Is the Job Market Dying?
rachdele.substack.comNo, it is not.
For those of you who are new here (aka didn't live through the 2000 bubble) welcome to a shitty job market.
1. Your best bet to get a job is your network. If you were a clock puncher, if you didn't go above and beyond, if you aren't the person who is gonna make the co-worker who vouches for you look good... you are not gonna get much help in your network.
2. The next best bet is to either a) start your own company or b) find someone who wants to start their own company. You know what got us out of the 2000 crash? Web 2.0 was the sexy name but it was ad tech that put money in the bank. Pop unders for Netflix, free iPods, and mortage sign ups... all sorts of nonsense... Today it's much easier to get something small going that pays the bills nothing is stopping you other than you.
3. If neither of these things are for you, and you want to be in tech then you might have to suffer. Job at the liquor store checking out drunks while you do whatever crappy contract work you can find on your laptop to keep yourself in the game.
Every one I know who survived not having a job when the 2000 bubble burst fit in one of these buckets. The rest left tech for good.
> The rest left tech for good.
This is an important reality check for many people.
I entered tech in 2004, during the immediate aftermath of the dotcom crash. At that time software engineers got paid well, but not insane. Additionally, every software engineer I met was passionate about writing code.
Honestly, around 2019 I was really missing those days. The field has become flooded with people looking for a high paying job with essentially no interest in software or computer science beyond the paycheck it provides. I don't blame people for wanting to make money, but I do miss virtually everyone in the industry being genuinely fascinated with software and programming.
The good news is, if you're the kind of person who would write code even if it paid minimum wage, you'll survive this. People whose book shelves are filled with CS books, who find themselves working on coding problems at night because it's fun, who can't help hacking around with new ideas on the weeked, will very likely continue to work in software. You'll likely make less money, but you'll also have more fun.
Unsurprisingly, in this current market I'm getting paid less but having more fun at work than I've had in nearly a decade.
> I entered tech in 2004, during the immediate aftermath of the dotcom crash.
I entered in 1999, when there were plenty of jobs mostly filled with people who liked paychecks a lot more than coding. It was hard to find jobs doing anything hard or nerdy in the sea of webmasters.
I remember working at startups in the mid-late oughts after the bubble burst and the industry was awash in get-rich-quick, gimmicky companies. Those founders had learned the lessons of the dotcom bubble: make your money and get out before it happens again! There was a VC slot-machine for quick, happy exits. And if you don't do well at the slot machine, well you've learned important leadership lessons, so start another startup.
If there was a golden age of nerds, it must have happened before I was in the industry. But, on examination, I'm not sure those actually existed either.
I think it's worth focusing on the work and atmosphere and how makers get stuff done, but I balk at about appeals to former glories. Make Software Great Again? Hmph.
Even if it never existed, it should exist. The false description is prescription. M"${foo}"GA!
I sympathize with your perspective, when most programmers were really nerds was a magical time.
I do wonder if we are indulging in an “eternal September” mindset though.
The times when IT department smelled like pizza, sweat, and Mountain Dew lol
To be honest I don't think we'll ever go back to this. The only reason why this existed was that programming was socially unattractive, so developers self-selected to be people with certain personality characteristics. Once the society recognized the importance of IT jobs, it started pumping all sorts of people into the industry. There's no coming back, unless a) programming becomes a bad career choice again or b) all people get the luxury of working jobs that interest them
Don't worry, programming remains very unattractive. Where and how one gets their money matters. You can literally watch the "ick" reaction happen within fractions of a second of mentioning to them that one is working as a "software engineer".
I find that if it's not an ick, it's resentment. Normies are catching on that huge amounts of tech bros are "overpaid" (working ~10 hrs a week at a rest and vest retirement home like Microsoft), and they're becoming luddites over the impact of AI in their industries.
They call San Jose "Man Jose" for a reason. Women don't like tech-bros, and it shows.
I have been theorizing that they all get FAANG jobs now.
Free everything, stock options, good pay....
Crush the competition before it gets its feet under it. It isnt that we dont have as many nerds, they are all just "locked up".
I sometimes think FAANGs select for that group... Basically, all they have to offer is the paycheck. Outside of a few 'interesting' departments, most FAANG stuff seems to be the same sort of work you'd get in any other industry. And they make sure to run you thru a gauntlet of interviews for the positions.
I think a lot of the "lifelong geek" crowd just finds more 'interesting' work (for whatever qualifies as 'interesting' to them...) in other companies without jumping thru all the hoops (and for less pay, of course). Lots of startups, niche companies, etc offer challenges that can make up for the lower pay.
I used to work at Google (and even Facebook for a very short time). They ain't what they used to be.
To be somewhat cynical, they're big companies. Big companies have lots of process, layers of management, fiefdoms, etc. etc. Doesn't matter if you're Google, Facebook, or a big bank.
size matters, but publicly traded matters more.
like sometimes that bureaucracy is a good thing. i remember an uncle who worked for EMC talking to me about being a big company vs. small company person; each has an advantage.
> size matters, but publicly traded matters more.
Google has been publicly traded for most of its life, but things have changed over time regardless of that constant.
> like sometimes that bureaucracy is a good thing.
Employed right bureaucracy is one way to scale up processes.
Eg compare (1) keeping the whole state of your project in your head, or (2) in a personal notebook, or (3) on a share whiteboard with post it notes, (4) in Jira tickets.
Depending on the size of your project and organisation, you will find that the increased overhead of the higher-numbered methods might be worth it.
Of course, not all bureaucracy is the same. When I was at Google around 2014-2016 I found that they consistently achieved more benefits results from their bureaucracy at lower overheads than the big banks I used to work at (which weren't actually any bigger than Google).
Bureaucracy gets a bad rep but when done right (and defined broadly enough), it can help a lot.
Another example of bureaucracy done right is distributed version control: it's so convenient (after you get used to it..) that many people even use git on single person projects.
>size matters, but publicly traded matters more.
It matters some but a very large private company still needs to organize and make money even if there's probably somewhat less immediacy.
>big company vs. small company person; each has an advantage
Yes. Small companies have limitations to what they can achieve even if they're impressive at small scale. And, certainly, software that doesn't involve enterprise sales allows for outsized effect.
But, in general, the level of just do what needs to be done that works at even a 1,000 person company totally breaks down at 10x and certainly 100x that scale. And that probably works well for people who abhor chaos and is anathema for people who sort of want to chart their own path.
> It matters some but a very large private company still needs to organize and make money even if there's probably somewhat less immediacy.
For a company like Google, it's exactly the same. Even after going public, the founders still control the majority of stock voting rights. And there's no obligation in corporate law that you have to maximize profits.
It's just that you have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders; maximizing profits is one things shareholders can want, but it's not the only thing they are allowed to ask for.
I think there's a bit of generational shift at play here. Elder-millennial earnestness vs younger millennial/Gen-Z social anxious binary view of things as either "based" or "cringe" (and openly geeking out about stuff definitely fits their "cringe" definition, whereas its endearing to older millennials).
Any open positions there?
I was box number three - tried to be box number two and went bankrupt, and took a job at PCWorld (UK version of BestBuy?) doing repairs. Couple of months in I had coded up a sort of automated PC fix program - turned 2 hours into 5 minutes. There is always a way to find an entrepreneurial gap - even if I never quite exploit it to my own financial benefit
Worst day in that job when I was trying to crawl out of bankruptcy was meeting a few of my ex-colleagues while wearing the crappy purple uniform. I was putting food on the table and they looked like I was a joke.
I still put food on the table, the job market always wants people who can just code. Networking is hard and requires longitudinal effort. But the jackpot remains elusive.
Keep trying
>> and took a job at PCWorld (UK version of BestBuy?) doing repairs
My first non-restaurant job (starting in high school) was Best Buy. Before they had the Geek Squad, they just had a generic tech area. You could get your VCR cleaned and your PC upgraded in the same spot.
Anyway, it seemed like once or twice a year someone would come in and take all the good sales people by offering them more money and fulltime hours. First it was the Gateway Country store (that didn't last long), then it was the local dial up ISP, then the regional DSL provider...
Any advice for those who absolutely hate networking?
Be nice to the people you work with. If you can't do that, at least don't be a jerk.
Do your job. Do it well. Your coworkers will know whose code works.
When someone leaves for a new job, get a personal email. Put it in a file somewhere (not in a work computer).
That's networking. It doesn't have to be going to the bar every night with your bros from work. It can just be that people know you, know your work, and have moved on to other places.
Right. I think a lot of people confuse having a network with "NETWORKING" (i.e. going to networking events, asking to have a coffee with one of the hundreds of thousands of people who went to your undergrad but you've never met, etc.). The former is useful; the latter mostly not so. Especially given that during a less-good market like we have now, a networking event is going to be filled with semi-desparate people all looking for jobs.
I think they're giving the answer. You might need to do something else at least for a time--including mostly crappy service sector jobs. But, honestly, even during better times I've relied on my network and you may end up severely disadvantaged if you don't. (Note. Networking doesn't mean going to networking events. It just means keeping in touch with and reaching out to people you've worked with.)
I disagree with #1. Not entirely but it is about perception. Working an extra 10-20 hrs a week for free in return for a chance but no guarantee of a vouch is in itself a bad deal. So while you may have reasons for working long hours, hoping someone has your back is not a great one. Unless you have known them since you were 8 or something and even then.
If you have a job and they are hiring. Two former colleagues come in.
Bob: he comes in, he does his work, he goes home. He's a good productive developer.
Jane: She comes in, does her work, it's always documented and well tested. She is happy to roll up her sleeves and help the people around her out. She will pause to help you even if it means she gonna finish up at home.
Your boss asks you: Your call who do we hire. You're not fucking picking Bob.
Dont be Bob.
This is not nearly as clear cut. In the real world, Jane has a much higher chance to burn out. Or mess up the team, as everyone now wonders if working long hours is Jane's peculiarity or the new normal. And if this makes people explore other options you always lose the best folks -- those who have opportunities in any market.
While I would agree with a softer form: "don't be a 9 to 5 clerk, do what is needed, including occasional long hours and weekends", if someone needs to regularly stay late it's a problem with the management, not with the Bob. My 2c.
And then the company just lays off Bob and Jane and thousands of others. Now Jane is angry because she committed a lot of her personal time for the company but was laid off anyways..
Don't be Jane.
Yeah, that happens. Jane gets a new job before Bob, though.
Not at all guaranteed.
Bob learns to surf before Jane.
And don't be Jane either, extending your working hours at home just to help someone out of your normal duties is a recipe for an eventual burnout.
The balance is in being both: good, productive, amicable, helpful to others while also knowing that you deserve a life outside of work.
This infatuation with killing yourselves for work (mostly Americans but also in Brazil and some other cultures) have is really not healthy, to yourself and to other workers that you put under pressure because you do more than what you're paid for. You're not being a great employee, you're being an exploited employee, and leaving the door open to normalise this exploitation to others that might have other priorities after working hours.
From my time with leading teams I wouldn't hire Jane, I have done it before and eventually the team falls apart because others feel pressured to work more than they are being paid for/willing simply to keep up with the Janes of the world, it crumbles team morale.
Or it turns out that Bob went to the same University as half of the team, and they pick him for a culture fit.
Jane works hard but puts in long hours because she's just not very good and has to hustle to keep up even on basic tasks. She's helpful and kind to others because she understands their struggles, but can't hack new tech as well and will ultimately pause to help. Her well documented, working code takes 3+ weeks longer, and no one cares about Documentation.
Preferring stabile predictability is not a bad thing.
It's just something we pretend cannot happen in software.
Most industries don't want anything like software's "death march," "sleep under your desks," "eat pizza" cultural ideals. Well, pizza is maybe ok once in a while.
Who's going to burn out, Bob or Jane? Bosses, often completely untrained bosses who just "know" how to boss, say they want Jane, but they're probably better off with Bob. Assuming they want stable long-term businesses, of course.
In your scenario it's likely that Jane becomes a boss soon and hires people with her own "work ethic." That sucks. Don't get Janed!
Where do you draw the line in not being exploitable though? Why wouldn't you hire someone who does all your work for you then it feels like the next question is. When there's a scarcity in job openinings compared to applicants, sure one of those might be chosen, but in a regular job market I feel like both should get hired.
>> Why wouldn't you hire someone who does all your work for you then it feels like the next question is.
Yes, this is why people start their own companies, and cash out.
>> Where do you draw the line in not being exploitable though?
Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, that's why I shit on company time... as the old adage goes.
The reality is that giving you a job only works if the company makes money off of what you do. If it lost money or broke even that would not be worth it. You're always being "exploited".
If you want to feel equal, there are plenty of companies that are collectives (mondragon look it up). I have a few projects going on right now that are structured like this. If one of them "takes off" it's a very even distribution for all involved as long as they are working there.
The beauty of capitalism is that if you hate how companies are run you can and should go run your own with the rules you want. If it was very equal, then everyone is incentives to go above and beyond... your still not gonna hire bob!
Depends on whether Bob is friends/relatives with someone in the C-suite or board.
It’s called hustling. Not everyone makes it, but putting in extra effort improves your odds. It’s pretty amazing to me that this is now considered controversial.
My perception of hustling isn’t about long hours, unless those are hours hanging out after work building relationships. It’s more about making your self visible for the work you do, being memorable in a positive way, maybe helping people who in a way that leaves an impression. Working late to deliver one day early, no one is going to notice.
Given you are happy to work say 60 hours a week, what is the optimal use of the extra 20.
For some it might be free work for their employer in return for something. Example might be in financial trading etc. to get a bonus or raise or promotion in a shop that is killing it.
For some it might be leetcode and reading everything on levels.io and teamblind.
For some it might be active investing for example property renovation.
For some a side business.
For some TOGAF and Scrum qualifications.
But remember 1000hours a year is a lot to bet on your company or colleagues vouching for you and being in a position where that matters.
Etc.
> But remember 1000hours a year is a lot to bet on your company or colleagues vouching for you and being in a position where that matters.
Yeah, at 50/hr that's $50,000 for a chance of someone vouching for you in the future that may never come to pass.
There's also the chance that maybe they were the manager that made you work 60hrs in the first place, so they don't see you as going above and beyond.
Whoopsie, you just wasted 1000 hours of your life.
No thanks. I'll get the job on my own merit.
You do you but don't complain if you end up having a harder time during economic downturn. Everything in life is about risk-reward and going the extra mile is about tipping the scale in your favor. To be fair, don't think op advocate for putting 60h every week. It's about being passionate about what you are doing and sometime just being available for your coworker outside of working hours can be enough. In my professionnal career, it was fairly obvious which colleagues was more than just clocking in and who I would be happy to recommend or hire on the spot.
> You do you but don't complain if you end up having a harder time during economic downturn.
Everyone has it hard during an economic downturn. Ugly people also have it harder, so do shorter and dumber people.
I don't find this exercise of comparing myself to others helpful. Despite having good feedback for my work, it doesn't really grow my network.
> who I would be happy to recommend or hire on the spot.
Yeah, assuming you don't have any biases and are a perfect judge of who's doing a good job. That's omegacap as the young kids say.
It's really not about the hours. It's getting the job done and helping out etc. I've gotten every job in a long career post-school through my network and I've never worked more than ~40 hours except in specific situations. I agree with the other comments. I am flexible and generally available but that doesn't mean I'm working ridiculous hours. I guess that means a certain discipline in that regard.
There’s a good paper on how effective networking and “weak ties” is for getting a job. It’s silly that this person is blaming AI resume parsers. https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/4865899/mod_resou...
I’d add one other option: look outside of tech. I knew people who were hit by the dotcom bubble pretty hard but ended up getting jobs in government, academia (I left for a computational research lab myself), non-profits, and high-touch but not tech businesses (e.g. a friend bailed to a law firm - they were flush with cash but none of the partners knew how or wanted to run the IT side of things.).
I’d especially add that this can be good for people without extensive personal networks or who are worried about discrimination. If you’re on, say, https://usajobs.gov they are going to be a lot more fastidious about equal opportunity laws than many private companies and won’t think twice about hiring a middle-aged person with cubicle bod who has to go home at 5pm to pick up their kids rather than grabbing beers after work.
I would agree with this for state work as well. Alabama, because Montgomery is super cheap, is a very good option. I will warn you though...the red tape can take a while. Fill out the paperwork or call the local contract recruiters. We find most of our people that way. They come in on contract, which I did, and convert to government. Depends on the department but once you are in it is fairly easy to move around. DOT is Java, Banking is a mixture of Microsoft and open source, Medicaid is a mix etc. If there is nothing immediately it may take 6-9 months before you get a call but if you are reading this you will be in the top candidates. Sometimes I think we are as "out of the way" as Alaska as far as people considering working here but we would love to have you. I love the state and I didn't start here until I was in my late 40's. Shooting for retirement at 70-75+...I really just love doing this for a living. I moved to government after my 4th 5 year startup/SMB experience. Just needed the stability, someplace I could code and feel good about what I was doing again, and good health insurance. It's the nicest group of people I have ever worked with.
Yeah, I mentioned federal because that’s where I have experience but I know more people who went to state level agencies, libraries, etc. Nobody gets rich that way but you also don’t get asked to work unpaid overtime or mysteriously laid off when you turn 50, either, and if you have any reason to be in a different part of the country outside of a tech hotspot that might be an easy way to stay near family, too.
Montgomery is cheap for a reason! But they definitely have lots of gov jobs down there. I'd actually recommend Huntsville (because rockets) or Birmingham (because of UAB and it having a larger economy) over Montgomery.
After getting laid off after the .com bust, I did a variation on 3), accepted a contract job with a terrible company. It got me by until the market improved and got a much better job.
The trick in a bad market is to understand that mostly the cool perks are gone, and for a time you need to lower your expectations. I think that is going to be very difficult in this cycle.
Out of curiosity. How long till things turned to be better in these days?
It was years in my case but should arguably have been less. (It wasn't a crap job by any means but didn't pay well by many tech standards at that point.)
It's always been through personal contacts but I've surely been lucky.
I held on to the crap job for 1 year 11 months. In 2004 I quit and found a Wall Street gig that was much better.
> For those of you who are new here (aka didn't live through the 2000 bubble) welcome to a shitty job market.
Just as we saw in 2001, the market is worst for (a) recent graduates who have not yet established a professional network and (b) people who had poured into fungible commoditized job roles during the boom and were a dime a dozen when the bust came. (b) is roughly "programmer/analyst" in 2001, "Java developer" in 2008, and "data scientist" today. It's not that some people working under those titles don't have non-fungible skills, but that there are so many others with that job on their resume, that it's hard to differentiate. My advice is, _don't go looking for those jobs._ The opening anecdote in the article describes how terrible it is to try to get hired as a data scientist right now. And no wonder. The job market is flooded with low-quality data scientists.
My experience working with data scientists has drastically lowered my expectations: you get a mediocre Python programmer (you must be willing to accept Pandas + Jupyter notebooks as their work output), combined with a mediocre statistician (can do linear regression and ANOVA, but don't expect them to do it right), combined with a mediocre SQL programmer (probably SELECT, maybe JOIN if you're lucky), and a mediocre machine learning specialist (has a list of preferred sklearn functions in random priority order depending on training, plus maybe one other random library that stops working in the middle of the project due to an API change). They made up for their cheap salaries by spending lots of money on AWS.
Maybe I just got unlucky. Didn't know how to hire well. I'm sure there are good Data Scientists out there, but it's so easy to hire bad ones that it's no wonder people are reluctant to do it. If you're one of the good ones, and if you're in any way qualified for a job with a higher barrier to entry, or even just a job with a more unusual title than Data Scientist, go for that instead of trying to stand out in a sea of mediocrity.
Interesting you don’t mention a huge option that opened up after 2001 — govt/defense work. There was a huge ramp up in military spending in the 2000s and it was still “tech” work, albeit often of the more “move slow, change incrementally” variety.
I spent the start of my career in Defense in the late 2000s. People told me it was foolish to leave defense for less money/benefits in tech startups where nothing was guaranteed. I ended up finally leaving and it was the best career decision I ever made.
Without question. I had a kid around that time so startup life seemed really mismatched, so now kinda stuck.
I worked a decade in the DoD, and then another decade in various tech companies. I was laid off from a startup 12 months ago.
There are definitely pros and cons of both sides. Here's my take on working for the DoD:
- PRO: Having a long tenure means you really get to know the software systems you're developing, and the people with whom you're collaborating.
- PRO: Lack of commercial / profit pressure lets you focus on what seems good for the country, rather than for stockholders.
- CON: Congress is insane. They still haven't passed a defense budget for FY24. The DoD is the only employer I've ever had that missed payroll.
- PRO/CON: Supporting the U.S.'s military might is good or bad, depending on how it's used. A lot of soul-searching may be required to do the work. But working for the private sector can also feel awful, especially in this age of surveillance capitalism.
- PRO/CON: The pay is okay-ish compared to the private sector (PRO), but there's no potential for major bonuses / RSUs (CON).
- PRO: Layoffs are far less common than in the private sector. There's no boom-and-bust cycle tied to interest rates (AFAIK).
- PRO: The hiring process is 10000x better than what I've endured from the private sector since being laid off about 12 months ago. No LeetCode tests, no 5 rounds of interviews followed by being ghosted. And yet, despite the far simpler hiring process, my corner of the DoD generally managed to hire good people.
- CON: Bureaucracy. It can be soul-sucking. But since leaving the DoD, I've learned that it's just a symptom of massive organizations in general. E.g., I encountered a lot of the same frustrations working at Intel under Brian K and Bob Swan.
- PRO/CON: Physical facilities. At least where I worked, the DoD offices were generally run down compared to typical big-corporation offices. On the other hand, the DoD workspaces weren't under financial pressure to maxize programmers per square foot. So there weren't any open-office floor plans. Everyone at least had a cube, more senior people generally had offices.
- PRO: No significant ageism. If you start working for the DoD, and don't egregiously screw up, you don't need to worry about being laid off because of your age. But beyond that, many of these systems / problem domains have long learning curves, so long-tenured developers generally command a lot of well-deserved respect.
**
Right now I'm actually interviewing for private sector jobs (Microsoft) and DoD jobs. I might have to take an offer from Microsoft because of financial considerations. But I'm also kinda hoping I end up back at the DoD.
How did you transition from govt work back into tech. Ive made some efforts but never seem to be able to bridge it.
> How did you transition from govt work back into tech. Ive made some efforts but never seem to be able to bridge it.
Probably a combination of factors:
- I finished my PhD in computer science shortly before looking for work outside the DoD, and that probably lent me some credibility.
- I'd had good success with several unclassified software projects while inside the DoD, and I was able to talk about them during the interviews.
- I put some effort into interview prep. E.g., I'd done very little with networking, so I brushed up on DNS, etc., before interviewing for a company that does internet stuff.
- Luck and timing. I'm sure there was some luck regarding which interviewers / hiring managers were interested in my resume.
Interesting- what trades did the people who left tech back in the first Dot Com bubble end up going into?
Preacher, Painter (houses, now has a painting company), two cooks, a few went back to school for various non tech things and I lost track of them at that point.
I went back to being a cook, then a mechanic. Then I freelanced for a while, slung mass code in personal projects and slid back in as an application support engineer. Now I'm a senior senior dev that can drive product design/strategy, architect, code, and write copy for marketing.
It was during covid, not dot-com, but this person went into carpentry: https://github.com/docker/cli/issues/267#issuecomment-695149...
It’s probably mostly temporary, until CEOs decide the “bad economic climate” is over and start hiring again.
I know decent former tech company employees who are stocking shelves at Home Depot until hiring picks up.
I'd rather collect $14 an hour on unemployment than earn $18 exacerbating the ageism I'll face when the market picks up.
Real estate
Investment banking
1 definitely tracks. My last company did lots of layoffs and the people who didn’t have a problem getting a new, maybe more senior or well paid, job were the ones that did a great job and put some oomph into their work. Absolutely nothing wrong with wanting or needing a 9-5, but the people who did reasonable work and then were unavailable after 5 are the ones that are having issues getting new jobs.
I don’t think the next best thing is to start a company however. Because the people who didn’t get jobs from their network are more likely to be the people who won’t necessarily excel at this. Plus there are so many variables here.
Next best thing in my view is to grind the heck out of Hacker Rank problems and get a job out of pure spite from brute forcing software challenges. Not fun or interesting, but can work really well to land someone a high paying job without having to think about starting a company.
Next best thing, or parallel best thing if this is your preference, is probably to get a more local dev job. There are surprisingly many local companies who don’t post remote roles, don’t post roles on HN, pay less than FAANG market, but are comfortable, in person roles with medium expectations. This is way better than being a liquor store clerk.
>> Absolutely nothing wrong with wanting or needing a 9-5,
Kids, life, have these things. Just make sure you are hitting your marks, that your helpful that your gonna roll your selves up and get shit done. If you have to leave, then leave, bow out.
If you cant come in, or have to go cause you need to be at the gym or your spin class or D&D night. No one is calling you back right now. They remember that you put you first and not the team.
It does NOT have to be, and SHOULD NOT be, toxic.
Easy enough to say, but when you’re going against people that put their life aside to deliver, and you’re not getting called back, and you’re emptying that 401k… I mean, I get where you’re coming from, but also, shit.
>> and you’re emptying that 401k
Door dash, lyft, über, liquor store. NOTE: dont end up in a back room some where! You want to keep your social game sharp and you never know who will want a web site, or a pc repair, do these things too, your networking while your working.
Start a side project: Build a CLI tool, in a new language... Go, Rust, Zig are all sexy for this right now. It doesn't have to be perfect just launch. Stay in the game make yourself hot.
Your job is getting a job. You will work at least 5 hours a day at this till you have a job. Thats on top of Lyft, and side project...
If you have a life, or a family your gonna see them less till your back on your feet.
People who didn't put extra effort into a job that wasn't their own is not indicative that they won't for a job that is actually their own.
Unpopular to say, but probably is relatively strongly correlated. Yeah some people will be horrible at a regular job and amazing at a CEO of their own startup job, but I bet the qualities like good time management that make one successful at a regular job are qualities that would make one successful at the other. I’m open to being completely wrong here.
Is this similar to saying that people who did not do well in school are unlikely to do well in life? (Things like time management, focus, dedication will make you a good student).
Well I have ample personal experiences saying you’re wrong. I think you’re basing a hypothesis off of what you think is right, and not going deeper to confirm or deny it.
organizations created conditions of learned helplessness, cynicism, bitterness, etc.
like, studies have shown that most people think their jobs are, partially or wholly, bullshit. that may or may not be true, but once you've checked out, you're out.
meanwhile when you're a manager / owner / founder, you have a lot more control; no learned helplessness while swimming in an ocean of processes when it's just you and 6 other people.
> Your best bet to get a job is your network. If you were a clock puncher, if you didn't go above and beyond, if you aren't the person who is gonna make the co-worker who vouches for you look good... you are not gonna get much help in your network.
Regarding this...I was the guy on both ends of the spectrum. The Rockstar that goes above and beyond and the guy who was punching the clock (sometimes a little too early). It made no appreciable difference in the quality of my network - it is still essentially non-existent, since none of my peers or ex-peers have much influence over hiring decisions.
My best shot at networking into a job is through a personal friend who works in a non-tech sector at a high level position. He's probably the only person who can actually get my resume seen by hiring people out of several hundred that I have met over my lifetime.
> do whatever crappy contract work you can find on your laptop to keep yourself in the game.
Ha ha so true!
I entered tech in 2000, right as everything was going down. Hey, it was fun for the 8 months I worked for what we now call a startup in Miami. They closed abruptly, and luckily I was able to get another job within about 4 months.
The market in tech is definitely worse than 2020 (I don't know why some here say those were the days of wine and roses) and I was always able to find work during the financial crisis, though it could take a couple of months. So, I'd say that the job market for tech is not as bad as the dot com crash but worse than 2009 or 2020.
Thank you. This article is just downright silly (and that does not mean I don't have a ton of empathy for people who are job searching right now). All of the following are true:
1. There was a massive amount of tech hiring not just over the pandemic, but really in the whole period from the end of the Great Recession until the latter half of 2022.
2. Many of those jobs were not just unsustainable pandemic hiring, but they were really just speculative hiring enabled by the ZIRP era, where more companies were worried about being left behind than overspending. Some examples: during the "Big Data Boom" there was an explosion of "data scientists" and "data analysts". I put those titles in scare quotes not because they're invalid jobs or something, but just that there was so much of a "just throw bodies at the problem" attitude that many of these roles were poorly defined at companies. Similarly, lots of companies staffed up massive user research teams. Turns out a lot of that low hanging fruit has been picked, and many companies have realized they can get by with much smaller, more targeted user research.
3. We are now undergoing a massive job restructuring, I would argue even stronger than what happened post dot com bubble, for a bunch of reasons: (1) the end of the ZIRP era coinciding with the end of pandemic-specific overhiring, (2) I've heard it said "Elon Musk showed with Twitter that you can run tech companies with a lot smaller teams" - while I strongly disagree (I'm always thinking, have you actually even used the complete garbage cesspool X has become, even more than before???), I think there is a valid point that a lot of companies just had way too many people than they needed, and (3) Gen AI really is having an impact on specific roles, e.g. copywriting roles and low-level data analyst roles.
It's simply a game of musical chairs where a ton of chairs were taken away all at once. Yes, the job application process is painful, AI-assisted ATS tools can feel like a labyrinth, and there are a lot more scams. But that is not the root cause. There are just a ton more people looking for jobs than there are roles available.
I was really lucky. After getting laid off. Called a guy who I had been a client for and had a lunch with him and a business manager. Ended up with a job in the post-2K bubble. Didn't pay well and barely made it to the other side but ended up the basis for how I ended out career.
> For those of you who are new here (aka didn't live through the 2000 bubble) welcome to a shitty job market.
But is the job market actually shitty? I still get plenty of recruiter spam on LinkedIn.
“Shitty job market” is an awfully charitable way to say “illegal, anti-market activity is de-facto sanctioned now”.
We spent the lion’s share of the 20th century building a vast “sovereign wealth fund” of technology via effective partnerships between the public and private sectors (substantially though not exclusively under “defense” budgets of one kind or another): everything from the transistor to the laser to the packet-switched Internet to Unix, the list goes on and on.
Then, somewhat abruptly in the scheme of things, a few things happened around the same time: “Dutch” Reagan was sharp enough to realize that he was a fucking movie star not a policy person, and needed some academic and intellectual heft to round out a serious presidential bid. The exact causal structure remains unclear to this day, it seems mostly to be related to cashing in on a Cold War that was winding down but good for one last corruption orgy, but somehow he and Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand and Alan Greenspan all got together and sold the public on a bunch of policies that were and remain disasters (Greenspan has since grudgingly admitted that he was wrong about pretty much everything in the kind of tortured language people like that use when they’re wrong about everything), Lewis Ranieri realized that in his words “Mortgages are math” and began a disastrous trend of extreme complexity financialization that created modern K Street (basically figured out how to buy up the commons for pennies on the dollar by gutting any remaining taboos against flagrant bribery of elected officials) and smoothly pivoted all of this into the Clinton Administration while codifying “Goldman Sachs is where we source finance people” in the form of Robert Rubin and his heirs, and the piece de resistance: brought Larry Summers into the mix, whose biography reads like the prelude to impeachment proceedings: everything the guy has ever touched has been illegal, icky, stupid, racist, misogynistic, kleptocratic, corrupt, or all of the above.
The last person to put up a serious fight was Brooksley Born, who was in the middle of preventing both the 2001 and 2008 financial meltdowns (and therefore almost certainly preventing the rise of reactionary populism in the Western World) when the cabal of incompetent Randian fuckups knee-capped her (using gender discrimination as a lever) and basically started running the “build a technology-denominated sovereign wealth fund” process in reverse: it’s been game on regarding raiding that cookie jar if you have the right “network” ever since.
The Department of Justice was taking time out of its typical day chasing around terrorists and human traffickers and what not to try to police stuff like trivial collusion and flagrant wage fixing in technology as recently as like 2011-2012, but seems to have kind of given up: it’s a losing battle. The last major legal action around big cap tech wage fixing wound down with a 400MM parking ticket in ~2011.
Three guesses where Summers is putting his greasy thumbs (the rest of that clique is dead or retired) on the scale now and who is the heir apparent to this nightmare.
Well, maybe I didn’t give the DoJ enough credit: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/21/technology/apple-doj-laws...
I’ll be convinced when they do NVIDIA and wage fixing, but they’re at least making some noise.
Nope, it's different this time.
1. My entire network is struggling, even the ones who have jobs are worried. Despite being universally acclaimed and vouched for by my past coworkers, it seems to have no impact. Companies don't trust their own employees references right now.
2. Maybe this is changing, but it seems like entrepreneurship is at an all-time low. Nobody has ideas, everyone just wants to go to sleep at a comfy 9-to-5. Maybe bootstrapping a company is so outside of people's comfort zone that they can't even fathom it.
The only 'ideas' allowed are AI and AI if done from the ground up can only be afforded by billion dollar companies, which is why you see nvidia, microsoft, google owning most of it.
The entrepreneurship of ten years ago of two dudes sitting in a house coding apps is gone.
This is not true. The one benefit of all the AI hype is that there are many small teams of smart people getting funding. Maybe in 2-5 years they'll all get acquired or go under, but right now is some of the most fun I've had in industry in a long time.
And, despite all the hype, there is a lot of unexplored stuff in this space that can be done on hardware that can be run in a home office.
Yes, it's not literally coding apps any more, but I know quite a few people working on small, funded teams having a lot of fun right now.
Not sure. Read the recent PG essay. But I reckon you are going to be writing the procurement app for a midsized building firm, or a ERP for a road haulage firm, or a shift management system for a hospital, rather than some low hanging tech bro idea fruit. What they call “IT”.
it has nothing to do with ideas. It's about opportunities: and right now there's not very many of those.
This person seems to be sharing anecdotes about the Data Science job market. That field, which exploded over the last decade, has experienced a rapid contraction. Data teams have shrunk and contain far fewer traditional “Data Scientists” and lean more heavily on engineers who orchestrate and plumb data around.
Data Scientists have become the “HTML programmers” of the tech bubble.
My advice: take a pay cut and pivot to becoming a business analyst or something.
Yea, I feel like "Data Science" was always a Zero Percent Interest phenomenon. It's the software company version of Dogecoin or GameStop or AMC. If you've got free money, why not throw 10mil at the moonshot of discovering a diamond in the rough of your data that revolutionizes your business.
For the last 10 years, every data team I've been adjacent to has had a near infinite budget, hired more people than the rest of the company combined, had an abundance of "scientists" for whom any sort of data process, version control, scientific method, or cost controls were never part of the equation. It really doesn't surprise me that companies have decided they're not throwing good money after bad.
There's absolutely good work to be done in Data, but it requires people who know what they're doing, and not just "here's 10 years of postgresql databases. I dunno, find us 10% profit somewhere in it". There's not many companies that really have the data or personnel to make it happen.
I think that’s a bit harsh – but only so much, as I’ve had to explain basic stats literacy to several consultants – but there’s a common factor to many “AI” initiatives: some executives really want to be able to tell their buddies that they’re doing amazing things, and often believe there are huge untapped opportunities to make or save money which all of the employees they don’t trust haven’t mentioned.
In reality, of course, there probably just isn’t that much money at play so the high-budget approach is unlikely to break even, and more critically it’s unlikely that people are prepared to change how the organization makes decisions. I’ve known some people who worked for places where they had data showing solid improvements but it either hit politics or was simply small enough that their executives didn’t want to go with it because it wasn’t the magnitude they’d promised to justify the data science program.
It's definitely harsh, and I want to be clear that I don't think it's innately a bad idea or destined to fail, but when it's easy to throw millions of dollars at a moon shot, trying to spin data straw into gold is worth a shot. It's similar to people trying to make a self-driving car, and how many of those are struggling/ending recently. It's not that there's nothing there, but when loans aren't free, you can't just throw money at it and hope.
It's a field that's just been over-hired because it's been a field where you can go "we're 2 years away from something big" for 10 years and the money was cheap enough to just keep paying people with questionable results or prospects. It doesn't shock me at all that people are having a lot of trouble getting work in the field. Even 8 years ago, going to college job fairs, I almost had to herd away Masters students in ML and Data Science who were already having a hard time getting a job and were resorting to applying for QA positions at web dev companies.
Eh. The real elephant in the room with "ML and Data Science" is checks and balances. They take over as the eyes of the company. Guess what department is seen as kicking ass? Guess which department is getting most money? Most hires? Data. Data.
It's like having the local police department check on the local police department.
What's worse about these anecdotes is that they ignore the obvious. I guarantee you some people are still getting hired for those open job reqs, it's just that when you have a big contraction and now have a ton more applicants for each open role, you're going to have many more anecdotes with people lamenting that "AI has broken the process" or "there are a ton of scams" or "insidious tech trends", because the real answer is just a lot more painful: there were tons of applicants for that job, and the person who was picked wasn't you. And (saying this from experience), that can just really, really suck, and when it goes on for a while it can be very difficult to come to terms with.
> In fact, a recent survey of 1,500 job candidates by the staffing firm Aerotek found 70% of people find their current job search more difficult than the last, even though people are more qualified than before.
I wonder how much survivorship bias is in there?
If the job market is strong, then people who are candidates now are only those left who have a harder time finding a job?
Or simpler: you'd expect the reported difficulties of the average person who's currently out of a job to stay roughly constant; a really good economy will shrink that population of people. (Ie people as a whole are better off on average, but the average of that specific, and shifting sub-group won't change much.)
Different kinds of people find jobs more and less easily as the job market shrinks or grows.
The young grad with 2 years of job experience looking on the west coast vs the 45 year old with 20 years of boring enterprise crud on the east coast see very different things when markets are loose or tight.
Critically people experience each job market differently as they move between buckets. This happens even if not that much time passed. The guy who retired early at 45 then got bored and starts looking at 50 is just in a wildly different position.
That does seem like it would be a problem! Like if you imagine 50% of people have an easy time (1 month search) and 50% have a hard time (2 months) and each person had two searches with no correlation:
The groups will be 25% each, ie .25 EH, .25 EE, etc., if you track only people who start looking for a job during the first month of their search. In the second month it will be 50% EH and 50% HH. So a total of 3/8 EH, 3/8 HH, 1/8 HE, 1/8 EE. Or 3/8 bad, 1/2 same, 1/8 better.
Hard time = looking for the better part of a year or more. Not 2 months which is pretty common outside of the tech boom.
The numbers are all made arbitrary/simple just to check if the general property is true: even if there's no change in the market, if you sample job seekers you will find more people who feel the job search is harder because a hard job search means you are on the market longer and more likely to be surveyed.
Yes, but a market where it takes a month longer vs. a year longer probably implies different behaviors.
So my original comment was to the effect that the average job seeker you can interview will always skew towards being that guy who's taking a year to find a job.
But 'that guy' will change: many more people will be 'that guy' during a downturn, than during a boom.
Every time Americans in tech mention applying to dozens or hundreds of jobs to get any position, Europeans are typically incredulous. This does not appear to be an issue on the other side of the ocean.
The problem is that the American hiring culture is uniquely toxic, and this is not at all limited to tech. I read stories of people who are desperately hiring but outsource the application and screening process, only to find the outsourcers put decent candidates in the bin for being from the wrong college, or merely having adjacent (and highly relevant!) experience but not exact experience. In other words, they will only accept a purple squirrel.
I once applied to a maintenance job at a facility where a relative works. No dice. I asked my relative. "Yeah they keep hiring construction contractors who quit immediately because they aren't paying enough, but I already talked to the manager and he would love to have you." Didn't matter, I couldn't get past the gatekeepers in HR. So because the "talent experts" didn't want to hire someone without carpentry experience to change air filters, or pay the carpenters they hired the $20/hour they wanted, they instead hired outside contractors for $150/hour.
In no other country would any of the above be tolerated. Even during the "job boom" of 2021, it was not as easy as it is in Europe to land a medicore position at a mediocre wage. We have a serious cultural issue with hiring and a high degree of arrogance on the part of those doing the hiring. I have no idea how this problem can even be tackled, except if maybe the federal reserve let the economy run hot for several years and forced employers to lower their absurd expectations.
Probably the most inhumane thing ever is having to make a recorded video of yourself answering personal life questions (presumably to be reviewed by a human from HR) only to actually be processed by an algorithm.
How about "Dont send us a resume! We aren't a traditional company. Make a crazy video showing us your personality and why you'd be the best person for the job. Costumes are a bonus."
It doesn't end at hiring. At one place I worked, the CEO got new hires in a room and "spontaneously" asked them to tell an embarrassing story about themselves one by one, to break the ice. People were very uncomfortable but did it. Nobody was having fun, it was pretty cringe. Then it was the CEO's turn (she went last), and she told the most flattering "embarrassing" you could imagine, which was basically just a huge flex about her life and opportunities.
Some company leaders just like to humiliate the people who work for them because they can.
I’ve been in such a situation but I don’t do group stupid so got up and left.
Same here. CIO and my boss look up and I'm gone. My boss blows up my phone begging me to come back. Ruined my career there. My colleagues literally gushed over me and said they wished they had the courage to leave also. It was traumatizing for most involved.
you tanked your career because you couldn't do a simple, if silly and lame, group ice breaker thing?
like, just make some shit up. this shouldn't even be a thing. "I never learned how to ride a bike" or "I peed my pants while skydiving" or something. fake a couple of laughs, and then think about how much beer you're going to have after work.
There’s a Black Mirror episode somewhere in here akin to the Hunger Games.
I mean, peddling the bike to keep your vim session going might be good for many of us. Well, at least me.
Peddling to keep it closed more like.
It's straight up dystopian.
All hail our new AI overlords. "Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss".
SEO for resumes has been a thing for at least a decade. It’s dystopian and dehumanizing. You can only imagine how bad it is going to get when AI gets to screen, interview, and hire; totally autonomously. I’m sure companies are begging for this: cutting their entire recruiting budget would surely return at least 0.01% to the almighty shareholders.
This has been the case since professional HR came into being in tech, and people (mainly women) with no domain background were given a major role to play in shortlisting candidates.
The gender comment feels unnecessary.
An empirical fact though.
Is that really a thing happening these days? Sounds horrible.
Oh, it's been happening since 2020. I was offered a few of these HireVues, but I could never finish any because the experience of speaking to a screen like it's a person is so dehumanizing. I believe one of them was from General Motors.
Wow, it's easy for me to say in my current situation but I think if I had to do that I would start considering another line of work.
If they'll dehumanize you in the hiring process, what would it be like to work there?
Where I work we stopped posting jobs publicly and stopped promoting them on job sites. We now get candidates in 4 ways:
• Internal referral – Sometimes a complete miss, sometimes a quick hire.
• External recruiter (rarely) – For some roles their network has been beneficial and we’ve negotiated down to as little as 8% of yearly salary in exchange for a case study or something.
• Direct Targeted LinkedIn Outreach – So much cheaper to pay for LinkedIn Recruiter Lite and reach out to promising candidates. I get a near 100% response rate and it’s been so much faster than twiddling my thumbs waiting and hoping for good applicants.
• Inbound queries through our careers page - We rewrote this to be honest about what it’s generally like to work with us, including what we like and what other people have disliked. Anybody who writes to us directly after reading it is guaranteed a 30-minute conversation to see if they’re a good fit for either now or in the future. I’ve been surprised how many people have found this page and read it.
This has cut our cost to hire for most roles by nearly 70% (also factoring in time cost) compared to promoted posts on job sites. Our time to hire is much faster as well.
Part of the trick is realizing you don’t really need The Best People. Find somebody who you’ve got reasonable confidence can do the job well and make them an offer.
"Part of the trick is realizing you don’t really need The Best People. Find somebody who you’ve got reasonable confidence can do the job well and make them an offer."
Right, the whole industry seems to focus on Hunger Games winners, when most of the jobs can be done by normal people, the the superstars are likely to leave at the drop of a hat anyway.
My sense is, there is less movement. It's like musical chairs. When more people are changing more often those that have been waiting on the side lines have a greater chance of jumping in and getting a seat. Now that the tempo has slowed down, more people are left standing longer.
Some big name layoffs aside, the market feels to be roughly the same size. What's missing is the churn.
I'm in a holding pattern myself. Some personal observations:
1. Leads and cold messages from recruiters are for roles that tend to pay a significant amount less than my current role. Easily 20%-50% less. This tells me that companies are still looking to play arbitrage and sell (fire/layoff) high, buy low. That's a losing game for me. No thanks.
2. I like my team and the work. There are quirks like any company. There's nothing that's motivating me to look for a new job other than occasional boredom or frustration that passes.
3. A fear I have is joining a new company, then getting laid off. Until the layoff trend subsides a job change is not appealing.
4. New hires need to contribute to profitability, not just growth. It's just plain harder to justify hiring and get reqs opened in the current business climate. Part of that is board and exec group think. Another part is higher interest rates and cost of capital. Not being able to depreciate software dev expenses anymore hurts too.
My department pays out any leftover budget as a bonus at the end of the fiscal year. I got an email recently that, due to retention, there probably won't be much of a bonus come June.
Churn is indeed down.
To add to this, the churn creates inefficiencies within companies since new employees need to onboard and can take as long as two years to truly understand what the heck is going on within the org.
If you have less churn, you have better efficiency and perhaps can get more done with fewer engineers.
Also interviewing and onboarding people takes a lot of time and effort from other employees, if it is being done right.
I don’t know to what degree this is happening but people staying in roles longer definitely helps. Even better if they are happy in those roles and not held hostage by a tougher job market.
> If you have less churn, you have better efficiency and perhaps can get more done with fewer engineers.
True. But the downside is groupthink. New hires bring new ideas, new perspectives, etc. Heck, even something as simple explaining X or Y during onboarding forces the "teacher" to rethinking and reinterpret.
No chun? No new blood. No new ideas.
I 100% agree. There is a balance and also different dynamics based on the trajectory of the company. When a company is growing, you could have new blood and old hats. When a company is shrinking, everything sucks.
It's been said over and over for the past number of months, but fewer companies have a lot of use for a person whose sole talent is "sling code" and you just need to start bringing more to the table, or be a top 1% leetcode nerd.
I'm seeing some self-taught quant/econ guys getting real software jobs without a ton of formal CS coursework, but a lot of practical experience. Turns out the employers love that shit.... go figure?? ;)
I can't speak for US but in Europe there is significantly less working options but old rusty corporates like insurance companies or banks are always hiring because their rusty boring old systems need mainteance and constant rewriting. At least thats my bet. Wait through bad times here. You can get easily starting point of six figures per year. Heh. It is not much but it's honest work.
I know that some companies are developing AI-based interview products. In a video conference, the AI asks questions and then evaluates the candidate's answers, giving a score. This can save a lot of time for the interviewer. Such a world is quite scary.
Record everything folks, can't wait for the lawsuits about this when AI asks a totally stupid question.
> Completely anecdotally
about sums it up
Let's do anecdotes.
I just got calls back from two jobs I applied for in November and December of last year. Interviewed, got offers for both, had the luxury of being able to choose.
Found it interesting that both places pretty much knew they had their guy pretty quickly and said they were glad to finally talk to someone who knew what they were doing.
I'm not sure if they were getting tricked by AI-generated resumes and cover letters, then finding the applicants didn't quite have the knowledge expected. Nothing fancy either, mid-level networking, Linux, programming...
It's not a great tech job market generally. (Was talking to someone knowledgable yesterday and we basically agreed it's not dot-bomb nuclear winter but more like 2008, although different.)
However, the scenario described in the post (that's somewhat backed in some of the comments here) is that it's become easy enough to apply to hundreds or even a thousand or more jobs that companies are forced to apply very simple heuristics or "AI" filters (which is pretty much the same thing) to deal with the volume. This means that, for a given job, you have a near-zero chance of winning the lottery to even talk to a person.
Therefore, your only chance is pretty much to have a direct path to a human (but, because it's not a great market, that's far from a guarantee either).
It is very bad for juniors and new graduates. It's fine for seniors and good for seniors who have good skills and connections.
> It's fine for seniors and good for seniors who have good skills and connections.
This has very much not been my experience.
(I imagine we're both drawing from personal experience, so I guess what we really want is some solid data.)
Yes personal and a few colleagues. I wish you good luck.
this has been my experience. had a couple people reach out to me for PM and DevOps roles, on the Sr / Manager level.
was metaphorically flirting with another group where the leadership were people I used to work for too, kept poking them to keep in touch, sounded like there may be some options. we'll see if they score more funding though; if not, they may not be able to offer roles or pay, but they keep talking like it'll happen...
Meanwhile on places like r/itcareerquestions and r/cscareerquestions it sounds like there are a lot of noobs and juniors fighting for a handful of roles.
But not too senior, or you'll be almost completely ignored.
I was laid off in January due to my job being outsourced overseas after I built the product. My job search has been terrible. Unfortunately my network is very small since I was in my first job after switching from a previous career in accounting. It feels crazy being able to provide results but not have any options. The market is incredibly conservative.
I’ve ended up deciding to attend recurse center in the meantime and see where things are in a few months.
There seems to be some survivorship bias in the advice people are giving. I think it is very possible that we will never see that tight of a labor in tech ever again - even without AI.
On the economic side it's more difficult to control inflation than it was in previous downturns so there isn't the option of dropping interest rates to the floor. There isn't much room to lower reserve requirements for banks either. I think stimulus measures will be largely ineffectual and the inflation produced increasingly unpopular. So it looks like the pending recession will not have the cushioning that we've had in the past and may be longer and more painful as a result.
Is there a route for high skilled engineer for going through this mess?
Say, I am happy and confident to do all your leetcode/homework assignments + 8h interviews, but I want to be also top candidate as result.
> Say, I am happy and confident to do all your leetcode/homework assignments + 8h interviews, but I want to be also top candidate as result.
Perhaps not a 100% guaranteed one. Some interviewers just do a bad job.
For example, in some of my recent interviews, the (always young) interviewer posed brainteaser questions that have approximately nothing to do with the skillset and knowledge that the job requires.
I'm sure those questions are good for identifying candidates with very high IQ and/or familiarity with that particular puzzle. But as a very experienced developer, it really pisses me off to be passed over because I didn't answer those to the interviewer's satisfaction.
Long story short: interviewing well is a skill, and as a candidate you can't guarantee a good interviewer.
> But as a very experienced developer, it really pisses me off
as very experienced developer, should it be part of your skillset to deal with all kinds of people in the group efficiently and achieve your goal?
As future employee you can't guarantee perfect coworkers..
> as very experienced developer, should it be part of your skillset to deal with all kinds of people in the group efficiently and achieve your goal?
If you know of a way to convince a 20-something interviewer, during the interview, that the puzzle they picked isn't a good way to winnow down the list of candidates, I'm all ears.
Dealing with people is absolutely a good skill for senior developers. But there are limits to how much interview nuttiness can be overcome by mere mortals.
Go for small firms, apply direct, see if you can mingle with the employees or even hiring manager somehow - a meetup they are attending, friends of friends, who knows.
One time around 2008 I was at a horrible conference put on by Blackberry (even then it was clear they were going to die), and I wound up talking to a guy for an hour about this and that, and it ended with an offer for a job at his firm.
Essentially you just need more hustle. When the standard situation is mass applications that are ignored, you need to try something novel and higher-effort.
if there is an OSS project that you have your eye on, you can easily get noticed by engaging with them and starting to fix/address small issues or convenience features. I know a handful of people who got hired this way.
I think this is very unreliable channel, but something worth to try in parallel.
To be specific, I am not looking for a job atm, but current approach seems broken, and wondering why companies don't like to use more efficient ways to hire.
This article has a lot of text but does not offer much besides anecdotes, and some generic advice about how companies should write hiring ads.
Despite all the noise claiming the contrary, the market is shitty, and I think it will remain that way for the rest of the year. It's election year and it would look really bad on the incumbent for numbers to be "down", so ghost jobs and layoffs will continue (only way to prop stocks up)
Did this post get removed? Why? Isn't this an important topic for the community right now?
I think it just quickly fell off the front page. (I think I found it on page 3.)
No, it is clickbait, also as someone said, it’s a BUNCH of text but not saying anything new or insightful actually. Just sophisticated, pretentious blathering to put it kindly
Because a "data scientist" can't get a job? Not surprising at all.
She brings an example of a person who after sending 75 applications considers changing fields. On Reddit people are sending more than 1000 applications to get a job.
If you get rejected by the first 5-10 companies you apply to then you need to take a step back and figure out what you are doing wrong, because spamming the same resume to 1000 more companies isn't going to change anything. 5 strong leads is infinitely better than 1000 weak ones.
Negative, ghost rider.
I’ve had a fairly consistent 100:10:1 application:interview:offer ratio for about 25 years, including bull and bear markets. It’s a numbers game. There is likely nothing wrong with his resume. You need to have a very wide top-of-the-funnel.
There are probably a few Captains Of Industry here on HN who can send 5 resumes out and get 5 offers. These are multiple-standard-deviation outliers.
I've had roughly that same application:interview:offer ratio for the last 5 years. It's made me realize that it's a numbers game too.
I've gotten comments from colleagues about how putting out a hundred applications seems kinda desperate, but with the ratios that I've experienced, the only way that you can make the odds that you get a job palatable is to increase the number of applications. It's easy to run the binomial distribution analysis to prove this.
Before this round, I received a job offer for every application.
I don't need a job right now, but I'm applying to jobs because I see the writing on the wall.
Despite very strong, and publicly verifiable, bonafides, I didn't even get a response from a number of very good (but very large) companies. The smaller and more exclusive companies are responding at a much higher rate, strangely.
So if I'm making it past the harder resume screens, I have to assume that for larger companies, they're just completely failing to read my resume.
I've been in the industry for 10 years now. If memory serves I've applied to about 20 companies, had 8 interviews, and 5 offers resulting in 3 jobs. I don't doubt your experience, but it's not a universal truth of how the world works.
I have sent exactly 3 applications in my career and been hired 4 times.
Then you're either not American, very well-connected, or you graduated during a bull market and always had the "right" amount of experience.
The only way I can even imagine this to be possible is 1. Your name is John Carmack or Ken Thompson or 2. You send your application out at the top of every single hiring bubble in history. Sorry, but I almost just don’t believe OP. It seems totally ridiculous and opposite to my lived experience over decades.
Ive probably sent roughly 500 resumes out over a 25 year career and got 5 job offers. Never even two simultaneous offers allowing me to choose. The ratio has been very, very consistent for me.
I’m willing to believe my experience is a statistical outlier and I’m definitely not looking forward to the next time I need to look for a job.
American, not well connected, graduated right after the housing market crash, so I suppose it could be the last one.
I don’t quite believe it myself (with people proffering 500 applications just to get one position) but I had a similar experience with online dating where my success rate was probably about 50% getting a positive response (and everyone seemed to bemoan their inability to get anyone to even talk to them).
Maybe this is just luck but I’ve also never been trying to work for google/microsoft/amazon.
I don’t consider myself particularly bright so I’m definitely not Carmack, and I’ve never seen the fabled 300-500k engineering positions, so my salary has been pretty modest for the duration of my career (always been comfortable but, well-maintained Honda civic money not Mercedes money). I just kind of try to make myself useful wherever I go.
When I apply for a job it has either been because a recruiter or former coworker asked me to, or because I was interested in what the company was working on, or both. I don’t go for jobs where I’m expected to performatively solve leetcode problems.
I get nervous around new people but I can get through a technical interview by knowing my stuff. I’m not particularly charismatic or anything.
Maybe I’m just lucky with target selection? I’ve always been about quality over quantity. I’m reasonably good at writing but nothing special.
It could be a sample size issue, my number of applications is not statistically significant compared to the overall market during the last 20 years or whatever.
> American, not well connected, graduated right after the housing market crash, so I suppose it could be the last one.
Maybe timing? Because your experience is roughly what I also remember in 2010/2011. Only applied to like 5 jobs and got one.
My company is hiring a senior Python dev and we've rejected at least 95% of applications so far. Many weren't even Python devs, most weren't senior (no, getting that title 2 years out of college doesn't count) and some had resumes so off-putting we just said "this person is full of shit." We actually discussed adding a survey question that read "Answer 'no' to this question" to see if they even read the page. So many freaking shotgun applicants.
I wonder how many of those people are saying "I've applied to X jobs and nothing!" Had they gotten feedback or maybe read the job listing they wouldn't have added our posting to their volume count.
The problem as an applicant is that after sending, say 30,40,50 carefully considered applications, spending up to several hours on each, and getting almost no response, you change tactics.
There's no point crafting a love letter which won't even be read - just stick a bunch of bullet points together and broadcast.
Several hours definitely isn't required. If you are a good match for a job your resume should already be a stand out, so all you need to do is read the listing and submit your resume (plus whatever HR system hoops they make you jump through). Anecdotally, I typically get a high response rate when I'm choosey and have never wrote a cover letter or anything specific to the job in question. Why would I need to write a love letter for a position I'm well qualified for? I'm the prize, not them haha.
Changing tactics to blindly applying for positions regardless of qualifications is just a waste of time. I for one wouldn't want an engineer who solves problems like that on the team.
"I for one wouldn't want an engineer who solves problems like that on the team. "
I guess this is some high-handed attempt at a put-down.
I think you have to consider what game job-hunting/filling is.
IMHO it's essentially quite similar to mating.
In that case, you see all kinds of strategies, tailored to the environment, and other realities.
Have you thought about why you're getting all these applications that clearly don't match?
Is it because people are stupid, or lazy? Or do you think there might be some logic behind a strategy of just sending out semi-customized applications in search of a match, knowing that most are simply ignored anyway?
I mean, someone who thinks through why things are the way they are, and what to do about it, even if they can't get to an answer, is someone I would want on my team.
I guess that argument makes sense, but then don't expect a high return rate or complain "I've applied to THOUSANDS and nothing! What gives?"
The last time I was in the market was September and I didn't have much trouble (I got a solid offer but decided it wasn't time to move yet). If things have changed in the past 6 months then yeah, I don't have firsthand experience in todays market. But I always see people complaining about this kind of stuff so I'm used to writing it off. If you think its gotten that bad I'll take your word.
I'm also in the market as a senior, went to a big name university and have been at a few companies that everyone knows so my experience being choosey may be different than others.
If someone is having trouble getting a response and answers by "well if I do it more with even less filtering then maybe one will come through" I think less of their problem solving. Although I am persuaded by what you said originally so I guess its not as terrible of a strategy as I was first thinking.I guess this is some high-handed attempt at a put-down.I would also compare it to mating. If you're on a dating app and write love letters to every girl who's profile you like you will get roughly 0 dates (this being the "spend hours applying" approach). If you are confident, believe you're the prize and try to find girls you're a match with then you will have a lot more success.
> Is it because people are stupid, or lazy? Or
Stop right there. Yes.
It's like that anecdote about a*holes
When everyone you meet is an a*hole, maybe you're the a*hole
I ask people to rename their resume file to follow a very specific filename template. Maybe 1/3 of the applicants do it and I think I have had more luck with them than with those who ignored my instructions. (It is a simple template and as long as folks at least try to follow it, it is fine with me.)
Python dev to work on what? ;)
Definitely not true in my experience. I have witnessed very little consistency, it seems most applications are simply automatically filtered using many variables that no one is going to figure out.
But you could argue that applications are automatically filtered because of the spam, but at the same time if you don't spam depending on your position you are a lost cause. It is terrible system that feeds on itself.
Right, but you should figure out what those variables are.
You don't have any feedback to improve your approach other than the fact that you did not get a response.
True - but in most cases you can get feedback another way.
Case in point, a buddy of mine is around 50, superstar programmer/manager and never really had to look for a job - was always headhunted - until getting laid off from a bank about a year ago.
I took one look at his resume and it was obvious to me that it was basically the same resume he had since College, with new jobs tacked on but never revamped to read like a "super senior resume." Which makes sense because he never had to rely on it to make a first impression.
It took me about 20 minutes with Google Docs comments to tag up his resume, took him about 2 days to totally revamp it, and go from "a guy with 30 experience who looks junior on paper" to "holly shit this is the engineering leader we need."
Perhaps coincidentally but he landed a role with a hedge fund very quickly.
That's obviously a personal anecdote, but if your job applications are failing to get traction, find SOME way to get an external perspective.
Is there anyone in your network you can ask? Even reddit is willing to give you feedback.
If someone can stomach 1000 cold contacts and no results, that person should consider switching to sales.
Are you speaking from experience in a job market not in the US? This is absolutely the experience of junior engineers.
I recently stumbled upon a freelance gig from someone looking to hire someone to submit applications for software engineering positions on their behalf. They were willing to pay a few dollars per application and would provide all of the content for the submitter.
Where did you find it? This sounds like a tempting service! I’d love to have an “agent” who would deal with all the drudgery of finding me a job and screening companies (and even interviewing on my behalf if that was even possible), and would probably be willing to pay multiple tens of thousands of dollars for this service next time I job hop.
It would have to be more than a typical hired recruiter who just periodically sends me a few job listings and said “whaddayathink?” It would have to be: “Here’s my comp. Get me to a job offer paying comp+$50k and I’ll pay you $25k.”
Dying? It's been dead. I haven't been able to find a job in a year+. And that's with almost 20 years of product leadership experience. Bunch of interviews for company that at the end laid off another 20% of people rather than hire me etc etc. Tons of war stories, ghost job postings and recruiter bullshit. But no job.
In a similar boat and I feel your pain. FINALLY expecting an offer on Friday (from a Who’s Hiring HN thread.) Hang in there…
This is by no means limited to tech sector. This is economic depression.
The job market is normalizing, not dying. It's hard to get a job in tech? No shit, that's how it should be. Sleepwalking into a $300K-500K/yr job with no effort and no expectation to perform was the anomaly, and that's over now.
It is for me!
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