dictionary or a class the function gets a copy of the reference and can use it to update the members of what was passed. Java operates on the same principle, although there may be some edge cases I'm not aware of where the two differ. Perhaps I'm being simple minded, but the id of the passed object within the function is the same as the id of the object outside the function, no? My mental model is that an object's id in python is basically an address / pointer. So, how come it's the same inside the function as outside, if it's not pass by reference? You're correct that the id is the same inside and outside the function, but when you modify the passed in argument the id changes because you're setting the value of the parameter, not what it's referencing. In C it'd be like changing the value of a pointer in a function instead of the value referenced by a pointer in a function. Here's an example to include the id differences and the fact that a does not take on the value of d: Until the second line of your function (in the first example), it's pass by reference, no? It stops behaving like pass-by-reference because you then reuse the name 'd' to create a new object, which has a different id and lives at a different address. At least, this seems like a coherent mental model of what's happening, to me. I'm not re-using the name 'd', I'm assigning to the already-existing parameter d. Which if d was indeed a reference would result in the variable passed to the function being changed. In explaining this I decided to check the Python docs and learned a new piece of terminology "pass by assignment", which is how Python explains its variable passing scheme: https://docs.python.org/3/faq/programming.html#how-do-i-writ... I don't believe they're saying the feature doesn't exist or never gets used, but rather it's rarely something that's taught to junior developers, and rarely something you see highlighted as a best practice. I've been developing for 25+ years in any language you can imagine, and know how to use pass by ref just fine, and know there are situations where it might be the best solution. But I can't remember the last time I've used pass by ref. It's really just a coding style quirk for me, I find it "ugly" and it breaks my train of thought when reasoning through the flow of code. I certainly don't begrudge anyone who uses it though. And OP's anecdote about the interview is certainly disheartening. You'd hope the interviewer would at least be open to the idea of learning something new. I've learned countless things from developers I've interviewed over the years, and I was incredibly happy about it each time. Edit: In re-reading your comment and below replies it seems you may be misunderstanding what's being discussed. Yes, the things we pass into and out of functions tend to be object references by default. But when we say "pass by ref" (in some languages at least) we mean, essentially, modifying a value in a calling function without actually returning anything from the called function. That's a horrible way to explain it, but the MS documents for the "ref" keyword do a good job of showing examples: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/language-ref... It's like the other day there was a post where someone wrote an entire blog post about how they changed a tight loop with a function call in Golang to pass a pointer to a struct instead of by-value so they stopped allocating and copying on each call. Like...duh? I suppose that's why I find Golang less weird to work with than others in my cohort. I spent a semester in the depths of C and OpenGL so I'm intimately familiar with by-value vs by-ref. I haven't used C++ pass-by-reference in years, but I'd recognize the syntax. Perhaps the interviewer just wasn't very good. doesn't really matter, all they have to do is run the code. They use pass by value but objects are reference valued. Yes, I understand... But the result, practically speaking, is objects are passed by reference, just like I said. Methods/functions can modify their parameters. But you cannot change the reference itself which is possible in languages like C, C++, C#, and many more. It's been a while, but my understanding was that actual C++ references were immutable, and what you are describing can only happen as a result of passing a pointer by value. Yeah, you cannot 'reassign' a reference. The compiler will yell at you if you try. You can definitely modify values of your referenced object though, that's fair game. When it comes to pointers you can do whatever the hell you want but be careful. All those languages pass by value and it's kind of embarrassing that you mixed it up while criticizing someone else for not knowing it. One necessary (but insufficient) test you can use to determine if your language has call by reference or call by value is whether you can implement a swap function. In the languages you list, a swap function is not possible to implement, whereas in C++ it is, which tells you that those languages do not implement pass by reference. We are actually both wrong. If they passed objects by value you'd be modifying a copy. They technically "pass by object reference" as another poster mentioned. No sorry, you are incorrect and you can verify the correct answer on Wikipedia or any technical book on this subject. For example the Java Language Specification states in section 8.4.1 that Java is pass by value: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jls/se8/html/jls-8.html... ECMAScript's Language Specification also states in section 10.6 that it uses pass by value semantics, although it's much more formal about the specific approach it uses: https://262.ecma-international.org/5.1/ I can't link to the specific section but you can review the semantics of MakeArgGetter and MakeArgSetter which are specified to produce arguments bound to the *value* associated with the name, as opposed to a reference. Python does not have a spec that I can reference, but given that its argument semantics follows those of Java, and once again the inability to write a swap function, it should not be too difficult to deduce that Python also passes by value. This is indeed correct. Object references themselves in Java/Python are passed by value, which is why the following two code samples do not have the same effect: I said they pass objects by reference, which is true. Technically, yes, Java is pass by value. However, objects are not passed by value. The value you are passing is a reference (pointer) to that object. If this were not the case, you would not be able to see modifications to method parameters reflected in the caller because you're modifying a copy. You are not modifying a copy. I think you are deeply confused about this topic and should not be making judgements about other people. Instead of making an honest attempt to understand the difference between pass by value and pass by reference, you are trying to mince words to save face and even your attempt to mince words is incorrect. While I likely can not convince you further that you are in error, especially since you're now trying to double down on this, for others reading this who have a genuine desire to understand this topic, please understand that Java, JavaScript and Python do not pass by reference, but instead pass by value and refrain from attempting to redefine technical terminology. The references I cite are quite authoritative and unambiguous on this topic. I already agreed you were technically correct! I'm definitely nitpicking here, but I'd say almost all languages use pass-by-value, and what you're talking about is copying a pointer. C++ actually has true pass by reference, nothing is copied in memory. In addition to pass by value and by reference, there's also a pass by descriptor mechanism. It's not widely supported, but it's just another way to glue different conventions for defining arrays in various languages, where it's not just a raw pointer to alloc'd memory. At one interview, as a joke at the end, the set of interviewers asked me if I could write code to reverse a string. I replied, "In place, or...?" which apparently confused some of them. ... at least they did not reply to you that "no, you can't take this home - gotta reverse it here" Coding in C++ could be a double edged sword whilst interviewing. It's hard for some interviewers to admit that they don't know C++ and they might end up surreptitiously misgrading your work. It's best to ask the interviewer's opinion on C++ before chosing it. IMO, the safest bets would be to stick to Java or Python (even Python's a fairly hairy language these days). I once shadowed an interview once, where this happened. I felt bad for the candidate, because I wasn't allowed to speak whilst shadowing the interview, and neither did I have to submit feedback; and the candidate clearly was coding well. Although, I did reach out to the recruiter about this. And I don't know what happened after that. Oh yeah, I didn't mention everything, I had analogous experience. At the second interview video call the interviewer didn't show up, because the recruiter forgot to tell him about it. At the fifth video call with a different interviewer, he was an hour late because of the daylight savings change, again the recruiters' fault. I'll add to the Amazon interview complaints (early 2021 so remote). The recruiter prepped me ahead of time that I would have only 4 interviewers, and the next day they would be sending me an approval or some feedback. Having done interviews before I knew this was nonsense, and sure enough 2 or 3 days after my five calls, he called back genuinely surprised that there was no feedback. The interview itself was genuinely interesting but complicated by this team not having hired a frontend eng before. this seems like a hazing ritual to make sure only those willing to be abused make it in. From being on various recruiting positions, I believe it's usually just incompetence or laziness. Hiring tends to happen when there's not enough people. Only the people who can do the job are qualified to assess whether someone can do the job. So you have people who are already at double the workload having to take time to design and handle interviews and such. And by the time you get everyone to sign off on hiring this guy at the extravagant tech salary, economic downturn forces you to fire a bunch of people. In a recession, the least useful people are probably HR. >In a recession, the least useful people are probably HR. I think you mean recruiters, not HR. Big difference. Indeed. HR handles layoffs. Well, unless you like lawsuits. My Amazon interview was cancelled as interviewer got ill. It was never rescheduled Sounds familiar! Not to mention the interview itself being a never ending stream of “tell me about a time when…” Eventually you’ll get a “No” along with a message that, per policy, they don’t provide feedback. And then you’ll get several emails insisting you send your feedback, because they really want to “improve the process”. *facepalm* Unfortunately, despite assurances to the contrary, I was generally unimpressed with the quality of the people doing the interviewing. One of them was in his kitchen, while family members moved about behind him. Another didn’t share video, because reasons, making every silence while they made their notes that much more awkward. And another would spend 2+ minutes typing in silence until finally asking the next question, ruining any opportunity for flow or conversation. Judging by Amazon’s recent growth (prior to the recent layoffs), I’m not sure anyone has had time for any engineering. They’ve all been stuck doing interview “loops”. Last time I interviewed for Amazon, I couldn’t understand one of the interviewers spoken English. Combination of bad audio (their side, I have a good headset) and accent. I kept asking him to repeat himself and eventually gave up, and tried to guess at what he asked. I usually defend Amazon (used to work there and enjoyed it) but the last interview cycle was really unimpressive. Same here. In one Amazon interview the guy asked a coding challenge that he had apparently come up with himself. I realized later it was NP-complete. Is that a bad thing? A lot of real world problems don't have simple computational complexity. I'd learn more about someone from how they considered heuristic tradeoffs and assumptions that could produce a "good enough" solution to a tough problem than seeing if they could reproduce Dijkstra's algorithm from memory. It wasn't framed as "find an approximate/heuristic solution". You can offer. Nothing about it being NP should prevent your implementing an exact solution, though. It'll be slow as balls on (at least) some inputs, and you should surface that, but maybe they only need something that works for N<5 or something. That's different than it being undecidable, in which case you have to insist on providing something other than an exact algorithm that handles every input. For the short story. A few years ago I was sitting a CS exam that was 3 hours of coding and then a defense where you explained what you have done on the board. You had to compute a graph from a set of points (i think it was knn, not sure) and do stuff on it. At some point of the defense, this happened Me: I skipped this question. Examinator: why? Me: If I compute it using the graph structure, it reduces to max-clique, which is np-complete. I looked for a solution using the point dara but didn't find it Examinator: can you write an algorithm for max-clique on the board? Me: here. This is exponential time Examinator: it's worst case exponential time. But in this case it would have worked, you just had to try it Me: urgh Now I've learned my lesson: np-complete doesn't mean impossible That's fine. Just provide and exponential runtime algorithm and you are good. I will never again interview for Amazon unless I am about to be evicted and they are the only one left in town. Interviewed for a senior dev role, went through all the rounds, took days off of work to be available, and after the final round they just ghosted me. I had to follow up to find out they had chosen someone else. The amount of time I put into those interviews was absurd, reading up on all their principles, coming up with stories from my career where I met their principles etc. To then get ghosted at the end was a real slap in the face. I think I'd rather dig holes over working for Amazon - I've never heard anything positive out of that place. It seems to be a mixed bag. Don't know folks there who are developers specifically but I know people who say they really like it (admittedly fairly senior) and I know people who couldn't wait to get out after a rather short period. Wow lot of complains here. I've had a good experience interviewing with Amazon few months ago. Recuiter was supper supportive and following up constantly. The interview rounds were also relatively nice. The only thing was to prep for all those behavioral questions. Been working there for a few weeks and so far better than what I expected. That's terrible, but I can't say I'm surprised. Amazon has done nothing but earn a reputation for treating it's employees, potential or otherwise, atrociously. This is my own experience: if the recruiters don't call me back, that means I fail. Calling them just makes me more stressful/sad. Yeah, exactly. Guess how many times anyone has called a recruiter and heard "Oh yes, you got the job - I've been waiting all week for you to call me about it"? It’s useful to call back because if you did well but they picked someone else recruiters can often send you to some other interview with a different team. This common because a team will often say we want person X, but Y is also acceptable if X declines. This is my own experience: if the recruiters don't call me back, that means I fail. No - it just means the decision has been made, and you won't be hired. Which is different from "you failed". It could just as easily be their failure to evaluate you properly. I came here to say this. You didn't fail. Its just not a good fit. maybe they are incompetent, and saving you heartache in the long run. Maybe they weren't able to extract your relevant experience. maybe you didn't share effectively. Just keep moving and good luck! It's also a sign of having bad culture. Companies should always contact candidates in a reasonable amount of time. THIS! It's a company that's not keeping on top of things! Overworked managers, HR doesn't have a queue, whatever, but it is unlikely employees magically escape these issues. It's also possible their top candidate is has competing offers, and the recruiter is waiting to see if they need to fall back to you. I tried to refer a friend to AWS and this happened to them as well. Twice. Here's the thing though: you know all those horror stories you've heard about big tech companies and how they operate? Most of them are true, so if you actually care about the field then AWS is not the place for you. Especially if you're senior. Junior devs: you'll want to start here to build your rep and get a taste for awful at least. EDIT: I should add that the ghosting of my friend was confirmed to be due to lay-off of the recruiters, so that's most likely the reason for the majority of the ghosting complaints here. I would say not that bad if you take it from a different angle: what if you managed to get there and then laying off started? Wouldn't that be better? They'd get a severance pay? Highly unlikely you will get a severance pay as most company will only offer barely minimum required by law, which is is not much and definitely not worth the hassle. Also probation period makes things even worse for new starters as it can easily abused to dismiss a new employee for no good reason. Most certainly not, because they would not work long enough. since amazon has a policy to layoff the bottom 6% every year (numbers may be off), any good manager will be constantly looking for someone to hire into the bottom 6% role so they can keep their good people. Since they are not actually looking for someone who can do a good job they don't care if they treat you well. A couple things: 1/ Managers particularly for SDE roles don’t usually have >10-12 people. In reality the URA (Unregretted Attrition) goal is mostly managed at the L8+ level where organization sizes are usually hundreds. Far more likely you have some underperformers in an overall organization of 300, even if an individual team is all awesome. 2/ Interviews at Amazon involve a Bar Raiser who almost certainly won’t work in the Hiring Managers span of control, and the debrief attempts to answer “Is this a bar raising hire?”, meaning is this applicant better than 50% of people in the role/level. I can really only speak for AWS and Engineering roles, but I never saw any “Hire to Fire” behavior at Amazon, and most every Bar Raiser that I saw took the role seriously and was not a “rubber stamper”. This is my experience, too. I've mostly stopped responding to comments where people talk about how bad Amazon is. I've never experienced the horror stories despite being here longer than the average tenure and working in three separate orgs. Balls may have been dropped by some people, but I always have recruiters pinging me relentlessly the day after I've done an interview so they can get back to the candidate within 5 business days. I keep hearing this trope but this is very naive. A manager simply cannot keep hiring into bottom 6% role. All candidates are subject to the same type of interviews. Every interviewer has to give a "hire" decision for the new candidate. Then there is a bar-raiser interview in Amazon where the interviewer belongs to an unrelated team. They need to give a "hire" decision too. Unless all of this happens, a manager cannot simply hire a new candidate. There is no way a manager can simply hire into the bottom 6% role to keep their good people. I saw this happen personally. I was in the interview loop along with the hiring manager, HM was not inclined but the bar raiser and other people on the loop, myself included, were inclined but as a downlevel (L7 -> L6). Candidate is hired, I start mentoring him, he gets dev-listed (aka Focus) within two months, is pushed out by month six. I can only assume the HM had an axe to grind against this candidate, and saw a H2F opportunity. “I can only assume” is I think the key to this comment, however let’s explore some hypotheticals. You are a Director; you have a 350 person organization; you’re leading a rapidly growing business (let’s say >40% YoY growth in revenue, not uncommon in parts of AWS); during the OP1 you secured incremental investment of 20% meaning you’ll grow to 420, which is +70 hires to make. You’re goaled against a 6% URA meaning 21 people exit voluntarily after being entered to Focus, during Pivot, or involuntarily at the unsuccessful end of a Pivot. If I spoke from experiences, I’d say the (vast) majority of your URA will likely come from the tenure group with < 18 months at Amazon, in effect, hiring decisions which didn’t work out and where, in debrief, everyone thought the person had potential to be a bar raising hire but in reality they were bottom quartile. In the debrief your clear options were “Hire at L7”, “Hire at L6”, “No Hire”, plus maybe some flavor of good fit for Amazon but not really for this specific role. Let’s take the extreme of this and say all URA comes from just the +70 growth, 21 people would be a 30% failure rate. In a less extreme and more likely scenario: it’s more like some fast failures occur from the +70, others are slightly slower and show up after 12-18 months (that would be the prior years growth). Tenured people with e.g. >4 years sometimes start to struggle for whatever reason. That’s not all that unexpected, in my opinion! Even with a structured well-used interviewing mechanism you’re getting perhaps 6 hours of signal and during this time the applicants are naturally very focused on “putting the best foot forward”. After a hire decision you work with someone for 6 months or more and ask “Is this what I expected?”, and “If I could make the decision again based on the signal I now possess, would I still be strongly convicted and proceed to hire this person?”. When the answers to these questions are “No”, that’s often what commences the performance management processes. Now, this explanation works for growth businesses, it’s less apparent how 6% URA makes sense in a flat growth organization, since you’d be finding those cuts from a mostly tenured and presumably mostly proven set of people. This is why my only response to Amazon recruiter emails is “No thank you”. This is seemed pretty standard practice now, small companies, big companies, recruiters, FAANG. Actually Amazon for me was the best - I deliberately followed up a week later and they actively apologized and provided some feedback. Could it be a deliberate test for being persistent? "Candidate does not jump through hoops to follow up, if they are not sufficiently interested we aren't either" Then on the other hand, nobody ever got promoted for being nice to rejects. If their processes select for ambition (and they sure do), nothing that does not promise promotion will ever get done and that should qualify as explanation three times over. Well they didn't change their mind. :) I think providing feedback is work which also requires coordination from more than one people, so is easy to avoid. I sat through Amazon's process twice. Both times was 9 total hours of interviewing. Both times ghosted at the end. ghosting is pretty standard in my experience,
1-2 months of interviewing and testing then nothing is pretty standard in the industry I went through four interviews with (insert popular encrypted messaging solution) a while ago and got a verbal offer, then proceeded to be ghosted entirely, no more replies, from multiple people. Still don't know what happened. How is this acceptable? So much wasted time, and not just for me. I basically interviewed the entire team I was supposed to be working with. Why redact the company name? It would be a kindness to warn us away from them. I still respect what they do, I don't respect their hiring practices or representatives. They are quite present on HN, for what it's worth. Fair enough, thanks for explaining. Here (Israel) it's illegal, you can reject a candidate for pretty much any (non discriminatory) reason but you have to tell them about it pretty promptly. It's weird there are US states where it's not a requirement. One practical problem is that there are a fair amount of people who are simply unstable, and if told why they were rejected (in very neutral to positive framing) they will actively challenge it and even go pseudo-stalker mode over it. Dealing with just a handful of these guys is enough to do away with providing any sort of feedback. Like many things, a few bad apples ruin nice things for everybody. Then we have a right (and moral right) to ghost companies without any notice, too. Yes, in the US you do. Makes you look bad just like it makes a company that does it look bad. ghosting in no way solves this problem,
it's universally acknowledged as worse than a simple 'no' Isan email that says we've moved on with another candidate sufficient or do you have to give the exact reason? Exact same thing happened to me with Amazon. Spent a considerable amount of time interviewing with them for a manager position, then they simply ghosted with zero recruiter response for weeks on end. Finally they told me they ended up closing the position. From what I hear Amazon is a terrible employer even for highly skilled positions, so maybe it's for the best. Very similar experience. Checking on my application using the link they provide would still show "under consideration", but I knew after 2-3 weeks I wasn't going to get a call back. Someone finally got back to me after I emailed/called a few people I had dealt with along the way and they confirmed it. Well I hope you didn't put all your eggs in the AWS basket ... What was the salary or benefits that made you decide to endure that? Don't know and I am desperate enough to not care about salary at this point: I apply for jobs everywhere and the only times I have had a reply the last 6 months (except for AWS), I was offered positions with relocating to other countries. If you don't care about salary then I recommend going to some small bank or finance place. I'm thinking the recruiters were the first to be let go. same experience with Amazon a while ago, same with Microsoft, looks like ghosting is common You are mad they didnt just hand you a job that pays 450k a year? I was planning for applying for AWS as well, but since their lay off, I didn't Thanks for sharing. Interviewed with about 28 companies for almost 3 months, without a single offer! I was starting to get really worried about money and burned out from interviewing. In the past I've never interviewed with more than 2 or 3 before getting an offer I now this is incredibly privileged. I'm not humble-bragging, just observing the change in the market. As things usually turn out, during the last week of the 3-month search I received 3 different offers all at once. For reference and if it matters: I've got 14 years of experience. I had the exact same experience about 5 months ago. > 40 applications, ~30 responses from recruiter, did at least 1 phone screen at 20 of them and around 10 full interviews (4-6 modules each). It was brutal and I don't recommend it. Almost 20 years of experience at great large & small companies in the SF Bay Area. I like to think that I'm relatively intelligent and competent, but man, some of the interviews were torture. Even interviews for what are mostly CRUD web app development positions were doing l33tcode interviews (literally, I googled them afterwards) of moderate CS algorithms. After 2 months of interviews I did get 3 offers at the same time. I've interviewed around here since ~2005 and I have to say it's still a crap shoot of if you'll get a good interview process. Some companies were great and had well rounded modules, focused on leadership, communication, design and just a little bit of programming. Others threw multiple l33tcode puzzles at you and had no idea what they really needed. Very frustrating. I know this limits job opportunities, but a few years ago I started pre-screening the interview process. I ask specifically if the interview will be the whiteboard-type. If the answer is yes, I politely refuse the interview and tell them that I don't participate in whiteboard interviews. This is all done tactfully of course, but I refuse at this point in my career to be part of the tech hazing rituals. I have many other things I enjoy doing, rather than spending 6 months on Leetcode to ultimately make someone feel good about their previously worked out binary tree algorithm. This has eliminated 90% of the stress involved in job searching, and I'm confident that I can get an offer at basically every interview I get into. I'm not going to get a position at Amazon or a SF company, but after seeing what friends have gone through I have no interest anyway. I also make coastal money living in the Midwest, which was achieved by the exact method I outlined above. Now if I was in a desperate situation I would probably be forced to go through with these whiteboard interviews, which would suck - you do what you have to do though. However, I wish more engineers would refuse whiteboard interviews. If more job seekers did this I feel like we could change the industry, but the whiteboard philosophy is so widespread that it's an uphill battle. I always ponder, after the years of experience - wouldn't you just leave the interview if it feels like torture? I never ended up in a good place when it felt this way... I'd say it's unprofessional to out & out leave the interview. Maybe for practical purposes it doesn't make a difference (though it can be a small world sometimes and you never know when something might come back to haunt you) but there's a certain amount of social norm & politeness involved, even if your own sentiment is "well they aren't respecting my time so why should I care?" Also it can come down to just a bad recruiting/HR process and the place itself is perfectly fine to work for, and maybe that doesn't come through in the initial screening nonsense but you figure it out from the final round. Or you just end up not having a choice if the market is tight and you would end up wanting to take the job for the paycheck even if it's only 6-12 months while you find something better. I guess depends on the context, I walked away from interviews where people were non-professional, rude or just plain wasting my time due to poor job description and completely different expectations. On the bright side, you save them time too. Also I would say poor HR practices are correlated to the quality of the workplace but that's just a hunch that I follow. Not science backed. Thanks for sharing. If I may ask, when was the last time you looked for a job? I'm saying this because maybe you're having trouble due to ageism that you didn't encounter before. I think age-ism isn’t that relevant when you’re under 40. There will be limited positions for someone who wants staff+ compensation though. what's staff+ comp nowadays? Very wide range depending on the company. Startups and the like $200K/yr+ and equity. The equivalent at Google is $500K - ?. As an aside, Staff Engineers have to ride this strange line of being tech leads, managers, architects, and ICs. In my experience, one part or all parts will suffer. Will Larson's book[1] dances well around the ambiguity, but basically when you take a Staff Engineer job, it'll be unclear what you're signing up for. levels.fyi I just did a job search with ~15 years experience for a Staff+ position in Feb of this year, got interviews at most places I applied, multiple offers. From speaking to friends, the situation today is completely different. Multiple places I applied or had offers have locked down hiring and/or done layoff rounds. Those who are still hiring can be a lot more picky - either lower comp, higher skill bar, targeting underrepresented groups, etc. Ageism is often conflated with higher compensation expectations. I'm in my late 50s. When I hear about the salaries that much younger folks are pulling down in the FAANG companies I'm generally pretty shocked - I've never made anything close to that and don't have any expectations to. My expenses are way lower than most of the younger folks in tech because my house is paid off (will be in about a month), we drive 20 year old cars and we're quite frugal. For most of the past decade I've worked in startups where the pay hasn't been great but the work has been very interesting (in some cases, fun, even) so I'm willing to make that tradeoff. To summarize: I'd be willing to work for $90K/year if it was working on something I found interesting in an early stage startup (You get more control the earlier you get in). Are my compensation expectations high? The one thing I never understood about in tech, people talk about so much about TC but never about take-home pay (after taxes, housing cost, lifestyle cost etc). I have friends who work very boring jobs in the gov't or non-profits (who make 90K but have a 10% 403b matching or pension; a 750K house; and a 1 million liquid investment account of CAGR of 20%), drive beater cars but through shrewd investments and frugality are multi-millionaires. I also have friends who flex in fancy cars, fancy luxury downtown condos and fancy jobs (who make 200K+ but never contribute to 401K, no house b/c lives in HCoL and only a ~150K in savings b/c travels, eat out etc.) but spend it all and when I talk to them in confidence, am shocked they have a fraction of what I think they are worth net-worth in the bank. I used to think these stories were some kind of Suzy Orman/Dave Ramsey made-up morality tales or exceptional one-off stories - but older I get, I realize they are not. It's just most people start off the same - and it's only after years, people's money habits dramatically compound over the years that these differences become exponentially large and comical. You're talking about monthly savings, not take-home pay, which is usually defined as cash compensation after taxes, retirement, and deductions (i.e. how much you "take home" from each paycheck). Take home - expenses = savings. And yes, savings and savings rate is the biggest determinant in eventual net worth. I know bond traders and FAANG engineers that make $200K+/year and live paycheck to paycheck because their expenses eat up all of that and then some. One guy literally blew it all on hookers & blow and then died of a fentanyl OD. I also know people that saved about 1/3 of their take-home on a grad student or Whole Foods salary and are now living a reasonable life as a homeowning family despite never breaking $100K/year in income. I wouldn't say so....90k is low for someone with a lot of experience. New grads expect more than that. The skew for pay in the dev industry is weird. When I graduated with my BS (2008) I was happy enough to find a junior position in game dev on the west coast at 40k. Mind you that was during a lovely market crash, but after 4 years in game dev my pay didn't increase very much (but my profit sharing did /eyeroll). Fast forward to the present, I work non-FAANG at a 210k salary and am only required to do dev work with no management silliness and no required overtime. My company hires juniors straight out of college at around 100k... this blows my mind. Yeah, that's exactly my point. The post above mine was implying that older workers demand higher pay. But I think it's the younger workers that demand higher pay. > Are my compensation expectations high No... You really don't wanna work for less than $150k at a startup, at least on the west coast. I have in the past 10 years worked at about 3 startups where I was making way less than $150K, and the most recent one where I was making right about $150K. In a couple of those cases I was willing to accept low pay because the work/field was a lot of fun and/or it seemed like a socially important project if it succeeded (alternate energy in one case) and I knew that their funding was very tight. Thank you for sharing, and that makes sense. That said, you yourself described this as "low pay". My comment was in response to the GGP's desire to calibrate their salary expectation level. So, I think we agree. Compensation in the SF Bay Area is another level but so is cost of housing in the SF Bay Area. So it's kind of a wash. Although if you're willing to rent and live frugally in the Bay Area you can save a lot. One of the paths to financial success in the Bay Area is dual income households - the high pay for those families make it financially a no brainer to live in the area. The compensation though makes take home pay far better than anywhere else even omitting that if you’re at a well compensating place (i.e. FAANG), even for just single individuals. If you're interested in connecting with a fellow 50-something, check my profile. Not sure if you're an engineer or other -- I'm a PM if it matters. While it's certainly very real, it's conflated with a lot of things: compensation expectations, specialization, potentially not up on current trends, maybe set in ways, etc. I think a big one is there just being fewer old programmers so you don't see them as much so you think there's ageism. But the market has grown a ton over the past 10-20 years. None of my friends in their 40s have trouble getting jobs. This includes software jobs that tend to skew young, such as game dev and startups. I wouldn't doubt it exists, but anecdotally it doesn't seem to be such a huge problem that you can't continue coding until a standard retirement age. Maybe naive but I don't really see 40s as ageism territory in general. That said, a lot of people adapt. Go into management. More externally facing roles. Different types of companies. I guess what's old is new? In my 20s I was told 30 is the end of the line. In my 30s I was told its the 40s. Now the bar is higher. Maybe I'm part of a large enough cohort of programmers that we continually push ageism out, and due to that it will be 'solved' as we hit our 60s and 70s. The key is probably that you can't be doing at 40 what you're doing at 20. Whether that means better technical skills, better management skills, better communication skills, just better able to navigate a company and the industry... It probably does mean that, if someone just wants to code, they probably have a higher bar than people interested in doing a more diverse set of things. > In the past I've never interviewed with more than 2 or 3 before getting an offer. I know this is incredibly privileged. I'm not sure why you are saying this. You're in a rough spot and you're human. You don't have to qualify your struggle, even a universal one or one you do slightly better than others. The truth is that it shouldn't take interviewing with 28 companies to find a single offer. Interviewing at a handful before an offer sounds like it should be the (historical) norm, not a privilege. I know plenty of boomers who brag about how easy it is to get a job, with many talking about how they got hired as a walk-in to a technical engineering jobs. So don't put yourself down, we don't need a race to the bottom. We empathize with you because you're human. More of this We got to stick up for one another and lift each other up. We're in the same tribe, even if we don't know it. I've been in this situation enough times that I don't ever really feel ok until I have a year's worth of savings to cover the time it takes to find a new job. Of the 10 or so years I've been a developer, I've only maybe spent 5-7 working as one Yikes, 28 companies is something else. I had a somewhat similar experience in the last downturn in 2010 - first of all I couldn't even get an interview for like 3 months, then in the last 3 months of my garden leave I interviewed at about 8 places before getting a visa/offer. This was despite having a solid CV. It was something else, and incredibly distressing. You have my sympathies - I'm pretty sure tech interviewing over the years has traumatized me. not to diminish your success, but I've found similar results in the past. I think there's something about scarcity. As soon as one company knows another company wants you, all the sudden the 1st wants you now too. and if two other companies want you well, then you absolutely have to have that candidate. it's kinda messed up. but, congratulations! Well I don't know what exactly is wrong with me but I typically have to interview for months with several companies before I even land one offer. I have more years of experience than you (for perspective). I'm glad things are finally coming through. Best of luck. I had a similar experience looking for a job a few months ago. I got lucky with timing and joining a company that's optimizing for longer-term cash flow. What are your skills and what kind of roles have you been applying to? Your experience has been quite different from mine. Laid off 3 weeks ago, 4 offers at slightly below what I was previously making. I'm a fullstack engineer. Thanks for sharing, last year or early this year, job hunting is very easy, one month I got about 2 or 3 offers, but not it seems hard, and my current company planned to lay off people as well. Probably need to repeat your journey What was the ballpark of the offers, if you don't mind sharing? If you're having trouble finding new work, know that the turn of the year is _always_ slow, every year. Hiring tends to pick up mid- to late January. I'd like to second this. Hang in there, we're probably going to be hiring starting in January. Right now things are kind of on ice because of the holidays. Even if we wanted to get started today (and it's tough with our own department's senior people taking time off), it's hard to move the HR people and get the budgets approved, it's hard to get the GM sign off on a hire if we want them (though that's kind of a formality, frankly), etc. In January the world starts turning again and those things get easier. Hard as it is, try to hang in there, it will get better in a month or so. Yup! Knowing this, I'd intended to put off seeking for a new gig, but once recruiters know you're on the market in any capacity, they start beating down the door - I assume to stay busy, meet their quotas/goals, and to build up a list of potentials for when hiring actually picks back up. After going through 2-3 rounds of interviews with 3 different companies since mid-Nov, all of which signaled "we love you and will be moving quickly with you" during the interview process, only to have them finally follow up with "some of our internal needs have changed with the end of year approaching, but we'll be in touch", I figured for my sanity and so that I could enjoy a little bit of my funemployment, that I'd just be upfront with them and set some boundaries. Now, I've basically just been communicating "I appreciate your interest, but this is a bad time of year for bringing on new hires when considering year's end, so let's plan on touching base in January". We will see if this works out in my benefit or not - but it quickly became clear that we were all just wasting each others time going through multiple rounds of calls and exercises during the end of Nov and Dec. During the turn of the year, do you think its better to wait until January to apply? I imagine people coming back from the office and just purging the last 30 days of resumes :( Maybe? Depends on what you need personally. If you need a job _now_, by all means, keep going. Just know that the system isn't as friendly right now, so it's not your fault when things are hard. If you've got the runway to take a month, ask yourself: would you benefit more from building the inertia of keeping down the job application path, or from taking a breather and starting fresh in the new year? Both are valid. It is when I've dealt with hiring but my last position I got two offers back in Christmas time 2018. Go figure. Laid off from Twitter three weeks ago, lots of interest and cool companies out there. I binged interviews and have three offers to consider. Senior eng with 20 years experience For that kind of seniority/experience, what fraction of companies asked LeetCodey stuff? Was it easy or medium/hard problems? How much time did you have to spend preparing/practicing? Not the OP, but with similar experience levels and I’ve never done a LeetCode interview, and even regular interviews are pretty light. I mostly contract though, and they generally offer me full time after a little while if I want it. Also not OP, and also similar experience. Most of my interviews are an hour or two of conversation, sometimes with a "I've been told I have to ask.. " techy question but never involves any actual code/whiteboard. Several times the interviewer has said something to the effect of "I won't insult you by asking you to do a tech test, it's clear to me that you understand the work" or similar. One occassion (some years ago now) I've replied to a request to complete a tech test with a "Would you rather look at my open source code/contributions?" which they did and I didn't need to perform the test. Not quite as experienced as you (I’m in the 10-15 year bracket). I never ask LeetCode questions because it’s far easier on both sides to ask experience-based questions like “what do you like/dislike about <technology on your resume>?” If I get superficial answers that tells me something. If i get well thought-out answers from people who have clearly spent time in the trenches that tells me something too. I've been doing this for 30+ years, and I've found the same. It's not just whether the candidate can answer correctly, but how they answer. Back when I was doing C/C++ interviews, I'd ask questions like: What's the difference between single and double quotes? A meh candidate answers something about you need single quotes for just a single character. A good candidate answers about how the data type for a double-quoted constant is a char. If I want to pass a variable into a function, and have its value changed by the function, what do I do?* A lousy candidate says "put an ampersand in front of it". A meh candidate says to pass a pointer to the variable. The best candidate will talk about the difference between call-by-value versus call-by-reference. People really do reveal a lot about themselves not just in what they say, but the way they say it. > If I want to pass a variable into a function, and have its value changed by the function, what do I do? A lousy candidate says "put an ampersand in front of it". A meh candidate says to pass a pointer to the variable. The best candidate will talk about the difference between call-by-value versus call-by-reference. I agree it's good for a candidate to demonstrate a solid understanding of evaluation strategies, but the way you phrased the question, the 'meh' answer seems about right. You asked what do I do? which invites a narrow answer specific to the language. Agreed. In fact, I had an instructor in college that would have marked you down if a quiz/test asked this question and you wrote an entire paragraph describing call-by-value versus call-by-reference. On the final, he said "Each of these questions is answerable in 1-3 sentences. If you're writing 1-3 paragraphs, you're wasting my time and I will subtract points even if your answer is correct." We need your professor to coach interview candidates. On the "interviewer" side of the table, I can't tell you the number of times I've asked a question that should produce a quick, simple answer, and instead got a 5-10 minute stream-of-consciousness word salad out of the candidate. Or a huge run-on sentence this-and-that-and-this-and-also-that-oh-and-this... without coming up for air. It's so common, I must assume that these kinds of replies are being taught to candidates as some sort of best practice. I suspect many interviewers reward using a question as an opportunity to
showcase knowledge though, even if it means rewarding that kind of expansive
verbosity. I suspect the this and also that you allude to is the candidate
not wanting to be called out for failing to mention a corner case or
tradeoff.
Of course, conversations are rarely
legalistically constrained to answering only the precise letter of a question
asked; it's a matter of degree. Forgive a painful mixing of metaphors: if the Workplace StackExchange is
anything to go by, one interviewer's flying colours are often another
interviewer's red flags. I'll add that, as an interviewer (whether of candidates or doing qualitative research), a pattern of very clipped responses to questions about experiences of various sorts soon makes me feel that I, as an interviewer, have suddenly become responsible for filling airtime. It should be a conversation even if that can involve sometimes going off on tangents. > if the Workplace StackExchange is anything to go by, one interviewer's flying colours are often another interviewer's red flags. This is absolutely true. In /r/RecruitingHell, I recently saw a job seeker saying a hiring manager dropped them after they tried to connect on LinkedIn during the interview loop. Meanwhile, another HM in another loop praised them for it. I think it's more likely a nervous candidate who may not be comfortable or experienced in conversation, as many introverted tech type people seem to be. I don't think it's being taught; it's more likely the result of the candidate not having had interview coaching at all. Yeah, nerves plus the big question-mark of not knowing what the interviewer's actually looking for. One interviewer's perfect answer will be another's "red flag" (see this very thread, where directly and correctly answering the asked question apparently got you put in the "meh" bucket). > On the "interviewer" side of the table, I can't tell you the number of times I've asked a question that should produce a quick, simple answer, and instead got a 5-10 minute stream-of-consciousness word salad out of the candidate. Yup. There's a fine line between giving a thorough answer and just vomiting up everything you know that's slightly relevant to the original question. I do AppSec. If I'm interviewing a candidate, and I ask them what Cross-site Scripting is, then if at some point during their answer they bring up SQL Injection, that's a red flag. This is what I've been told. The idea being that the questions are more like prompts, and you should go ahead and elaborate to show your knowledge? Of course sometimes a questions really is just a question. Must have been before rvalue references. Both great questions, where the answer will give you a level of knowledge, rather than a yes/no. (personally, I would be a meh candidate until you probed further - but I've not touched C for.. hmm, I'm old) I often get questions where I need to determine if they're looking the textbook answer, or a real-life answer. Usually I will go with "well generally, the answer is $Textbook. However, ..." I just realized that my above model answer gets broken by the formatter. the first question should get answered with char-star, that is, pointer to char. If you put a backslash in front of the asterisk it should be kept as-is instead of triggering the formatting. This is why I don't use C. ;) Why would using pointers be better than references ? At least a reference cannot be null? Well, at the time I was doing that, it was actually for a C and not C++ job, so &references weren't even a thing. But my point wasn't that using the ampersand is wrong - just that if that's how you describe what you're doing, you probably don't have a very strong foundation in how the language really works. Completely off topic, but I wanted to see if your bio could be parsed for an email with chatGPT - since I thought yours was the most interesting I've seen in some time. Turns out cgpt is quite clever: What's the email address: To email, send to the domain [redacted], using the mailbox "[redacted]". In general, email addresses consist of a username followed by the at symbol (@) and the domain name, such as [redacted]@[redacted]. However, without being able to verify the existence of the domain [redacted], I cannot say for certain what the email address would be. Hey someone flag the above comment - I’m an idiot and left the email in there We've redacted it now. as the person you're talking about - I just up-voted you anyway, just because this is interesting :) Exactly this!
I haven't been interviewed for a long time now, but since the beginning of my career, when I have interviewed people I ask deeper questions. Even with tech tests, I use them as a jumping board for diving deeper into language design, tradeoffs and experiences.
Even a trivial, reverse-a-string kind of questions can take you deep into candidate's knowledge. Yes, I'm exactly the same. Contracting interviews are nothing like FAANG though, I literally had one that was a 30m chat with a couple of softball questions. Compared to FAANG they are all a walk in the park and barely need any prep. I give contractors a coding question related to the job. Unlike LeetCode, it isn’t really challenging (not even fizzbuz), just a test that they can learn a few APIs (that are given descriptions) and write down code. You’d be surprised how many candidates freak out at that point. Unfortunately, it’s often needed for the role. Not everyone can do this, but if you can manage to first do contract work, IMHO it's win-win for both parties. From the company's point of view: senior engineers are very expensive -- having a contract period lowers risk. From the employee's point of view: you get a good idea of what the company is doing / what your exact role would be before you commit. In theory, it's at will employment yada yada. But in practice, it makes a difference. How do you find contract opportunities? Is it the same as regular job searching? Do you use a firm? Do you apply to full time job posts but say you prefer contract to hire once you have an interview? the canonical way is reaching out to anyone in your work history that you had any sort of positive working relationship with. i just went through this exercise and saw a tip in a similar thread to ask something like this in the email, “do you know anyone who is looking for contractors?” this way you don’t create a potentially awkward situation for them where they have to say they can’t hire you. and, in my case, this led to referrals that ultimately ended up in signed contracts. there are sites online, like the whoishiring threads here. i’m running https://hourly.fyi/jobs/ For me it was opening up on LinkedIn and making myself "Open to work", recruiters were reaching out daily (or close to it). big agree on contracting interviews being light. i’ve had about a dozen in the last year and only 2 asked technical questions. the rest were more curious about time lines and cost. Can you share which companies these are? I went out of my way to not do leetcode so I only had one because Glassdoor was wrong. I would ask the recruiter during the initial call where I also talked about salary so as yo not waste everyone's time. I cancelled a few interviews that I later found out were leet code, not because I don't want to do them but more I think the people you end up working with are better at testing than coding, from my experience. Was the comp comparable to FAANG and other public companies in the end or did you take a paycut? You can make SF/Seattle/coastal money without participating in leetcode interviews. There is a fascination on this website with these cities, but you can make just as much from just about anywhere without going through this popular hazing process. It will limit the amount of opportunities offered, but there will still be opportunities regardless. Base is higher than I was making at Twitter, but instead of RSU/ESPP it's now options which can go either way, so it's a gamble. For me, I prefer startups, but the golden handcuffs are hard to takeoff once you've had them on for a while. just chiming in for others that i've had a job specifically waive a coding test because they saw me livecode in front of 2000 people and my fave amazon interview story was a guy that walked in with his laptop open to my blog saying "this is just a formality i've read your work" lol TLDR why leetcode in private when you can work in public* (*yes yes, not everyone can work in public, but i bet a fair amount of you can but havent given it a real shot) Last time I had a coding test during a job interview, I was left alone for an hour with a laptop that was screen-shared with a number of interviewers that was unknown to me. It felt a little like live coding in public but without any audible feedback. That might stress some people out I’d guess, but it felt chill to me. I did my usual thing, even used StackOverflow for some quick syntax & library tips, and finished the program (a Tetris-like game with an AI player, in Python). Got the job. It was pretty fun TBH, even with a lot of experience, I’d prefer the live-coding interview over talking through database schemas or whatever. That's quite a bit for an interview. How long did it take? Did they gave you code to plug a piece into? Or did you have to write the whole game? It was a whole game from scratch in the programming language of my choice. They only specified the rules. It was keyboard and console only, btw, no graphics or controllers or sound. I took the whole hour and was mostly done when I ran out of time. I forgot to write the score keeping before the interviewer came back. The AI player was “extra credit” and I finished that, so it helped excuse my scoring oversight. It wasn’t that much or that bad, really. The setup was pretty simple, and quite doable for junior devs IMO (though full disclosure I had just left a position as a lead game programmer, so for me specifically it would have looked a little bad if I didn’t smash this particular interview question). It also helped that the problem was open-ended with extra credit features. I learned later when giving the interview myself that most people never finished the basic game, the majority never tried to write an AI player, and the interviewers were quite forgiving with their ranking & scoring - it was adaptive to the candidates. The coding part of the interview was just trying to be a bit fun and not just be pure dumb LeetCode problems. IMO it worked, I totally enjoyed the interview. The rest of the 4 hour interview included some whiteboard questions (on DB schemas, which I flubbed pretty hard) and also a lot of just talking about experiences and goals. Yea that would do it for me haha. My bread and butter is embedded C! Technically it's C++ but we try to ease off the ridiculous C++isms because this stuff needs to be readable to the person that was waken up with a phone call at 3am and needs to explain some random behavior lol. I've never done anything spectacularly fancy with CLI terminals. I could rig up a UI with c++ and qt, or python and tkinter.. but it's been a while. Longer ago, I used to do objc but that was forever ago! So yea, I'd die on this one hahaha. I should try it sometime. I love tetris! Oh you could do what I’m talking about in C, no problem. By console and keyboard only, what I mean is that this is a game done in the shell with a REPL using printf() and scanf(), it was not graphical or anything. The programming problems weren’t about game programming, it was just design a little data structure to hold the board state, implement valid move checking, detect win/lose states. Really simple stuff, I guarantee it wouldn’t be hard for you. Re: ridiculous C++isms and embedded C, I’ve been in the same spot for my entire career. After learning C++ in college, I joined a CG film company that had banned C++ (dumb story) so I learned how to write object oriented C. Working in console games after that, we weren’t allowed to use any built-in memory management or exceptions or a current compiler, so very restricted C++. (And the worst bug I ever fixed was when someone tried to get clever with their C++ copy constructor.) These days I use CUDA, which is also technically C++ but basically C. So your suggestion is to just become a content developer and start marketing yourself online? Getting your work in front of others and getting the amount of reach that you have is also a lot of luck. Not everyone can get the same amount of reach as you have - I've seen hundreds of developers shouting out into the void without any recognition. > Getting your work in front of others and getting the amount of reach that you have is also a lot of luck I think this is dismissive of their talent, relative to other people who might try doing the same. To be fair, swyx was also being dismissive of their talent "Just work publicly and you don't have to prove your coding skills!", which of course assumes your talent will be evident to anyone glancing at your public work. In my opinion, making incredibly complex work look effortless, and therefore easy to follow, requires exceptional talent. > I think this is dismissive of their talent, relative to other people who might try doing the same. I believe those who are popular content creators are also better at marketing and sales. Getting their work recognized means that their marketing talent is good and not necessarily their programming skill relative to other people who are doing the same. When looking from that perspective - are you optimizing for hiring people with good programming skills or those with good marketing skill? You don't need to become a Twitch streamer or anything, I expect the main developer of a significant open source library would have a similar advantage in adjacent industries. You can take a traditional career path, or you can carve out a niche somewhere. Not OP, 15 years of commercial experience, been writing code since 95. Only two companies did something similar to LeetCode, never prepared — last time I seriously took part in programming competitions was in high school in 2004 — still easily solved everything they asked for. One of the problems was actually famous n queens — which I remembered as a problem, but didn't remember the solution for. Solved it in 40 minutes (with an uncommon solution, as interviewer later told me) anyway. Most of interesting questions had to do with system design and debugging, soft skills (also system design and debugging, but of systems made out of people instead of code) and code reviews — with me reviewing their production code. Sometimes I got pretty stupid interview questions like remembering REST spec (there isn't one) by heart, but those were companies I wouldn't want to work for anyway. Not OP but similar level of experience. I had the leet code once, interviewing for Meta. I didn't prepare because I thought that it was pointless, but I was curious about what it would be like to do it. So, I went through with it and to my shock and awe I managed to do it. The feedback was that I didn't ace it but I did more than well enough for the interviewer. I didn't get the job though. The last step was a really strange and uncomfortable 1-1 chat with a "very senior employee". This did not go well. > The last step was a really strange and uncomfortable 1-1 chat with a "very senior employee" I had one of these once. The chief product officer came into the room, stared at me for awhile, then asked "tell me something you've thought really hard about...". It was a classic case of a narcissist exec. Glad I didn't get the job, as they are struggggggggggglin' right now. Was that conversation socially, ideologically, or technically uncomfortable? Ideologically and socially. I can only describe it as creepy. Sorry for slightly off topic response but is there a site (twitter account?) you can recommend for (unsubstantiated) gossip about what's happening inside twitter? While I'm obviously guilty of wanting to know details about the 'car crash' I'm also curious on a professional level about the challenges and changes that are happening to the engineering teams in this extreme situation. Care to elaborate? You sure have some interesting stories to tell Can you share which companies you got interviews with, and for what positions? I got laid off a few weeks ago I’m mid senior level in Product Management but come from a big well known tech company, and I work remote from a non-tech “city”. 5 years PM experience, 6 years as a Software dev. Launched 3 products from concept. One has over 20 million MAU, one created 9 figures of revenue for my previous company, and one I have no idea because I got laid off lol According to my LinkedIn I’ve applied to over 200 roles in the last few weeks and heard back from about 5. Of those interviews, I’ve been rejected from all of them, even smaller shops. Hearing from recruiters has been much more fruitful, making it to middle and final rounds at surprisingly good companies, but in both final round instances, the role either got defunded due to a hiring freeze or other issues. In one instance, the recruiter I was working with at a Big N tech company got laid off in the middle of interviews, at which point the company ghosted me, presumably with my application falling through the cracks. My severance package is much smaller than most, since my company is framing the thousands of layoffs as “performance based” which allowed them to skip the mandatory notice period, and avoid paying out our very generous severance packages. It turns out benefits don’t matter if a company is afraid of a recession. If anything this whole experience has wiped out my idealistic views of working in tech. I’m a cog in a machine that can be gaslit and disposed of when convenient for people levels above me who have no empathy for my existence Can any other PMs speak to how their job hunt is going? Hoping it’s not just me > My severance package is much smaller than most, since my company is framing the thousands of layoffs as “performance based” which allowed them to skip the mandatory notice period, and avoid paying out our very generous severance packages. Consider talking to a lawyer, and comparing notes with other people in the same boat. Doing this is almost certainly illegal in the US. (In addition to owing you severance, they may also be open to slander/libel charges. I am not a lawyer.) I find for PM roles location is much more important than technical IC roles. Living in a "non-tech" city might be your biggest handicap. Job searching since Q4 of 2021. Same thing with PM roles. Have lots of direct operational experience with a particular industry, have full stack dev exp, have PM exp, have big tech names, have 15+ YOE, so naively thought I can apply for companies in the space and get some professional courtesy for at least call backs of feedback. Nope. Learned real quick that end of the year nothing gets done and it's just a waste of time. Big tech company recruiters, big bank company recruiters, startup recruiters, etc would shuffle amongst their many things, deal with sicknesses, deal with internal communications and mandates, and you're just another ticket in the queue for someone to gladhand. Sent out 500 resumes, even hired VAs to do it for me, and would get 20 call backs, 5 interview requests, 2 round two/full day, 0 offers. By Q1/Q2 of 2022 switched strategies, got into studying for certifications (Sec+, PMP, etc.), and still the same. Responses picked up because start of the year and there's more action. Have more interview requests, and finally learning how much emphasis people put into STAR or CFAS frameworks, Leetcode, full day virtual onsites, and all of it was still kind of bullshit. Went with lots of crypto startups this time around since many were looking to staff up for the year, every single one of those crypto startups had lots of audacity and arrogance and ran by kids. Looking back, out of a list of 100 resumes I sent out only 10 companies are still around after this summer. I ended up working at a supermarket around this time. Q3 of 2022, switched gears one more time, now going for contract roles, backfill roles, tried to go through the list of YC companies. Learned now the new batch of YC companies are run by kids and equivalent of grad students, lots of ghosting, dropped communications, unrealistic expectations. Finally found success with contracting. Figured out how to update my LinkedIn, resumes, github, personal website to be more modernized and up to date. Q4 of 2022, learned to work with connecting to TVC agencies and agency recruiters, now getting steady contracts at Big N companies because I kept following up with recruiters that held tight to my resumes. That said, is it you? A bit of yes, a bit of no. Product Managers are a heavily impacted role so comp wise you have many applicants. Job searching is a skill to be learned and flexed, rebuilding your digital presence is important to be part of the mix, and mostly it's also building up a network of relationships with recruiters and referrals to get your name in front of someone at the right place and at the right time. Right now it's end of the year, nothing gets done. Jan, Feb, and Mar will be better. There will be tons of disappointments. It's after the thousandth resume submission, and after hiring a virtual assistant to submit for me, that the pain goes away and you just see routine. It's after smiling at the same bullshit over and over again being pitched how a company is viable that you realize it's all the same, you just need something to get going then figure it out from there. But you've done this before, you'll get to do it again. Didn't get laid off but resigned around a month ago after a long stretch of non-stop work since I was basically a kid (worked through college, university, and straight after O_o). Basically for a little break and to focus on doing some real intense OSS. Been a wild, challenging, and rewarding 1.5 months so far. Applied to a couple places that were working on some interesting things, some even related to my own OSS, reached out by AWS but I wasn't willing to relocate to Sweden so I broke that off. I did my first "leetcode interview" a few weeks back and did quite well I think for someone who A) has only done around 5 leetcode problems for fun ~5 years ago, B) comes from a Physics, not CS background, C) is a quick learner and solver, not rote-learning BFS and DFS kind of guy. 7 YOE in web dev, full-stack. Leaving this here if anyone has any remote work for me :) EDIT: For anyone accessing my site, I apologize in advance for slowness or crashes, it's hosted in my residence on a puny server sitting behind me :( I've been meaning to cloud it for a while now but I kind of like the DIY of it all. Similar to you, I left my job about a year ago after working non-stop for 25 years (worked through college, software development, architect, director, eventually C-level, all at the same small company). My break was to focus on spending time with my children. It has been very rewarding. Initially, I thought I would take 6 months off and then get back into an IC role, but after a year, I am in no rush. I have played the interview game with a few companies in the last few months, but so far have not found an inspiring place yet. There still seem to be plenty of opportunities with small companies out there. When I left a year ago, I thought that it was likely that the industry would start to slow down within those 6 months. I have been watching everything happen with mild curiosity. I am fortunate that my wife has a healthy career, so looking for any work has been low-stress. Thank you for sharing. You are certainly at a different point in your life and career (I am but only a humble developer), however it was very nice to read your story about spending more time with your children. I share that feeling of observing the industry. I think that some of the recent sentiments are a bit overblown about the tech industry. Some seem to think that it's all going to blow up because a few thousand FAANG rest-n-vesters got let go. (side-note: I know that not all who got made redundant were of that type, just adding flare!) Good luck with your search. I think I will be soon in the same boat and happy to hear that your time was (at least partially) rewarding. I have 13 years of non-stop work for big tech and I cannot wait for the day I resign. Hopefully, sometime in the next 3-4 months. :-D It is better to be unemployed if you can afford it. Thank you. Good luck with the future. It's a big leap of faith. Similar story to mine, 7 YOE backend dev, working non-stop since I got into college, Hope that at least you got some rest. Hi and thank you. The more I think about it, the more I find it kind of nuts that I worked non-stop for ~10 years of my formative life all the while completing a Physics degree without taking a little break apart from annual leave here and there. All the best with your future! Your website doesn’t load. Ah, sorry, I have edited my original comment. TL;DR it's a very little server sitting right behind me, and gets easily stressed. For remedial points, claim it's on a raspberry pi. Slowness due to React but you're re-writing it in Rust. Then everyone would think I'm just a ChatGPT bot trained on HN ;) /s Great! When can you start? Fine for me in firefox, at least gives me a white page with menu items. Seems to load now It loads for me. I used to work at a hardware store. As in literal bolts and nuts type of tech, not software related:) Recently lost my job. Originally from Kazakhstan. Thinking of going back if I can't find anything else. No credentials to speak of other than the fact that I could probably think my way out of an undergrad level abstract algebra or real analysis problem if cornered. Maybe topology, too. Native speaker of both Kazakh and Russian. Speak rudimentary Turkish, but could easily pick it up to a decent level if necessary. Currently studying CLRS to finally learn how to design algos. Also, trying to pick up Mandarin. Maybe I'll be able to immigrate to China in the coming years. Shenzhen or Hong Kong area. I'll just leave this here in case anyone has a remote work for me :) And what is it that you want to do remotely? Sell nuts and bolts? It’s unlikely someone would read your post and think “oh yeah, you’d be great for our company working remotely”. You didn’t outline a single capability other than selling nuts and bolts. Resume tip: "x years of experience working at the hardware level. Implemented stacks and queues on bare metal." Yes I have experience with rust I don't have any work for you, but it would have helped if you had described your software engineering / computer science skills in more details. I'm not familiar with CLRS. CLRS is a fairly well-known algorithms textbook: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Algorithms The acronym comes from its authors: (Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, Stein) The other users correctly disambiguated CLRS. I am not experienced with software other than the rudimentary syntax of Python and Scheme. Read a CS book years ago based on the latter. Anyway, I was just wondering if anyone had any kind of job for me. Maybe something like data entry. Would have to learn coding in earnest after I pick up algo design techniques from CLRS. >Would have to learn coding in earnest after I pick up algo design techniques from CLRS. You're almost certainly better off learning to code first and then learning about algorithms once you've got a decent coding level. In a typical entry level coding job you can easily go a whole year without implementing any algorithm more complex than a binary search (if that). Agreed. I would even say this is the order of importance for being effective in a real job: 1. Domain knowledge (understanding the problems you are trying to solve, for who and why they need solving) 2. Full stack awareness (understand computer hardware, networking, OS, HTTP protocols, UI etc. AND whatever the core components of your domain are. This is crucial for being able to reason about and debug a running system.) 3. Technical communication in written and verbal form. 4. Programming fundamentals.
Honestly I feel much more than "fundamentals" is a waste of time for new entrants. If you haven't been paying attention, GPT-3 has taken away the need for programming acumen for most creators. Prior to that Google+Stack Overflow got a whole lot of us through gaps in programming language expertise. Leetcode is literally just a proxy for formal education/privilege and has no direct application in daily work with the exception of a narrow few areas. If you are truly a nuts and bolts person, let that be your domain. You could write a better inventory, search, and/or checkout system (wow bolts are easily stolen aren't they?!). You could also take the abstract mechanical intuition and focus on robotics. One shouldn't aspire to work at a "tech company" - most of those that you might think of are actually ad companies. Following the analogy of 100 year old media, Googlers are out selling classified and yellow page ads in Search/Display, Netflix is a magazine publishing house, Amazon is the Sears-Roebucks catalog (Mail order homes!), Meta, the newspaper of newspapers. If you like sales, marketing, and influence it would make sense to work at such a place. I cannot tell you how many people are surprised by this, but it is vastly larger than it ought to be. If you want to call yourself a developer/programmer/engineer/hacker then show up to build something that will run for a long time and not injure people during its operation. Build something better. If that isn't your ethos or ethic, there are better ways to make money. > GPT-3 has taken away the need for programming acumen for most creators. I strongly disagree. GPT-3 is impressive technology, but it isn't even in the same universe as a team of sharp experienced developers. It is a valuable tool for them to use in some contexts, but it won't be replacing them anytime soon (at least not at a company I would work for). The parent comment might be refering to github copilot or chatGPT, both are fairly decent at removing a lot of google-fu for typical fullstack problems and helping newer programmers get up to speed or closer to a viable solution quickly. It's a classic undergrad CS textbook: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Algorithms Sibling comments addressed actual disambiguation. For validation, it _is_ confusing, since CRLF is carriage return/linefeed CLRS = Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, Stein - The authors of the famous book Introduction to Algorithms. > No credentials to speak of other than the fact that I could probably think my way out of an undergrad level abstract algebra or real analysis problem if cornered. That seems like a rather bold claim to make. I don't think anyone could really do that without having studied those subjects deeply. Did you study mathematics at a University and just didn't complete a degree or are you completely self-taught ? >I used to work at a hardware store. As in literal bolts and nuts type of tech, not software related As an SWE, this sounds way more fun. It's about 80% the same as any other store (keep things stocked, tell customers where they are, operate a cash register kind of stuff), 5% copying keys, 15% answering questions that are either really simple ("what do I use to hang a painting") or underspecified ("I need a replacement nut for something"; the trick is to ask them to bring the bolt or another of the same nut if they can). Have not been laid off and I am not living in the bay area, but in Germany. Still wanted to offer some perspective. ~15 years fullstack and DevOps experience, visited top local university, no degree. Mostly Python + some other languages. Have been interviewing for Lead SE/DevOps/SRE roles as well as some architecture positions. My findings about the German job market for developers: - Remote-work is here to stay. Almost all companies are okay with full-remote, those who are not, want ~2 days in the office per week. - Companies are starting to do leetcode-style interviews. Sometimes some FizzBuzz level to check basic understanding, going up to harder problems unrelated to the position. Unless they are very hard, you will just get used to that. - Remote or hybrid meetings with multiple participants are horrible for interviewing. The delay makes you come across slow and is very distracting, when you need to look sharp. - If you want to earn money in Germany, you have to join a bigger company. - Bigger companies do their development in Java with a minority being MS shops. Python is for data science and DevOps. - The missing degree is mostly not a problem. Sometimes the CTO's PHD makes it one. - Landing lead/lower management roles seems to be difficult if you have limited experience leading people. Those seem to be mostly staffed internally. - The market value for a profile like mine in a big German city seems to be around 100k € including some small bonus. - There are many offers under that number. I think I would get hired almost instantly if I would accept offers for 80k €. - All-in all IT does not seem affected by the downturn yet. While these numbers are not directly comparable to the US (lower cost of living, better social security, health-insurance included and not tied to your job etc.) my subjective feeling is, that I am getting taken advantage of here. Salaries seem to be too low. You are often getting low-balled because "it would not fit within the salaries of the other team members". For the time being, freelancing is the way to go in Germany, even though you are fighting against regulations. >salaries seem to be too low. You are often getting low-balled because "it would not fit within the salaries of the other team members". Preach it! CoL in German cities is far too high for how low skilled dev wages are. 100k at 15 years work experience is an insult when you look at Munich/Berlin house prices and that new grads can get 60k. And DW posted a YouTube video yesterday about how Germany has a shortage of software developers and they need to actively recruit from India and Pakistan. [1] More like a shortage of desperate people willing to be low balled and a shortage of companies paying good wages. Companies in Germany need to start paying ICs more and stop complaining about shortage of workers. Simple. Oh... that about "we have too few SW devs"... I've been hearing that for decades (literally) also about medical personell... Truth is, they just do not pay enough!!!
As you say, 100k would be just fine for 5 to 10 years in some small city... but Munich, Berlin, Hamburg... you have to talk 140k for 15 years real experience. >but Munich, Berlin, Hamburg... you have to talk 140k for 15 years real experience. Outside of FANGS & MANGAS, German companies would start laughing if you ask for that much for IC positions, even senior ones. That kind of cheese is usually reserved for management/corporate bootlickers high up the command chain. Actually I had more that one offer for 140k. For example from Magna. But yes, it is not easy. And I have 20+ years of experience.
Note, I do not say they actually pay that, but what they should pay, if they want to find the people. I strongly disagree. Here's a family home with garden in the Berlin area that you can rent-to-own at 1900€ per month: https://www.immobilienscout24.de/expose/135035667 So with a 100k€ annual salary, one working parent alone can buy the house and feed the entire family. You consider that an "insult"? First, 100k EUR is _before_ tax which I believe you might be confusing here. After tax you get maybe 50-ish % of that so you end up with something like 50k EUR per year. In no European country that would be enough to "buy the house" and even more so in Germany. Secondly, I'm genuinely interested in your thoughts here. What if you: * Lived in the EU * Being salaried 100k EUR (which is probably around 90th percentile) * Worked for a _global_ company with a _global_ product deployed on a _global_ market with _global_ competition And now some of your colleagues are from the US and you: * have the same responsibilities as they do * have the same skill-set needed for given position as they do * have the same impact, or potential for it thereof, as they do * have to go through the same agony of being and staying among top performers And yet your US colleagues are salaried 2x-3x as much as you are. Without taking RSUs into a picture because that's a very rare thing to have in European companies. What are your thoughts about this? Do you attribute this difference solely to the cost of living? The offer I linked to was literally a "buy the house with monthly installments and no upfront payment" offer. So yes, you can "buy the house" if you can afford those 1900€ per month in addition to food and heating. Also, with 2 kids and 2 adults out of which only 1 is working, you'll get heavy tax deductions, so I'd expect an effective tax rate of around 15%. That 100k€ gross will turn into 85k€ after taxes. Deduct another 10k€ annually for top-tier health insurance for everyone, 1900€ per month = 23k€ annually for the house and that leaves you with about 4300€ each month to spend on food, clothing and heating. This might be just me, but I think if you pay people so that they can have a very nice lifestyle where they live, that's a "good salary". If the absolute $ number is higher in San Francisco than it is in Germany, then you either need to pay them more to match the lifestyle, or maybe hire in cheaper markets. Germany in general seems to be very remote friendly. Many larger companies even have programs where you can go on a work-vacation to a tourist resort and they'll organize a co-working space and necessary permits. I guess that's why you see salaries equalize more throughout Germany while in the US the regional differences are quite strong. > so I'd expect an effective tax rate of around 15%. That 100k€ gross will turn into 85k€ after taxes. Your calculus is far far from reality so your further reasoning is therefore flawed from the very start. 4-4.5k EUR is probably more realistic. Moreover, property prices around EU are generally speaking anywhere from 3k EUR to 15k EUR per sqm. For a 100sqm home that's 300k EUR for the cheapest one, 700-800k EUR as a median and more expensive ones over a 1M EUR. Even with the 90-th percentile salary such as 4k EUR per month (after tax), how exactly do you envision buying a home with that sort of prices? Software engineers are being grossly underpaid in Europe and all this recurring bullshit around housing prices, living costs etc. is just a bullshit that capitalist companies will spread to convince people such as yourself to start considering your colleagues as a "threat" and not just human beings who want to be paid what they are deserved. My purchasing power, even with the 90-th percentile salary in EU, is _nowhere_ near the purchasing power I'd have with the same skills I have if I had lived in the US and that's where all the discussion can stop. If we take some of the other European countries as an example that gap is going to be even much larger. Purchasing power coefficients are a real thing you know. https://www.steuerklassen.com/kinderfreibetrag/rechner/ with 100k€ income and 2 Kinderfreibetrag and no further deductions comes out at 18k€ taxes which is 18%. So to reach the 15% I predicted you only need 3k€ in additional deductible expenses like trash, cleaning, gardening, daycare, etc. Dude(?), you’re seriously mixing things up. It’s not Switzerland and there are no 18% taxes in Germany. Stop spreading all this nonsense. Calculation for Bavaria with 2 kids, 100k and Steuerklasse 3. Every month:
Brutto. 8.333,33 €
Netto 5.581,90 € There is shitton mandatory insurances and payments. Income tax alone does not really matter. Rundfunkgebühr is very real tax and can’t be avoided. Edit: sorry, I am rude. But downplaying all the so called insurances, that must be paid from salary is not nice. They must be paid in full and can’t be avoided. I would love to decide about my retirement by myself instead of funding current retirees. Please, stop spreading the nonsense and incorrect information. It's not anywhere near what you state and if it had been that way, we would have a tax oasis in EU which we clearly don't. We are talking about someone with 15 years experience though. 100k @ 15 years is too low when new grads now start at 60k. So you hire someone who has 14 years of extra experience and brings a lot more value to the company and only pay them 40k extra? That's why I'm saying it feels like an insult. 15 years of experience might also mean they are excellent at PHP+jQuery but have never heard of Rails+React ;) Sure, we are getting into semantics now. 15 years experience could mean knowing how to lead and bring up a team and product form scratch or it could also mean 15x 1 year experience if that person was constantly switching stacks/companies. It's why we should compare salaries for positions rather than YoE. > 15 years of experience might also mean they are excellent at PHP+jQuery but have never heard of Rails+React ;) Not in this case. It is 15 years of proper software engineering and devops experience, for times in leading positions with additional responsibilities. The problem is, when you retire, you cannot pay the rent for the house anymore... what do you do then? The cost published does not include heating or any other utilities, that adds up pretty quick! It's rent-to-own so if you start early enough, you'll own the house by the time you retire. And yes, heating and utilities add up. But we're talking about a salary that after taxes will be 3x to 4x the down payments. I don't think that is how it works. In the ad the Kaltmiete is €1900, which is simply the rent without utilities. It does not mean that a. you are eligible to buy that property b. the buy-to-rent price will be the same. And even if it was, the legal costs alone add up to a few tens of thousands of EUR for a property like this (eg. if the property is worth €500k, you are looking at at least in the order of €50k of legal costs and taxes...). But I don't know of any bank that would lend you 100% of the price of the property you want to buy, if you do please introduce me to them... If it really was so easy, everyone would be buying these properties. But the upfront costs are simply prohibitive. Then let's go with buying this more fancy house for no upfront down payment, then 3k€ monthly, and paid off over 30 years: https://www.immobilienscout24.de/baufinanzierung/finanzierun... "But I don't know of any bank that would lend you 100% of the price of the property you want to buy, if you do please introduce me to them..." Here's a FAQ on buying a house without any prior capital. Obviously, the interest rate is going to be higher... https://www.immobilienscout24.de/wissen/kaufen/finanzierung-... Every lender (Wüstenrot, Interhyp and Sparkasse) were ok with 100% lending as long as I was able to bring in my own 10% for legal/buying procedure. Of course it was during cheap money phase. Now it might be different. I also wouldn’t buy a house from last century anymore with current insane gas and electricity prices. And this makes things complicated since new buildings are very rare. > Landing lead/lower management roles seems to be difficult if you have limited experience leading people. Those seem to be mostly staffed internally. Because at most places lead/lower management is another word for yes men that have proven their blind loyalty to the CTO, usually for 2 or 3 years. They don't wanna hire a manager who may question the status quo, especially when it comes to architecture and best practices. > The market value for a profile like mine in a big German city seems to be around 100k € including some small bonus. That sounds low to me and attainable in Europe if you have 5+ YoE at the right places. It sounds to me like you are being lowballed. I'm getting similar offers with way less experience. > That sounds low to me and attainable in Europe if you have 5+ YoE at the right places. It sounds to me like you are being lowballed. I'm getting similar offers with way less experience. Where you at? In the Netherlands getting anything over €70k is incredibly hard. There are very few companies offering close to that and those are often for architecture roles. Lead dev is usually €60-70k, with some €70-80k exceptions, but those usually require ~10 years focused experience. Interestingly, over here the freelance market is much better. Those will easily get you €100-150k gross and are often quite long term. And even with €100k, combined with all the tax benefits it's very much worth it. My country is lower income than the Netherlands and Germany. 70k is upper management money here and a bit more than what I make. I have talked to some companies in Ireland and the UK in the last few months, and their ranges usually start at 80/90k. The most famous example is probably Google. Entry level (L3) is 100k-ish and L4 starts at ~120k. Even if OP was placed at a below average level for someone with 15 YoE, they should be getting 150k+ offers. >In the Netherlands getting anything over €70k is incredibly hard. Well, it's definitely possible in Poland. Certainly not. You are just underpaid and speak from your experience. Specially in Germany middle management is all about contacts (they call it "B-Vitamin" because of the german word for "relationship" starts with "B") who do you know and who knows you is the most important thing...
Technical background is relegated to a second plane (to say the least) because you are "not supposed to solve the problems, but to manage the people who actually solve the problems". You’re being ripped off. I’m paying guys in various parts of Europe well more than this with probably less experience. European software developers are grossly underpaid across the board but 100k is very low. I’m paying around 120-130k in Amsterdam which has a similar CoL to Berlin. Can I ask if you know how average costs in Scandinavia hold up to that? Working in Norway atm making ~90k€ equivalent after some time, but I took the paycut from the US because of quality of life/healthcare/state pension, etc. Still, it’s a very good salary here, I’m in the top few % of all Norwegians. But it was a huge paycut. I’m definitely happier than I was in the US but I have been considering moving a bit further south. Bumping up to 120k and getting more sunshine would be very nice. I think Sweden might be worse in all of Europe though. 90k€ is unheard of here for developers, unless you are managing a team or a middle manager or something. Well ok, maybe its a thing in Stockholm actually. Living in a slightly smaller city, now way Jose. I am applying currently, don't know how that will turn out, but he manager even said that Swedish developers are cheaper for the company than people from Germany, Switzerland and I think even Poland was getting bigger wages. So Sweden has this low-wage aura apparently. How does it compare to the rest of Sweden though? That’s how I justify it here at least. I mean, I make 500.000kr less than I did in the US, but 900k also puts me in the top 5% of all earners in Norway. So I have a very good quality of life. The middle class is so compressed here that it’s a super cozy income, and I will never have to worry about anything financially or healthcare related for the rest of my life. I just have moments of «I want more», which is when I get anxiety and look elsewhere. But honestly not sure I need it in any real way. 10-20 years of experience in software engineering means around net €30k in Sweden, even in Stockholm. Tax and social security fees are the highest you will find, which means the cost of this might be around €70k-90k to the employer. I’m not sure about Norway but Sweden/Stockholm is in the same class as Berlin, Amsterdam, etc. I feel like Norway would be higher but I’m not certain. Premium areas are London and Paris. But even these salaries are closer to a middle rate USA city. Super-premium (on par with more expensive USA salaries like SF or NYC) is Switzerland. Very expensive to hire there and easily the highest salaries in Europe in my experience. This is just based on a CoL ratings at a single place. Paris ? Like, how much ? When looking at offers there, there is absolutly nothing beyond 70k. I'm not looking for anything right now but just out of curiosity you'd care to share a name? Even privately? Company I'm referring to would fit the profile of a small/mid-cap publicly traded company. Compensation in any company of this size or larger is based on industry information. In essence, companies share their compensation via surveys and can then subscribe to a database which lists ranges for certain levels and roles and regions. Companies tend to have a ladder and different paths/comp levels for managers and individual contributors. Different regions are then sliced into different levels and what you're left with is location, a role, and a level. These are combined to create a salary band which is the range an employee that fits into the profile. It's important to note, it's a salary band. This means an individual can have a fairly wide range of total compensation across this band. Also, some companies are biased towards salary or stock options/RSUs. But generally, an employee will have a lower "comp-ratio" meaning they are under the middle of the band. This leaves room for raises, etc. At some point an employee will be at the top of their band. They are either promoted into a higher level, kept at their current level but only given CoL increases (bands tend to increase ~3% each year), or fired. The company can decide how competitive they want to be in each region or choose to not hire in a region because it is too expensive to be competitive there. Sure I understand, but I was specifically asking about an example name since I know quite w bit of people around Hague/Amsterdam/Rotterdam and noone besides freelancers really goes above 70-90k eur/y from my experience. Hence my interest in who actually offers rates this high. 100k€ for 15 years of experience seems about right for me. If you factor in all the freebies and tax refunds and stuff, that's roughly equivalent to earning 1000€ per billable day as a German freelancer, or the equivalent of about $150 per hour in the US. Typical freebies in Germany include: - 13th salary as a Christmas gift (so +8.3% salary) - only half of your health insurance costs are included in the nominal salary - tax refunds if you buy a PC, do courses, or drive to work with your car - company pays for children's daycare - government-backed retirement fund with generous payouts. If you pay in 83€ per month now you can expect to receive at least €450 per month later. Also, with a bit of searching, you can rent a house with garden for €2000 per month even in large cities like Hamburg or Berlin. As a result, an 100k€ annual salary will be enough for you alone to comfortably bankroll a family of 5 - something that's almost impossible in the bay area due to high rents and insane costs of living. 13th salary?.. It’s actually Austrian thing being taxed less in Austria. Never had this in my dozen jobs in Germany. Xmas bonus yes. Health insurance is expensive and low quality. One must pay for all modern treatments despite being insured. Or have another expensive additional insurance. Cancer will be treated for free, that’s right. Tax refund is a bad joke. Spending 5000€ to get cents back. 50% taxes and mandatory insurance plus 19% value added tax (food less, fuel with additional taxes). So 2/3 earned go to the government. Nice! No company from dozen paid for childcare. I know, that it might happen, but it’s rare. Some companies have on-site kindergartens. But well… the waitlist is long unless you are important manager. Government retirement will be about enough to live in extreme poverty trying to save every cent. Just got intrigued and opened immobilienscout24. No houses for 2000€ in Hamburg and Berlin for a family of 5. Rather old Reihenmittelhaus for 2500€ with current electricity and heating prices. There is nothing comfortable about 100k€ annually. Especially for a family of five. It’s like 4500€ after taxes every month paying 2500€ rent and living from 2000€. Belarus freelancers also make this and have really comfy lifestyles. Edit: with 3 kids it’s closer to 5000€ after taxes. Still does not provide any luxury. Wait! the Christmas/Vacation "extras" are already factored in the 100k.
The tax refunds may seem a big thing, but are actually not that much.
Company not always pay for children daycare. You have to make sure it is, and even when they would pay, sometimes you just do not find a place that accept the kid, because there is lack of places in many cities. About the retirement... I would be careful about big expectations. Everything is based in constant growth of the german economy. Any public retirement is basically a Ponzi scheme (not my words! but from a Nobel Economy laureate) Also one very important thing about cost of living: Hamburg and Munich, for example, the cost of living means that doing 20k more per year, as compared with say, Stuttgart, at the end you get the same... or the way around, 100k in Stuttgart is like 120k in Munich. You really have to factor that into the equation. The only thing on here that is in any way better than what I get in the U.S. would be the free daycare. Everything else is worse than what I earn as a fully remote employee, who could choose to live in any number of second or third tier American cities that are nearly as cheap as Berlin. (and probably the healthcare system that doesn't bankrupt you) It's pretty hard for a software engineer to get bankrupted by the US healthcare system. As long as you maintain your insurance coverage, your biggest worry is the annual "out of pocket maximum", which is the most you can pay in a year, and is usually very low end of 5 digits. There are gotchas with this with uncovered services (i.e., rescue helicopters) but in general, this whole bankruptcy concept is overblown, especially in our privileged market segment. "maintain your insurance coverage" sounds like a pretty difficult thing to do for a hypothetical software engineer who just got fired because of burnout. In this industry severance is common, which often includes some amount of continuation of coverage. You are then usually eligible for COBRA, a law that lets you continue your current policy for 18 months self-funded (often expensive). You have 60 days to elect COBRA, so if you find another job or gain other coverage before needing care you can sometimes avoid paying for it. You can get your own coverage on the Affordable Care Act exchanges. It's not necessarily a great deal, but again, it's about keeping that out of pocket limit as a safety net. In all likelihood the burned out hypothetical software engineer is going to recover and find work with employer funded healthcare coverage again. You have an easier time earning money in a high-cost area and are then able to move to a lower-cost area when you are retiring. I on the other hand, can not do the opposite. Additionally, while we Europeans like to make ourself feel better through the "US health insurance bad" meme, there are some US regulations, that make the difference even greater (e.g. there is no such thing as a 401k in Germany). > - 13th salary as a Christmas gift (so +8.3% salary) My 100k number is all-in. > Also, with a bit of searching, you can rent a house with garden for €2000 per month even in large cities like Hamburg or Berlin. As a result, an 100k€ annual salary will be enough for you alone to comfortably bankroll a family of 5 - something that's almost impossible in the bay area due to high rents and insane costs of living. That is true. But you have to say goodbye to any romantic dreams about owning any property big enough for children (within a nice area of such a city), if you and a similiarly well-doing partner do not want to work for it for the rest of your life. If you have not come across FIRE, that might be okay as well. Yes of course. A 100k€ annual salary won't let you retire early if you are the only one working in your family and you want to buy a nice house in a nice area of the city. But then again, would that work out if you were to work in San Francisco for $200k annually? Think about it this way: I am in the top earning 2%. It is only possible to buy such a home if you have a partner, who makes similiar numbers and then together decide to dedicate your life to it. The 98% of the rest cannot do it. Ergo I am either not earning enough or we have to accept, that you cannot really buy property within a top-tier city in Germany. In the end the whole debate turns into young vs. old and heritage vs. salary. But would the situation be better in the US where you might get 2x the salary but rent and housing prices are also 2x the German level? US is generally cheaper to buy a house based on income. Too lazy to google the graph. You can get way more than 100k if you’re applying to tier 1 and tier 2 companies in Berlin. I’m at around 160k (6 yoe); but I agree with you, we are getting paid less for the same work as our American coworkers I’m having a hard time believing it, so pardon my skepticism but which company pays €160K for a 6YoE in Berlin? I don’t want to say something that might dox me, but there’s quite a few, check levels.fyi Do you have any advice for freelancing in Germany? I’ll be moving to Berlin in January, aber ich spreche nur Englisch und ich lerne Deutsch. Ich habe die EU-Staatsbürgerschaft und meine Frau kommt aus Berlin. I am a senior front end dev who has experience leading teams You are likely to be successful going this route. Some advice (some of it obvious if you've dont it before and not specific for Germany but maybe it's useful): Have a profile on Linkedin and Xing, upload to sites like freelance.de and maybe to a bunch of agencies. Be ready to send a profile, listing as many projects as possible, i.e. different roles in a company could be separate projects. Make sure all relevant search terms (languages, frameworks, tools) appear for each project even if repetitive. English-only is ok in many places, German-speaking projects can be a little better though. It's all through intermediaries, which means you can (and should) negotiate rates hard without worrying about burning bridges. No call with a recruiter that didn't go pleasantly ever led to anything so if it feels weird just hang up. Expect to be placed 3-6 months min, 2 years max in a project. Research a little on "Scheinselbständigkeit" but it's not a huge issue these days. If you want 100% remote it should be possible. Good luck and welcome to Germany :-) Thanks. Looking forward to it. I’m so done with England! Welcome :). Berlin in January is tough, even for German standards. 1. Just get a tax advisor who is fine speaking English with you. Just let him do everything in the beginning. Afterwards you can do more of that yourself. Try to be classified as Freiberuflich, not Gewerbetreibender. It helps if you have an engineering degree, but he can help you with that. 2. Do at least two gigs per year (Scheinselbstständigkeit). 3. Use HAYS and others to start it of. 4. Continue to learn German. Maybe do some German interview training or something to get in. There are teams working in English, but you will have an easier time overall. Be sure to look into how you will handle Health Insurance. You are required to have Health Insurance if you live in Germany, and for freelancers it is quite expensive(it will probably cost more per month than apartment rent). This can be a dealbreaker for people with limited financial resources who need some time to get their business off the ground. former freelancer here (writing, not coding), but I would not do it again, the stress around taxes, insurance etc alone is not worth it (at least for me). Plus, you probably won't be leading teams but be more of a workbench. However, if you don't want to be tied down, something like "Elternzeitvertretung" (aka jumping in for people on paternity/maternity leave) might be interesting for you. Why do you want freelance? You can apply to any job... AFAIK the headaches of tax declaration and setup for freelance are not worth it. I just hate being “employed”. All of the politics and incompetence in other people’s businesses reminds me too much of the Russian communist party. Every large capitalist company ends up like a low-stakes episode of the Netflix series Chernobyl. Perhaps I’m just grumpy but that’s who I am. I’d much rather just code some stuff and get out before I start having to “assassinate” my managers. If I could find a place that allowed workers to vote out managers then maybe I’d be happy, but until then I’ll just come and go. Like politicians, managers are only as good as your ability to fire them. You’ll love my code, your customers will be happy. Let me go before I make you cry. Not to mention the 42% paid in taxes every year, assuming the €100k is gross, not net. €58,000 seems like a low take-home, even with all the caveats you gave. The actual tax rate with 2 kids and 2 adults out of which only 1 works and earns €100k is going to be 18% if you don't declare ANY deductions. This is not how taxes work. 42% is the marginal rate, not the effective rate. >Salaries seem to be too low. Yeah, seems so - 80k is on the higher end, but possible in Poland, while the CoL is laughably low compared to Germany. Is this 100k gross or net pay? Gross... and about the 1/2 goes away. Like 45%.
Also depending on where you come from, you can be shock by the 19% VAT on almost everything. While food is cheap, some other things are more expensive (tech stuff). The gov. has good health service, and also education. But the education system has some interesting limitations, that may surprise you. FYI you only pay 45% on the income that exceeds 277826€ annually. A typical rate for 100k€ income for a family of 4 would be 15%. I'll say again. Please stop spreading this nonsense information around the thread. Either you're very much misinformed or motivated by something else. Just stop. It is gross, but very hard to compare, because it does not include your employer having to pay halfes on social securities. Actual gross would be something like 120k, but with obligatory expenses, you cannot opt out of. Net would be something like 55k if you are single, but you already paid into a mandatory retirement plan and you, your kids (and laughably also your partner) are health insured. Gross. Net depends on various factors (kids, spouse etc) so isn’t usually used for comparison. Personally I‘m living in Austria, where things are quite similar - I‘d say 100k gross should work out to 55k net for a freelancer. That’s after having paid for a deductible company car and hardware etc, so, again, hard to compare to others. 100% gross Layoffs make news, but if you look at the numbers they are relatively small compared to all the hiring the last few years. We have gone from the best time ever in history to be in IT, to a great time to be in IT. There are a lot of jobs if you step outside big tech (and targeted jobs in big tech with certain skills). Yup. Even with Meta's huge layoff, they still have more employees now than they did a year ago. https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/yqweue/oc_... Depending on how you view things, layoffs are only starting. Companies are taking a wait and see approach before taking everything off the table. Some are predicting 2023Q1 to be when it peaks. ProTip: Absolutely nobody knows. There are indicators this way and that. The predominant point of view I see in the sensible press it that a global recession centered around China is likely for 2023, but the US will likely be more insulated than most. Things could much worse, but it's now considered unlikely with a soft landing looking pretty plausible. But really the data are increasingly hard to predict and looking ahead more than a month or two at a time is mostly guesswork. Source? Not OP, but weigh these. Recession case: inflation depresses other spending, new home starts are decreasing, strong dollar, Chinese economy wobbly, EU economy weak, continued supply chain disruptions, PMI weaker, ad spending curtailed. Soft landing case: Goldilocks scenario for USA employment; inflation has decreased; chip shortage over; few layoffs outside tech; airline, hospitality, defense, healthcare, energy sectors booming; China economy may strengthen with softened zero-covid policy. That doesn’t matter to laid off people if most companies have a hiring freeze and there’s net reduction in tech workforce. It means most laid off people won’t get jobs until companies start growing again. It's quite bad atm. Senior C++ engineer specializing in system-level programming, worked across several challenging domains including database internals for the last several years. 10+ years of experience. Applied to around 25 jobs. Ghosted by 15 of them. Out of the 10 remaining, 3 of them are limited in terms of remote - to be considered you have to reside within certain countries. From the remaining 7 I only got the interview round with 1 of them. Did not get an offer because I was not strong enough candidate despite successfully going through 5 interview rounds. Whole process was very slow and lasted for about 1.5 month, with not getting the feedback something like 2-3 weeks after the last round. All in all very weird experience and unexpected outcome with no strong arguments. From the remaining 6 I did not even get an invite to an interview but a direct decline. Getting the (systems programming related) remote job while located in Europe seems like an impossible task to me right now. > Did not get an offer because I was not strong enough candidate I was laid off last year and went to interview at an adjacent employer. They had a bunch of employees (not only engineers) hired from the company that was laying me off. One of which had previously walked out the door with a bunch of code to form their own startup; they were hired as a staff engineer. That employee frequently reached out to me for advice and guidance on writing the piece of code that they made off with. I flunked their cargo-culting hiring process hard. I knew I should have walked out of the interview the minute they put fucking Leetcode in front of me, but didn't. Moral of the story: your interview success has little to do with your experience and aptitude as an engineer. Here's a list of shops where you might find more success: https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards Where in Europe? It's one of the European Union countries. I'm feeling uneasy to share more details here, if you want, you can reach out through my email (on profile). Software engineer with 10+yrs experience and was on a break for 3+ yrs. I haven't done outbound yet ("applied" to companies). Mostly got referred to companies/startups through folks in my network. Remote work is an important requirement for the time being. So I spoke to 15 (remote-friendly/first) companies through my network (could've been more if I were up for onsite work), 4 started the interview process (rest had hiring freeze or wanted to prioritize folks that got laid off from FAANG) out of which: - 1 ghosted me in the last round - 1 rejected in the last round without any reason/feedback (although I think I did pretty well) - 1 rejected in the first round because they wanted me to stick to a specific programming language (in their leetcode round) that I am now rusty with - 1 rejected me in the last round on fair grounds and were decent enough to give feedback. I believe I made mistakes out of being super desperate to land a job. One thing I noticed (although small sample set) was that the interview processes are very slow (like 1 round per week). This might mean things like companies are in no hurry to hire and they have abundance of candidates applying for the same positions at different "expected CTCs" making it a buyer's market. I am currently interviewing another company who has scheduled the next round to happen after 2 weeks. Also no inbounds on Linkedin from recruiters. I used to be swamped till like July/August. Probably means there's decent amount of hiring freeze and most of the recruiters are fired? Tbh, even though I got rejected in a few places, I did not feel too bad because I did not "feel" like they were doing solid engineering work (I ask lots of questions about the tech stack, challenges, culture, etc. in each round). I've decided to spend a few months upskilling myself till the situation gets better and take the hiring process slow (rather being desperate). Although lucky to be in a position to be able to do so. > One thing I noticed...was that the interview processes are very slow We're thick into the holiday season. I wouldn't expect anything to speed up until January, regardless of market conditions. > One thing I noticed (although small sample set) was that the interview processes are very slow (like 1 round per week). Yep. And almost everyone is hiring by committee now. Because if the committee hires the wrong person, nobody hires the wrong person. And with all of these people involved, now you are subject to the calendars of the various very busy “stakeholders”. One company I engaged with had me talk to 11 people between individual interviews and panel interviews. That’s 11 calendars to coordinate, with illness and PTO and holidays and on and on to sort through. I had one situation where I had to wait two weeks for one of the interviewers to have a spot open on their calendar. “She is so busy”, I was assured. They eventually extended an offer, but this and other warning signs made it clear it wasn’t a fit, so I respectfully declined. > And almost everyone is hiring by committee now. Because if the committee hires the wrong person, nobody hires the wrong person. At least in some cases, it's a reaction to some managers having made hiring decisions perceived by leadership as mistakes. Impersonal and bureaucratic as it might be, to the extent it keeps the bar higher I think it's a good thing. I understand that reasoning, but I don’t think it bears out. It results in frequently hiring the lowest common denominator. No risks are taken. Bold thinking is suppressed. It trains your managers, whom you don’t trust to hire their own team members, that leadership is done by committees. And what’s the solution to a bad committee hire? A bigger committee. All fair points. It probably depends a lot on the size of the company. At some stages you need to take risks; at others, you need to prioritize avoiding bad hires. Could you elaborate on "other warning signs"? Maybe others could learn a thing or two. Absolutely. In the case I mentioned, interviewers did more talking than asking and listening, interviews were far too easy (I’m glad you like me but if you can’t really discern whether I’m good at my job, you’ve probably hired other people who are bad at theirs), and bad answers to questions about their business model (when stock options were part of the compensation package). It just didn’t feel like a fit. interviews were far too easy (I’m glad you like me but if you can’t really discern whether I’m good at my job, you’ve probably hired other people who are bad at theirs), Maybe they have ways of evaluating your potential without subjecting you to an endless barrage of gratuitously difficult (or simply tedious) questioning. Maybe, and it’s flattering to think that. But I have to make my decisions based on the data I have. I give "easy" interviews to people that have shown signs that I can trust their technical work. I far more interested in their communication and organizational skills once we get past the technical aspect of it. As well as their higher level "engineering" experience. What I mean by this is- when we're planning a complex feature, I want someone that has the experience and communication skills to stand up to the team and not be a yes man, point out potential issues and concerns and propose better ideas. Leetcode is not an indicator of this. The interview may feel easy to the person being interviewed, in the sense that there isn't wrong answers, rather, there could be an absence of correct answers. I can appreciate all of that. Maybe that’s the case I encountered and I wasn’t savvy enough to discern. But it’s also possible the interview simply wasn’t a good competence filter. And that possibility gave me pause. The holidays are rolling in the US, too, so I expect that getting scheduled for interviews is going to be pure grief until Jan. When you say on break for 3+ years, do you mean that you didnt work for 3+ years leading up to these interviews? I did some hands-on contract work last 10 months but the rest was "no work" yeah. So 3+ years of being out of a full-time role. So you spent roughly a quarter of your career not working? That's likely a red flag for a hiring manager. Why would they risk hiring you and you quit when they can hire someone with no gaps in their history? Should they care about this? No, but that's just the way it is and employment gaps are not a protected class. not in my experience. coming out of college, i worked for 3 years then took 18 months off. nobody i spoke to cared. if they asked about it, it was out of genuine interest for what i got into during that time. Same for me. After my first job (3.5 years) I took a 1.5 year long sabbatical to travel around New Zealand. I even put that on my CV. I think it made me more interesting for the interviewer. To me, break implies it was chosen for personal reasons. But I'll let GP answer for sure. I know a guy that left one FAANG recently which was laying off people, interviewed at two other FAANGs, got offers for senior remote roles for over $600k, accepted both and is now working two jobs at the same time. Given he was doing the previous FAANG together with a tough grad school, I think he'll be fine. Im guessing an IC position? Still, being that senior I'd expect he's in quite a few meetings. I would love to hear how he manages his schedule and comes up with novel excuses. If he really is coding 90% of the time though, more power to him. There are some strategies one can use, e.g. work for one company on the East coast and one on the West, then being an early starter at the first one and late starter at the second one. Perhaps have some known medical issue that occasionally requires skipping some meetings if there is a conflict. I am honestly monitoring him and I hope he'll share his stories, tips and close calls for some added amusement. He's definitely using two computers to keep any monitoring system at bay. Is that legal? In the interview, you basically have to lie about your employment situation, right? How many CEO's are CEO'ing for more than one company? If they can do it, why not the plebs? Because the plebs sign contracts saying they won’t. It’s not illegal, just highly unethical. It’s also not true, he does not know someone doing this. Is it highly unethical? You're hired to do a job, if you can successfully do that job and another one, I don't think there is anything unethical about doing that. It's very common in lower wage positions, not sure why it's suddenly unethical in higher wage positions. I would say it's unethical to force people to sign a contract saying you own all of their attention during the day, even if you don't use it. You sign a contract stating you're going to devote all of your available professional mental energy towards your company's problems. Violating a contract is not the same as doing something unethical. People violate non-competes all the time and IMO doing so is VERY ethical. What's unethical is saying you'll do something and then not doing that. In your example, the "ethical" way to violate a non-compete is to redact it from the original contract. I'm not saying you're the worst person ever, but littering is unethical, and so is saying you'll do something and then not doing it (or vice versa). I agree that would be ideal, but realistically there's usually a pretty big power imbalance between someone seeking a job and a potential employer. I'd say that how ethical it is varies depending on the company. For example, Jimmy Johns has non-compete agreements. Someone working at Jimmy Johns has 0 ability to negotiate that. Are they unethical if they quit after a year or so to go work at Subway? I would say obviously not, maybe you'd think they are. I'm sure you're thinking "but we're talking about software jobs where people have a lot more choice and bargaining power", which is definitely the case, hence why I mentioned that it depends on the company. On the most unethical end of contract violation I'd put the small startup that treats its people right and on the other end I'd put Walmart. No; this is simple, if difficult. If you want to be ethical, you cannot sign an agreement knowing what it says in full, and then violate that agreement when the counterparty has operated in good faith. What the person in your Jimmy Johns example has is the ability to seek work elsewhere. They are indeed acting unethically if they choose to work at Jimmy Johns, knowing what Jimmy Johns requires of its employees, then proceed to quit and then go work at Subway. I'm concerned you're considering "acting unethically" as a kind of condemnation. It's not. Life happens, and nobody's being sent to the stockade for acting unethically, but that is what you're doing when you violate a contract. I'm not worried about "acting unethically" being a condemnation, but IMO actions taken in a vacuum can't really be judged to be ethical or unethical, which is what it seems like you're trying to do when you state that violating any arbitrary agreement is unethical. In fact I'm not sure you really fully believe this, since you add the proviso "when the counterparty has operated in good faith". I would add that ethics is an entire branch of philosophy, so you know, there's so ambiguity between different folks' definitions. IMO it is ethical to violate contracts that would cause undue harm to one of the parties without good cause and furthermore it is unethical for a party to ask another to sign such a contract. And working at another sandwich place is not good cause. Clearly in your opinion you think it is unethical to violate such a contract because you appear to believe that violating any agreement (almost irrespective of context) is unethical. I'd be curious if you think that Jimmy Johns is ethical, unethical, or neutral for inserting such language into a contract in the first place. I would strongly disagree with that being either neutral or ethical. Not that the US government is an arbiter of ethics, but Jimmy Johns has dropped their non-competes in several states after state Attorneys General filed suit against them: https://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/22/jimmy-johns-drops-non-compet... If you sign a contract, then it is breach of contract, which would be a kind of illegal. I don't see the ethical quandaries though. So long as one is doing the work promised, and the company is satisfied with their output. It's not any more unethical than working on any other side project after hours. It's not, generally speaking, a criminal offense to violate a contract, I don't believe (IANAL!). Not the sort of illegal that'll get you thrown in jail though. Right, it's the sort of illegal where you go to civil court. Sure, if you lose you probably just end up paying money. But lots of "real" crimes have punishments that amount to paying some fines but no jail time. It's true, I know the guy. He's an outlier for sure, but he exists. Moreover, he moved from the toughest FAANG to more relaxed ones. I believe you. People that doubt these things are usually projecting some kind of insecurity. "It's impossible!"... no actually, not only is it possible but it happens all the time and yes it happens with FAANG workers too. It's funny, when this topic comes up, the people that are juggling multiple jobs are usually stuck in this weird place where they want to convince people it's true but at the same time not draw too much attention to it (for obvious reasons). > People that doubt these things are usually projecting some kind of insecurity. "It's impossible!"... no actually, not only is it possible but it happens all the time and yes it happens with FAANG workers too. And a lot of this comes from people who are far less wordly than they think they are. Like there are people that genuinely believe that no one in security makes more than $200k except CISOs. I doubt these claims because I know human nature pushes people to lie in order to contribute to conversations. I understand it's entirely possible to juggle two remote jobs, I just don't think it's nearly as common as people claim or think, which is why it's an easy lie to make. It's got nothing to do with the total salaries involved, and everything to do with the exceedingly rare nature of the claim. I can believe it happens, but not with two jobs paying $600k each. It's total compensation (including stocks and bonuses). Well, if I didn't believe you before, why do you think "It's true!" would sway me? You said "it's not true" and not "I believe it's not true", i.e. a fact vs opinion, so I reacted. But that ignores my point; you said something, I said what you said isn't true, so when you restate what you already said without adding anything, you're not improving your position. I personally know I person who works two remote PM jobs at the same time and in addition runs her own side gig. Sometimes she joins two meetings from the two laptops at the same time. I know a guy who overlapped months of two different jobs. So it exists and happens. And for IC-type positions should be even easier. Well, you aren't supposed to destroy the fabric of society! /s How do you think society would work if there was no restriction on the size of the group that is allowed to break the laws for their own benefit?! Imagine the horror if all plebs were allowed to do that! Could everyone live in Monaco or what? Util(itsrianism) is truth(tilitarianism) The categorical imperative deserves to stay in the dustbin of history. If it's in your contract where you promise not to work for anyone else without telling your employer, yes, it's illegal because breach of contract is illegal. But it's not illegal in its own right. However I doubt that they didn't make him sign a contract to the contrary so he's probably double dipping. Contracts don't determine what is legal and not legal. If the said person is found out then they would be in breach of contract and could be fired or sued. They would not earn themselves a criminal record. This is an underrated comment! Getting sued is not getting convicted of something. They could earn themselves a criminal charge if the court decides what they're doing is fraud which it likely is if they have signed something saying they wouldn't work elsewhere simultaneously. It's not fraud. If you are performing to expectation, no one is being defrauded. Anti-moonlighting clauses are nonsense. If the expectation is that you're not moonlighting so you sign a contract saying that you're not but you actually are, it's fraud full stop. You seem very confident of this, so I'm going to assume you're either a lawyer, or have knowledge of some sort of legal precedent here, right? that's not enough to show injury. If an employee does all their assigned work, there is nothing of value lost by the employer. No injury means no standing means no fraud. He'll likely get fired once they figure it out but by that time he might be able to retire early. You don't have to lie if you're unemployed during both of the interviews and then accept two offers simultaneously. If we assume they started both on the same date, then they wouldn't have had to lie or mislead prior to that point. Then the question is only whether it's legal (contractually) to be employed by more than one employer at a time. But to that... would it be legal for a company to own every waking hour rather than just your employed hours? I've not seen anything that says someone has to be exclusively hired, but they would need to be able to fully do their job for their employed time and surely that's all that matters. My contract says I can't be employed anywhere else. Part of it is for IP reasons, because they want to own everything I create. I hope they are paying handsomely for that provision. I'm in the top 25% compensation for senior SWEs in my area, according to levels.fyi, and I only have 5 YOE, so I guess so. I don't know that either me or them feel like that provision is the driver of this, but if it weren't a great offer I'd probably fight harder. This probably goes without typing, but that is amazing to think about. Thanks for sharing! I'm not in the USA so I'm not sure how the W2s and SSNs are tied to job/healthcare/401k etc, but how does this double timing work? Won't the Tax office/Finanzamt (IRS) know about this? The individual will end up overpaying on social security and underpaying on most other taxes. When they file their taxes for the year, they will most likely owe some additional money to the government. As long as they pay it promptly, I don't think the IRS will have any issues with the situation. They can also request that the employer withhold additional taxes; this is fairly common because of situations where both spouses work. They likely have two healthcare plans, but that's generally not an issue - again, it's fairly common if both spouses are employed. For the 401K, the individual will just have to make sure that their total contributions between both companies are under the federal limit. It’s not illegal to have two jobs. Why do so many people think this? Conditioning via plutocracy? I am not in the US but where I am from the contract usually says you are not allowed to work for another employer unless approved by your current employee. All the stories of overemployed get me kinda envious because I would never dare to try it myself. In your jurisdiction (Europe?) you are likely fine doing it legally if you are a consultant/contractor (i.e. responsible for all taxes/insurances yourself) but not as an employee. So if you find two remote jobs in the US, you are good. Ok. I’ve done it, and the money is nice. However it is a bit stressful and you’ll pay thru the nose in taxes, so I wouldn’t recommend long term. It is likely a breach of contract at both jobs, though. All contracts I’ve signed in the past include a clause that say “this is your one and only primary job and you hold no others”. The US system is setup such that employer A doesn't see any information that would reveal employer B. The IRS knows but they don't tell employers. Yeah but banks and credit bureaus also know. This is the true path to financial success It's a better path, for sure. But the true path to financial success is to own a large enough share of a large enough company that you can get paid a 100-1000x salary for one job, rather than a 2x salary for two. In a risk adjusted basis, making a million a year even for three years can set you up for life. Starting a business has so much risk, and could be attempted after you have 1.5 million saved and sitting in some index fund. I feel everyone who's in a bad place now, uncertain about the future. My approach has been often to take a mixed-risk approach, and it seems to work out well. First, no debt. Second, long-cash. After working for about ten years in relatively low paying roles I have something like a runway of about 25 years - that is I would not need to take on any job for 25 years while keeping mostly my current standard of living (plus be happier, as I would have more time). I plan to work for about 5 more years, then switch from a high-stress environment to cool projects that do not need to make lots of money. The key has been to continue to live like a student, we have a small cheap flat, go out eating maybe once a month, no car, no expensive hobby, little distractions. With a faang salary, I probably could have achieved that not in ten, but in two years. That's why I'm a bit curious why people are so stressed out. This falls apart when you want to get married and have kids? It’s certainly possible to find a frugal partner but kids still cost a lot of money in general I agree but IMO there is still a huge amount of discretion involved. My wife and I are routinely stunned at what other families spend on their kids clothing, hobbies, family vacations, etc. We hear a lot of grumbling from our kids about it too, but we both feel it is better both for our wallets and the kid’s upbringing. Life feels too short/uncertain to not make use of the cash you've got, is the other perspective I guess. Well, I use cash - I buy good food, for example. But just knowing that I can just say bye to any job, if it gets to the point is quite a value to me. 70 to 100 years is short? You could spend your entire savings in a month if you wanted so I don't understand your advice For many people the main concern is not money, but maintaining visa status. Yep. Living frugal has big advantages. You can just walk away if you need to. I don't have 25 years saved up (well, maybe I do counting retirement savings and I am getting pretty close to that 59.5 age where I can access them) but I can go a good while without working. Our cars are 20+ years old and still going strong, our mortgage on our very modest house will be paid off in a month or two. You have to be willing to trade status symbols for freedom. Feeling enough is something that money can't buy. I'm happy for you. Based on a small sample set. Seems like hiring is picking up. Most tech companies are still at higher valuation then pre pandemic times. They were profitable and hiring. Bold statement: Tech will pick up first. And companies who are making noise based on Elon's move at Twitter will strave for good workers and die Tech hasn't slowed down. High-burn SV companies are slowing down and large SV companies seem to be cutting cost. Small, normal companies haven't been able to fill positions for ages though, so they might finally be able to catch some fish now. Not great for the salaries of those used to FAANG and high burn salaries, but nobody should have to worry about having a job. It depends a lot on which streams you're casting in. At the seed/series A stage (one I'm most familiar with), any company that raised money this year or is cash-flow positive is still hiring opportunistically. At Series B and beyond, it's really a function of the health and resilience of their business model. Within this bracket, there's fewer total jobs available, but the "median quality" of jobs is better than it's been in a long time: most companies that are hiring are good companies, so if you were to pick completely randomly between offers, you wouldn't be too bad off. Comp packages have not come down ($180-200kish cash basis for a "senior" engineer). For people who know how to analyze early-stage companies as a prospective engineering hire, this is paradoxically a great time to be looking. From my perspective, it seems like many ex-FAANG employees are seeking stable comp at late-stage growth companies (which may be a buyer beware situation...). I think the hiring there has gotten much more competitive, but I have less firsthand experience fishing those streams. My tackle box: laid off from Meta after <1 month of Bootcamp, 5ish YoE as a backend engineer. Meta would have been my first FAANG experience. Was affected by the meta layoffs. Haven't looked seriously. Here is my read on the market situation. 1. Last 10 years of low interest rates and growth made Faang like companies seem much more valuable than they were. Now that tech is making it easier/cheaper to build and compete with their products (think TikTok vs Insta or AI driven frameworks for automating all kinds of workflows) expect the big/old companies to take time to realize and pivot to build more valuable products to stay alive. And it's not just Faang but any companies that are ripe to disruption where if you get hired it may be less stock comp or volatile job durability. 2. Also related to this, the FTC is tightening the screws(meta was blocked from supernatural, Nvidia could not buy arm) so they can't grow the way they did monopolistically like before and expect less of hiring bounties. 3. Seasonal and recession effects will slow down things for a bit but the former will wear off come January. Latter is a wildcard. 4. Don't get the first job you get without vetting the positiom even if it takes 3-4 months to find one(assuming you are not squeezed by issues like immigration or cost of living). Try vetting the companies and see if they value what you have to offer and the place is not toxic. Remember that only cracking the tech round is a zero sum game but mutual value in a work relationship is not and often more important. So vet it well. 5. If it's been a while since you last looked and are procrastinating on practice of leetcode or interview prep cause or you aren't clear on what to do like I am, take care of my mind first. Meditation, simplifying your life, figuring out what you really value in life and why you value it, is useful. Networking and talking to people on what's out there to change what you do is also useful. I'm in Ukraine. What I seen from begin of war, there are extremely few positions for juniors - different sources say, 60-2000 cv's per position. For experienced people, things slightly better - at 1 years exp, 5-20 cv/pos; 2 years exp ~1:1; 5+ years exp, there are much more positions, than candidates. Rumors said, no new projects opened, and all people hired to support (and if you fortunate, to grow) old projects. But don't forget, we are at war, few months ago more than quarter of Ukraine considered occupied by Russians, and we still are not safe from strikes on infrastructure (about week ago we survived blackout for near 20 hours). I've been half-heartedly looking for a new job since Jan 2022, at which time I left my last employer by choice. I've interviewed with ~20 companies this year, usually with folks that reach out to me from the 'Who Wants to be Hired' thread. I've received three pretty decent offers (200-250k base + equity) all at small, early-stage companies. From what I've observed this year, companies that are doing difficult or low-level work are still as starved as ever for senior/staff/architect-level folks that can deliver, and are happily willing to hire them. Probably irrespective of company size, but I pretty much exclusively look for teams of ~5-20 people. One material effect I've noticed from the downturn is I've gotten a lot less emails from recruiters advertising positions that are at companies with BS products, or that have clearly nothing to do with my skillset. My bio: I've got ~10 years professional programming experience and consider myself a generalist. Typical projects I look for include graphics programming, language runtimes, compilers, data streaming.. low-ish level stuff that's usually pretty technical. Anyway, since someone asked, that's my 2c :) > From what I've observed this year, companies that are doing difficult or low-level work are still as starved as ever for senior/staff/architect-level folks that can deliver, and are happily willing to hire them. Probably irrespective of company size, but I pretty much exclusively look for teams of ~5-20 people. How do you find these companies? I'm trying to find such roles since this is kinda where I excel at, but most of the roles I seem to get interviews for are pretty generic backend roles. If you're not in a rush I recommend posting on 'HN: Who Wants to be Hired' every month and let people just come to you. If you are in a rush, I've had pretty good success in the past with applying to 'Who Wants to be Hired' posts, as well as AngelList (they just rebranded, but I forget the new name). Not sure if that helps at all, but that's what's worked for me. Wellfound is the new name It is not saturated. Not many companies laid people off in tech. They were just big names with bigger numbers but there are a lot of jobs. Yes, if you are only looking a MANGA-like companies sure. But there are a lot of jobs out there. Many of those jobs would be at a significant pay cut though I’ve been getting more messages from recruiters since the layoffs (not laid off myself — federal employee) for machine learning research engineer work. If you’ve been laid off and have those skills, could be fairly easy to land a job. I haven't interviewed myself and I've suffered working for a corporate that is hiring but also not hiring dealing with the same sort of bullshit "throw_aws_inter" is dealing with but from the other side (being told simultaneously we really need to hire + that we're on a hiring freeze and still hiring in practice). I do however mentor a bunch of juniors (less than 2 years of experience) and the 3 that got laid off got a bunch of offers within a month. It took more interviews but my experience from the last few weeks is that there are still a lot more jobs than applicants. Got laid off in June, was contacted with a lot of different opportutities but most of them were start-ups with no revenue. I joined a start-up which has been a horrible experience(Toxic culture) and I'm back looking for a new job again. I think I had something like 3-4 offers rescinded and a couple of interviews where I reached the final stage just to be informed that the company halted hiring. I've been really lucky with my startup experience so far. The two I've worked for have both had really great, though different, environments. My most recent startup was 4 to 5 people and it was absolutely fantastic. I got laid off last week. I have had ~40 linkedin messages so far. Turned that into ~10 initial calls. I am waiting to hear from ~7 hiring managers. I hope to have a job offer signed in the next month. I'm regularly getting enquiries but I do DevOps (AWS, Kubernetes and Istio) so I guess my skillset is still in demand. I guess what's more important for me is the type of work. I'm looking for startup work that's a bit more secure now, if that's possible, lol! Doesn't seem so easy to find. Bunch of companies migrate their stack to Kubernetes or other orchestrators (side effect of moving to microservices even when not needed) so you are safe and in demand for long. > even when not needed Examples? Every time I see kubernetes pop up it's because of better performance or lesser costs. Anecdotal example, though I'm sure I'm not the only one: We had a C++ service. It needed high availability, but didn't have super high resource requirements. Our setup was an ec2 instance (c5.xlarge) to build and release AMIs (a bash script using debootstrap to build the AMI which someone wrote 10 years ago probably), an autoscaling group of 3 t2.small instances spread across AZs, and an ALB. The total cost of this was perhaps $200/mo, and we had incredibly good uptime. So, what's the catch? Well, it took the service about 20 minutes to build, and about 35 minutes from clicking the "deploy new version" to it actually running. Someone higher up noticed, and a bright-eyed infra engineer said k8s would make the deploy cycle faster. Fast forward a year. Our autoscaling group is now 3 c5.xlarge instances because the kubelet + docker + coredns + all this other k8s gunk I don't understand need significantly more CPU than our app does (and without giving them more CPU, deploy times were much slower since downloading and unpacking the image was so slow). We have a new logging system (our old logging setup wasn't cloud native apparently) that takes a gig more memory per node. A gig of memory per node to support our service, which peaks at 200MiB RSS. Building and deploying a new version still takes about 35 minutes because compiling C++ is the exact same speed in a dockerfile as it is on an ec2 instance. It costs about $600/mo, and it has far more operational load. When it isn't having any issues, the p99 is identical. > better performance or lesser costs It seems like the opposite of what you'd expect. K8s is adding more components. It's adding more resource usage. Why wouldn't that be slower and cost more? this might pick up even more given the VMware/Broadcom acquisition, so you are likely good Not laid off, but got an offer this month. All I did was turn on "open to work" on LinkedIn, respond to >400 recruiters, ~3% of which were offering good enough compensation. Had 4 on-sites, 2 rejections, 1 I rejected before offer stage, and 1 offer. Senior SRE, no leetcode / system design, but they did have a take-home project. What was the salary range? ~$275k total comp b/t base/bonus/RSUs in MCOL. Years of experience? 5 I was laid off a week before thanksgiving. Job search has been going pretty bad. Only a few screen out rejections and a handful of obnoxious crap recruiters have contacted me. No interviews yet. I've been there. The last time around was in 2020. It seemed like it took forever to get any response. Even when I was able to get through the interview process, it just stalled and I didn't hear back at all. I thought I was being ghosted. I finally took an offer in late January. By March I'd had no fewer than five companies come back with written offers out of the blue, long after I'd forgotten about them. Not sure this is appropriate but if anyone wants to interview with a really cool food delivery company [1](I know, I know -- I think we can make the business model work but if not, in the mean time, come help us try!) hit me up at alexandar dot narayan at delivery hero (no space) dot com. Or check out careers.deliveryhero.com. The culture is awesome, the pay is good, the stock price has a ton of upside potential. Work life balance is amazing here in Berlin. And we work with really large datasets and there's a lot that can be improved I am sure with your experience brought internally. The company offers work visas, relocation assistance and a relocation bonus, and stock RSUs. [1] I applied for a startup, on a lark, on one of HN's who's hiring in such and such month and landed at a startup in Hamburg. I am now in Berlin. HN changed my life! Not laid off, but webdev I've been applying about a year. About the past 3-4 months have been harder to land interviews than early on, even if I write sample code in company's stack/language and contact them. Have an online portfolio and contract work experience. Fortunately for me, I didn't walk away from my last gig empty handed, and so have been afforded a bit of time to figure out what's next. As others have said, hiring really slows down in Nov and Dec. You have quarter end, the year's budget is running low, project priorities are being shifted with anticipation of the new year, etc.,. Having been on the hiring end many times over the last several years, I know that higher ups often push you to fill a position - but just as soon as you settle on a candidate during this time of year, they almost always pump the brakes on actually hiring until new year. Knowing this, I'd initially planned no not looking for a new gig until 2023, but once folks hear your back on the market, you basically can't avoid people trying to play matchmaker for your next job (which is a good problem to have, I suppose). Not wanting to pass up a potential opportunity, I accepted a few interview requests that came about from my personal network in Nov. After going through 2-3 rounds of ultimately fruitless interviews with 3 different companies since mid-Nov, I've decided to just wait and enjoy the downtime. Each company I interviewed with essentially signaled "you're perfect for our needs and will be moving quickly with you" during the interview process, then would go radio silent - only to have them follow up a couple weeks later with "some of our internal needs have changed with the end of year approaching, but we'll be in touch". So I figured for my sanity and so that I could enjoy a little bit of my funemployment, that I'd just be upfront with them and set some boundaries. Now, I've basically just been communicating "I appreciate your interest, but this is a bad time of year for bringing on new hires when considering year's end, so let's plan on touching base in January". We will see if this works out in my benefit or not - but if they can't respect that, and aren't capable of acknowledging the reality of things, I'd probably not want to work with them anyways. Wasn't laid off (end of contract) but spent ~3 months looking and interviewing for jobs. Applied to about 30 positions, heard back from 3 and received 1 offer for Google. Didn't exactly give me confidence about the future when I may be looking for another job... YOE: 3 Dude. You got an offer from Google. How do you not have confidence for the future?! Google took you! Who cares what the places that didn’t take you think? *GOOGLE* thinks you’re good. That’s a hell of a statement. But getting a job at Google tells you that your overall skillset was not the problem. You just didn’t match the other positions as well as some others for some reason. FAANG level jobs are always hard to get, always hyper-competitive. You’re obviously good enough to be there, so the worst case scenario is likely that you’d have to leave the prestige of FAANG and similar. You’ll be employable for as long as you want to be, I’m sure. Google may pay well and look good to future employers, but the internet is littered with stories about Google's weird promotion-driven-development culture and the stress/disappointment it can cause. I genuinely wish GP the best but it's not a company I would want to work for if I had another option. If I ended up at Google I'd probably keep my head way down, only showing up and getting the work done because everything about it seems like a toxic work environment these days. But I can't help but think it's worth leveraging an offer like that, if not only as a favor to your future self. Go in planning to work for like a year, near the end start looking for a jobs and I have a feeling there will be a ton of companies drooling at someone wanting to leave Google for them. But you do you! Agreed. I got offered an interview at Google years ago and passed on it hard. On the one hand I feel like I should regret the money they I may have made, but honestly I regret nothing... Sometimes the fit matters more than the money and I would've hated my life there. To add to that, hiring is very slow at Google right now. Kudos on getting an offer (even if you're not going to take it). Googles prestige is on the decline. Blind is filled with posts talking about Google culture turning toxic. Googles stock has performed quite badly with the downturn, and the heat is being turned up on the workers. Compare it to place like Salesforce or Oracle or Intel or IBM. Salesforce and Oracle may actually beat the google offer too since Google is low balling a lot these days. Now that Google will be in your resume I'm sure you won't have any trouble finding jobs in the future. Does "heard back from 3" include even acknowledgments that you made contact? Been laid off in September, interviewed for a month and accepted an offer at the end of October. I'll be starting in mid January since am legally still employed with the old company until 31 December. Still employed since that's how we get our severance, so am enjoying the time off. The thing that bothered me the most was that I had to update my CV, interview again and all the things related to that. I landed that job in March so I really didn't feel like finding a new one, I also liked the place. I have a nice resume so was pretty confident I'd find something before the end of the year, so I didn't feel much anxious about it. For those of you on long breaks or have been unemployed for a 6+ months, what do you do with all your spare time? I resigned from my position in Jan 2022 and have been developing a computer game in C++ as a way to level up my programming skill and release it as an (eventually) paid product. The process has been very satisfying and I am learning a lot. I keep to a 9-5, Monday-Friday schedule and treat it like a job. I have a some life events coming up next year so I have started to turn the gears on my network and contacts but I am pretty much only interested in consulting and contract jobs that can be worked remotely. Right now, I primarily see it as a means to raise some cash, so I can make the occasional splurge purchase. I have honestly thought of doing DoorDash. Someone in the thread talked about the importance of a runway and I totally agree. I spent 6 years doing a STEM PhD and about 6 years working in industry on okay but not great salaries and even at that rate I have a runway of about 10+ years of savings before I run out of money (living frugal). After my last job I think I promised myself to never just take a job because I am offered or out of prestige - I am turning mid-30's and I feel like I can't waste anymore time just doing time - i.e. waging for a paycheck without a higher purpose. This causes tension with my partner and probably my future father-inlaw doesn't like me but long term I intend to be my own boss and run my own company. Especially since the pandemic I feel increasingly the urge and need to be the master of my own destiny - especially with regards to income. Which country are you from? I don't see how it's physically possible to save 10 years of runway with a PhD's worth of debt and only 6 years of work. I did 10 years of labor with only a Bachelor degree's worth of university debt and my net worth is only enough to get me through 2 years if I liquidate everything... But my startup shares are illiquid (pre-ICO) and all my cryptocurrency is locked to earn forging rewards so in practice I only have about 2 months of liquid runway. PhDs, at least in the US, are free. They actually give you a stipend, usually under $80K/year, but more than $50K/year I'd wager. This depends highly on the program you are doing. Often, STEM grad students will get paid a stipend but 50k sounds pretty high for a Bio major, and it could include having to do a lot of teaching. I’d guess CS PhDs and especially industry-friendly fields do okay. But other fields don’t make anywhere near that much, if their phd is even paid at all. I'm sure most devs will be fine, as illustrated by some of the replies, it's the purple haired product managers and head of diversity staff I feel sorry for /s Yeah, I'm making stainless/steel high pressure containers/barrels/pipes. I'll tell you working with 15mm+ stainless is nothing like ~2mm PC case grade steel or aluminum :D Very hard but also very forgiving, which is what allowed me to get in - I've learned TIG welding, too, may even get certified just for job safety. Welds get x-rayed and warranty is in the double digits so you can't half ass the important parts. Plenty of work from big and small companies alike. Some US middleman has contracted most firms around this city to build ion exchange components to be used in lithium battery production. A lot of orders for big ion exchange containers from DE and CZ, afaik also for lithium battery plants (Production? Recycling?). I'm also Berry Alien, the fastest replacer of ion exchange material alive in September 2022 in bf middle of nowhere, Germany :D Next step, building robots at some company. Always wanted to try that. I seem to fall ass first into opportunities I always just abandon, but this time I have medicine and crypto on my side. Thanks Chris for the unique (for me) opportunity. I got officially laid off on Dec 1st, so far: - 38 applications - 8 rejections with no interview - 1 rejection after 1st round - 1 first round with no response - 1 2nd round interview (no response yet) - 1 3rd round interview scheduled for this week - 1 1st round scheduled for this week The others I've gotten no response. Senior Product Designer with 8 years of experience, well versed in UI/UX Design, Design Systems, Accessibility, Prototyping, Documentation. Sole designer at my last startup on a brand new product that got acquired. Just got laid off early December after celebrating my 34th birthday. They had nothing wrong to say about my performance. They said i was a good leader, a performer, a hardworker. Not sure what went wrong but i guess they never had a good reason either. Well here i am, still looking for a PM gig. If anyone can point me in the right direction, here's my linkedin:https://www.linkedin.com/in/eileen-anzabwa-41b34b144/ and a link to my CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wav2woivdifgw2QyZpYyyUFKAhJ... I wasn't laid off but after my company announced layoffs I received ~25 messages on linkedin from recruiters so I think things are still pretty good if you have a decent resume.
I am currently in interview process with about 5 companies which signaled that they could match or exceed my current comp. Too bad I suck at interviews though I've been looking for a remote design + engineering role, but it really seems like most companies are not hiring or just have way too many options to choose from! I've got 10+ years as a design who is also a full stack engineer (node stack). If you're hiring for a role that is well-rounded product, please message me, I'd love to talk. Portfolio link in my profile. Hang in there! End of year is usually bad but now it's MUCH worse. Typically you'll see some improvement earlier in the year. I'm curious what % of offers coming from applicant's applying directly versus recruiter outreach/networking. In my experience applying for jobs feels like a waste of time. Maybe 1/20 will acknowledge you. And you have no idea if the job really exists. But if you're contacted first by the recruiter the hit rate seems to be much higher. The job search can be difficult right now. Many companies are still determining if they should continue hiring or stop, sometimes even lay off their staff. As a tech career coach & tech recruiter, I recommend the following:
a)try to remain optimistic and patient, I know this will be the hardest thing, but it will be an essential step forward for you.
b)recruiters don't have all the answers you need because they are also waiting to hear back from many different stakeholders. You need them.
c)make sure your resume is the best resume you have ever written. The competition is high right now. I've written a 12-page resume handbook course with two google doc templates that you can use in under 5 minutes. https://www.careersycoaching.com/product-page just sharing this in case someone needs it. You can use the 20% promo code: Interview
d)connect with recruiters on LinkedIn with companies you'd like to work for. They might advertise a role in the near future. When you are connected with them, it will be easy to share your resume directly with the recruiter. But you got to do the work now. You could write something like Hey x, a friend recommended connecting with you. I've heard great things about your work culture. I would love to connect and stay in touch with you; who knows what the future might bring.
e)rewrite your LinkedIn profile. Once the market picks up again, you want to have an impactful LinkedIn profile that can be found. At the very least, ensure you have the relevant tech keywords somewhere in your profile. Thanks, X
f)you need multiple processes to be successful. I recommend having at least five processes, if possible, to increase your chances.
g)the market is changing. The bar is going up; you need to prepare really well for your interviews. Don't wing it. Prep as much as you can. Practice as much as possible for the coding interviews and do your research online. Many companies have their coding questions on the internet. Hope this helps, if you want me to share more tips please let me know and I can add a few more things. I’m not looking for anything atm but using my (small) savings to learn and get some perspective on what to do in the future. I’ve wrapped up the Fast.ai deep learning course and switched to studying the language of my country of residence. The rest of my time is calls with random people via my office/mentoring hours (https://sonnet.io/posts/hi) and learning how to live with a dog! I try to code a bit and have some side projects I want to monetise or share, but tbh I’m struggling with getting them out because for some reason I’ve started to be overly critical of my work. I know it’ll pass. I’m also exploring different ways of working, such as co-ops. I’m a founder/SWE with 20 years of experience. I primarily write Elixir these days. At first I was worried that there wouldn't be a lot of Elixir jobs, but the ones I did apply to have mostly gotten back to me and I've been interviewing. I have 5 years of experience with the language, FWIW. There's a motorcycle parts store that's on elixir in my area. Almost learned elixir just for that I'm compiling a list of companies confirmed to be using elixir (not just suggesting it as a language in the description), dm me if you'd care to share lists I was laid off back in August. Had a bunch of interviews right off the bat at top companies that ended up dragging on for weeks (months in some cases) as one role was on again/off again while other companies were slow to schedule next steps. Ultimately, none of my on-sites resulted in offers by the end of October and I suspect layoffs and budgeting concerns were a factor in at least two of them. I think openings and interviews are very slow right now due to the holidays A bit off-topic. Saw a lot of posts lately about layoffs. I feel in Europe, at least Germany, and Sweeden, we are having the opposite issue to the USA: staff shortage. In Frankfurt airport, I saw an ad by Lufthansa that they are hiring 20,000 people from ground staff to IT. In Stockholm, some trains got canceled due to staff shortages. Not laid off, but my 2c, from Euroregion. Demographics is the killer force, basically with a MINT background, you can find a job almost instantly. You may not earn a top salary, but you'll earn enough to get by well. Given Europe is in the worst crisis since WW2, I'd say job market is fine. What is mint? I would assume he means this:
https://www.ue-germany.com/news-centre/blog/what-is-mint-any... Yeah, German thing. The equivalent English buzzword-abbreviation is "STEM" There are a lot of exciting opportunities in the space industry for those looking for a field change. Here is a site that aggregates jobs from major Space companies
https://rocketcrew.space/ A lot of companies think they want a top-10 l33tcode developer rockstar king, but what they're going to get is a normal run of the mill rule-following developer who produces consistent quality work. Got multiple interviews and a few near-offers, only to have companies “change direction” or slash the budget last minute. Still looking. Caviet: in Australia and cyber security not Dev. 2 offers in 2 weeks. Started without losing a day of pay. 7% pay rise. Market is great right now Contract ended with slowdown/pullback in expensed. Already have another part-time deal starting next quarter. Some initial billable hours in Dec. So not bad. If you're a SaaS Sales Engineer based in Seattle looking for a remote role for a New Zealand based company then give me a message Stefanini is hiring! Growing and Hiring! Stefanini.com Job search? Why would I do that? My last day is Friday and I plan to take several months off. In Canada, there's a lot that feels very positive at the moment. - Recruiters being very open about the salary range. This is a change from even a few years back, where there would be endless back and forth of "who calls the number" first. Now out of maybe 30 early conversations only 1 recruiter absolutely refused to state the range. The top end is extremely consistent, the bottom end (as typical for Canada) can be laughably low. - US companies and remote work coming in in a big way. Some of them position themselves at the high end of the local market (which I define to be around C$200k base for non-MANGA companies). Others decide to offer the US range (US$180-200k), which is of course better but in some cases has the drawback of being a contractor. - Demand in my field (DevOps/SRE/cloud infra) hasn't changed much. Still multiple pings a week from recruiters, down from multiple a day. Not a problem getting interviews, at all. Had multiple offers already but looking for a better fit. - Few attempts at take-home exercises. I generally refuse these outright unless they are paid; some companies react to that by simply waiving the take-home. Some things that did change... - the remarkable extent to which US salaries are outliers worldwide is beginning to have an effect. Every single company I worked at for the last decade had non-NA dev teams, usually at the periphery (support, integrations, follow-the-sun ops). Now core teams are distributed and dev work is shifting away from high-cost centers. One example I saw is in Gergely's "which companies are still hiring" spreadsheet -- how many of these companies are not looking in US at all, or are Europe-/Asia-centric? - startup non-base comp is becoming a really bad deal, even for Series A. I was offered some shares, even with the founder's own rosy projections an exit for me would be a nice bonus at most. Why deal with the stress if there's no meaningful payback at the end? - some smaller companies asking LC Hards all of a sudden. To me that just feels like someone out of Google founding a startup and having no idea how to hire non-developers. - people having less filter in general. One of the best things I really started doing in my interviews is shutting up and listening instead of working to sell myself / ask questions. People will admit amazing things about the company or about the level of fit / misfit for a role when they try to fill in the silence. - as a corollary, how do interviewers behave if they sense it's likely not a fit? Do they start trash talking your experience / chances of success / achievable salary, or just let it go? I've had a recruiter try to convince me there aren't offers at 175 base + in Canada. I've had a founder tell me no one will offer me a manager role (after a 30 minute interview wherein they talked most of the time and barely asked me anything). Just take a bit of time to listen and the trash will sort itself out. Technical jobs available at Actian!! If you know anyone looking for a job send them the links below. Actian has several open positions in Engineering, IT/DevOps, Finance, Marketing, Sales, and Support. #ATXJobs #jobs Engineering: Principal C++ Engineer - Remote
https://hire.lever.co/jobs/internal/480a3819-a573-47b6-9e83-... Engineering: Senior C++ Software Engineer - Remote
https://hire.lever.co/jobs/internal/8975c3da-5bbb-40c6-8813-... Engineering: Senior Cloud Engineer - Remote
https://hire.lever.co/jobs/internal/e0573a22-ea25-48f3-80b8-... Engineering: Senior UX Designer - US Remote
https://hire.lever.co/jobs/internal/979e375f-d87f-49bd-ac27-... Engineering: Sr. Software Development Engineer - US Remote
https://hire.lever.co/jobs/internal/3a74b305-c866-4341-abc3-... IT/Dev Ops: Lead Dev Ops Sys Admin - US Remote
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https://hire.lever.co/jobs/internal/6d29d877-8342-44ac-95ff-... silly. the onus is on those posting. nothing to do with AI. if you post shit, you are shit. I feel like this should be a "Who's hiring" thread. But anyway - we're always hiring if you're into small consulting companies. We mostly do AWS, Azure, and not a lot of GCP (sad because I like GCP), and it's almost 100% K8s. You will have to be able to get a CKA, CKAD, or CKS at some point. Need to be in the US. Send resumes to Josh@BoxBoat.Com How many valid inquiries do you get by posting in non "Who's hiring" thread? As of this afternoon, seven. When I post in a who's hiring thread... actually I don't like to post in a who's hiring thread because I end up with way too many conversations. One may suggest to 'learn to code', but it is not enough this time. Perhaps now one may say, it is time to 'learn to adapt', since with the recent release of ChatGPT now gives the excuse for managers to be more motivated to hire less engineers and programmers as the cheap money has essentially evaporated. So this time it is indeed different and I would expect less engineers to be hired and more programming jobs to become very competitive. No-one is safe; and that includes 'seniors'. ChatGPT is not going to eat all the jobs. Can we stop this nonsense, please? I'll get scared when someone shows me an actual deployed, running, and maintained app by something like chatGPT. Solving problems with code snippets is a tiny part of the job I'll get scared when a chat bot can log into JIRA, take a ticket, read the requirements, say "Hmm, there's not enough details in here and a couple things seem ambiguous or contradictory..." Then it schedules a meeting with the biz dev and a QA resource and they all hash out and improve the ticket. Then it goes and implements the code and puts it out for review, addresses any comments, works with QA to clarify how to test it (maybe that's another chat bot) and deploys it. I'll be ecstatic when that happens..... Jira is like the worst part of my day Not to mention, until on-prem chatGPT is available, companies that care about source code secrecy aren’t going to expose their codebase to OpenAI. We’ll get another slew of decades long court cases once one line of Oracle or Microsoft code proprietary code comes out of chatGPT. We will be all dead and gone long before any of those points are a reality... If anything, we'll need more engineers to help GPT-3.5/ChatGPT eat most receptionist, customer support, and similar customer-facing entry level jobs. That itself could become a very healthy and large industry. This feels kind of arrogant? People working in many customer-facing entry level jobs do emotional labor within organisations that no AI-training has even taken aim at.
If glorified chatbots could do their work receptionists would've disappeared a long time ago. Emotional labor is a problem, not a feature. A receptionist only needs to be polite with the guests. But unfortunately, receptionists are often subject to emotional abuse. We've never had glorified chatbots like GPT-3 or GPT-3.5. I'm not just praising GPT; I've myself casually run through a few simulations with a hotel chain receptionist and an executive. The technology looks very competent, and aside from cost savings, there's also the customer service quality aspect (consistency particularly) and the element of removing staff from abuse. The biggest challenge is integrating language models with live data. Making customer data accessible to them is not a problem technically (prepending prompts), but it could be a GDPR problem if a third party like OpenAI is involved (having to hand over data to a third party might make the AI receptionists unappealing to some customers -- maybe, needs to be tried). The other aspect is letting the AI make changes in a data model. But there are ways to solve that as well. When these obstacles are resolved - and there is a lot of incentive to fix them now - a lot of customer-facing reception-type work can be outsourced to AI. By the way, some hotels are already very interested in chatbots for reception work. There has been a lot of talk about that in some chains since about 2020. Old-style NLP bots, too. But of course, GPT-3 capabilities are very appealing. I just want to add, ordering through the McDonald's big touchscreen machine is much better than ordering through the human and that alone has elevated my affinity for McDonald's. Which other experiential leaps from replacing humans with machines remain unimplemented? Eh on McDonalds but I do like the self-service ordering. Kinda amazing this has not caught on more and sooner in USA. Much more low tech versions of this have been used in Japan forever. The noodle bars and ramen shops are case studies in efficiency. IMO AI code will eat entry level software eng jobs before AI eats in-person jobs like receptionist. I would not want to be a “take this UI and add a new field” coder right now. I don't think so for several reasons. First, there's the uselessness of entry-level engineers. They are hired for their growth potential (that every human has, but language models don't) and are expected to grow into mid-levels and seniors. In most of the sw industry, entry-level roles are also not terminal, which means that such an engineer must get promoted at least +1L to keep working in the company. Someone (or something) perpetually stuck at the entry level is a bad value proposition for a sw company. Secondly, the code that language models produce is buggy. They can, on occasion, produce amazing code and even entire codebases. But this is an exception, not the rule. You can generally prototype something or get an idea for something from language models, but you can only push very little of that into production. What good is code you can't use? You still need an engineer to oversee the language model's outputs. Overall, if some company replaced their juniors with AI, that would be incompetent management. > ChatGPT is not going to eat all the jobs. Of course. My comment was about 'less programmers' getting hired. Not the extreme of 'All programmers' getting replaced by ChatGPT as you read incorrectly. Believing that programmers don't need to adapt and that managers won't need to reduce or do layoffs especially with programmers, is quite frankly a denial and delusion of what is going on with cutting costs in hiring too many of them in the first place. Denial is the first step to acceptance and as I said before, less programmers will be hired with juniors and some seniors impacted. No, that will also not happen. More developers will get hired, because ChatGPT will not perform the higher function tasks most developers actually spend most of their time working on. The reason this will happen, is because ChatGPT will be more efficient in performing the lower function tasks and there will be more of a need to put all that automatically created code into actual use, integrate it with Enterprise Package FooCPT, figure out what caused the product outage at 2am at night. And on and on and on. Not to mention that ChatGPT will not be able to talk to your users about what they want next, convince your manager that that's the right thing to do and everything else that you need to do on top of the coding part to be a good developer. What possibly will happen is that junior developers will have even harder time getting into the industry, because clueless PHBs will see ChatGPT doing all their work "for free". A few years later they're screwed, because nobody at the company knows how their applications work. Except ChatGPT...maybe. > What possibly will happen is that junior developers will have even harder time getting into the industry, because clueless PHBs will see ChatGPT doing all their work "for free". A few years later they're screwed, because nobody at the company knows how their applications work. Except ChatGPT...maybe. Reads like what I said before. Some will be affected and less programmers will be needed,. Especially in particular, juniors and some seniors getting impacted. I don't know where I said 'All jobs' as you once again brought out as you clear read incorrectly. I only said less programmers will be hired and these software engineering jobs will be more competitive. The best course of action is to learn to adapt and it certainly applies to programmers. Pretending that they don't need to adapt is a delusion and denial of constant change. With or without AI. You are right, but it doesn’t fit worldview of your opponents, they are just too scared to think this thoughts. To anyone who used Copilot and ChatGPT it is obvious that in 5 years demands for entry to software dev will be much higher, and there will be less positions open, because sheer productivity increases for the already employed people will outpace the demand. It’s like peasants arguing about security of their future prospects in the beginning of 20th century after seeing a tractor. Winter is coming, but they just can’t believe this since their income directly depends on this not being true. No one is hiring ditch diggers because someday they may grow to become backhoe operators. No one is hiring content farm writers who can be replaced by an AI with someone a bit more senior providing some basic supervision. And no one will hire junior developers when frameworks, AIs, etc. can replace 90% of what they can do. Who’s going to write new code to train the model? Who’s going to figure out why the code generated by the model is slightly off? The performance gains from chatgpt are going to be amazing from a quality of life perspective but overall not a huge change (except maybe in some niche roles). Programmers are not spending much of their time figuring out code that chatgpt can generate. The question is not who, but how many people are required to write code to train model? You are like a peasant arguing about security of their job in the beginning of 20th century after seeing a tractor. Sure there are farmers now, but much fewer of them is needed. About that last point, imagine the horror of having the responsibility to maintain whatever the AI wrote 3 years ago. :) ChatGPT has quite literally nothing to do with tech lay-offs. Read a freaking newspaper once in a while. Yet no-one here said that for this year's tech layoffs. But I wouldn't be surprised to see less engineers being hired compared to last year which is my entire point. Bringing in ChatGPT into the mix now won't make it any easier for entry level job seekers or for several seniors. This time, it is not the same as before. But of course. Denying it all, and not adapting sure is a great way of coping with rapid changes. /s > since with the recent release of ChatGPT now gives the excuse for managers to be inclined to hire less engineers and programmers as the cheap money has essentially evaporated I don't understand the relevance of ChatGPT to this. I assume because I've seen ChatGPT successfully: - write a Gitlab ci job that tests python code and outputs a junit test report. - can you add code coverage? - write a sql table that has users, age, and a biography - write python that parses the above output from the table - now use a lexer and parser - create a unit test to verify it's correct. - write a perl one liner that parses a list of users and phone numbers It completed all of them. I was already impressed with OpenAI when it generated an argument for why Britney Spears should become president and a test for a third grader about Socrates which I then answered incorrectly and had it grade it. Have you tried doing this yourself? On Twitter etc. you see some really cool cherry-picked examples that are quite easy to break when replicating them yourself. It is often confidently incorrect. Which is easy to spot if you know the subject matter, but nearly impossible if you are not familiar with the subject. I found the same thing! I asked multiple questions and a lot of things were “confidently incorrect”. It was the exact term I thought of seeing these answers. I found it funny because it made it more human-like as well. (Example: “what’s the difference between timestamp and timestamptz in postgresql?” will answer that timestamptz will store the time zone and takes more space, which is both incorrect!) I also asked it general, abstract programming advice and it gave pretty well-reasoned arguments mentioning maintainability and readability. > It is often confidently incorrect. My god, it truly can replace computer programmers. As a lifelong product manager, I’ve always considered my specs to be prompt engineering for incredibly impressive but sometimes misguided intelligences. It can barely spell out the correct ingredients of certain dishes, wouldn't trust it. Garbage in, Garbage out. GPT3 is as good and reliable as a Tesla autopilot. I've tried it and it works. It sometimes makes mistakes which it corrects when pointed out. And it's going to make less and less mistakes as the technology improves. It also can do many things I am not able to do. It's incredible. These were all examples I tried myself. On being able to replace a real programmer I'd say ChatGPT is about the same distance lane assist is from FSD. Why you ask? Well it's because most of what a programmer does is more complex than the AI can handle right now. For example my job involves the following: a) multiple interacting systems and management of the relationships between them b) > 90% of my work does not involve writing new code c) the programming part is mostly about changing existing code d) or debugging (and sometimes setting up a debugger and running code) e) reading hundreds of articles to figure out why the trivial example these systems are good at doesn't work (sometimes on someone else's machine or staging only) f) taking product requirements and making small alterations to allow them to become reality (and knowing when to tell people about the decisions you made and when not to) g) talking to people who might know more about the specific problem you are facing and when to battle through h) sharing ideas on how to do things with the wider team i) fighting the good fight and sneaking in refactoring when people are not looking I don't think we are anywhere near these things yet. The most important, I think, is talking to the customer, and understanding what they want... even when they do not know it... Okay. If there is somebody out there where the hardest part of their job is those tasks then that's not good for them. There are a lot of people for whom those kinds of tasks are the most difficult programming tasks they'll be doing (more or less) per feature. It's just their job will often involve a lot more than just that (and if it doesn't, goodbye job...) Right. I don't understand the concern even for people working on small crud apps using widely used frameworks and little specialized business domain modeling. The act of writing code isn't the hard bit. I agree. People think coding is the hard bit, when for most jobs it isn't. How don’t you get it? Singularity is around the corner. This time for sure. This is just as good as a prediction as the alternative: ChatGPT will be the new gold age of programming, all you need in any company is only programmers, all kinds of programmers, no other job will be able to do anything of value. So everyone who knows how to do a for loop is safe. Or the extreme, we finally have to move to post-money society, because automation is no longer creating any jobs. Except that my statement isn't extreme or supports either extreme. I said 'less' programmers, not 'none' or only programmers / all people being programmers. I still stand by that no-one (including Big Tech companies) is safe, especially after the 2022 tech layoffs which happened to many and tools like ChatGPT will eventually reduce the need to hire lots of programmers like before. It is not going to be the same as the hiring euphoria that happened last year. I understand you disagree, but I am pointing out that you can just as well predict extremely positive outcomes instead of your pessimistic ones, which you probably convince yourself are 'realistic', but there is no such thing as 'realistic' predictions, because we live in true emergent chaos. So, you have a choice how to look at the world. I don’t get the nexus between the release of chatGPT and rising interest rates. Are you implying the former somehow caused the latter? My guess would be either chatGPT convinced JPowell to raise rates, or a large chunk of the world's money supply was spent training chatGPT I like to the the original comment is written by an older NLP model GPT took our jaaaawbs! proceeds to building a time machine to get a job in 2015 Don't forget to patent the transformer algorithm.
func swap(x *int, y *int) {
var temp int
temp = *x /* save the value at address x */
*x = *y /* put y into x */
*y = temp /* put temp into y */
}
Since the above are primitive data types (ints), in order to make this work, the language needs to generically support passing the address (reference) of the variables. Java¹/Python² etc. are not able to do this; they copy the value of the variable and send it to the function, which will operate on the copy. a, b = 10, 20
swap_fn(&a, &b)
a == 20 # true
Python 3.10.8 (main, Oct 13 2022, 09:48:40) [Clang 14.0.0 (clang-1400.0.29.102)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> def f(d):
... d['foo'] = 'bar'
...
>>> a = {}
>>> f(a)
>>> a
{'foo': 'bar'}
does not modify the passed in dictionary, because the reference 'd' itself is passed by value. So the function doesn't change what d references for the caller. Java works the same way. Python 3.8.10 (default, Jun 22 2022, 20:18:18)
[GCC 9.4.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more
information.
>>> def f(d):
... d = {'foo': 'bar'}
...
>>> a = {}
>>> f(a)
>>> a
{}
But, as I've posted elsewhere in this thread, this example will change the contents of 'd' since d itself is not being set, its contents are: >>> def f(d):
... print(f"id: '{id(d)}'")
... d = {'foo': 'bar'}
... print(f"id: '{id(d)}'")
>>> a = {}
>>> a
{}
>>> id(a)
140362610196224
>>> f(a)
id: '140362610196224'
id: '140362610196160'
>>> a
{}
>>> id(a)
140362610196224
>>> def f(d):
... d['foo'] 'bar'}
...
>>> a = {}
>>> f(a)
>>> a
{'foo': 'bar'}
Python 3.8.10 (default, Jun 22 2022, 20:18:18)
[GCC 9.4.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> def f(d):
... d['foo'] 'bar'}
...
>>> a = {}
>>> f(a)
>>> a
{'foo': 'bar'}
Python 3.8.10 (default, Jun 22 2022, 20:18:18)
[GCC 9.4.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> def f(d):
... d = {'foo': 'bar'}
...
>>> a = {}
>>> f(a)
>>> a
{}
but it's honestly first time I'm seeing this too, might be just a German thing. Careers and academic disciplines in the fields of:
Mathematik (Mathematics)
Informatik (Computer Science)
Naturwissenschaften (Natural Sciences)
Technik (Technology)