Ask HN: Those who have recently undertaken a job hunt, what was your experience?
Hi all,
I am getting ready to start searching for a new position and am wanting to move from a hybrid position to fully remote to offer some flexibility with familial obligations but but I'm not entirely sure whether or not that's a realistic goal in this job environment.
Recently I've seeing some sentiment that suggests the job hunt process for us in tech has been improving, and that recruiters are starting to reach out more often than in the last year. If you've recently switched positions, what was your experience like and do you have any advice for those who are currently looking to change positions? For those that have gone remote, any specific insights? About a year ago, I sent out over a hundred resumes, got 3 callbacks, most of which weren't serious, and then there was one job I wrote a cover letter for because I matched everything they were looking for and handily got the job. So it's both impossible and very very easy. I think tech hiring is going to be a knife fight for a long time, because we're long past the point where only the thoroughly interested are looking for jobs in this industry, and there's so much money in the field that competition is high enough for people to take "towers of hanoi in optimized big o" interview tests seriously (probably because they cut the candidate field down to a manageable number) >For those that have gone remote, any specific insights? Be ready to manage your time, it's very easy to let 15 minutes off for chores turn into blowing off a whole day. > Be ready to manage your time, it's very easy to let 15 minutes off for chores turn into blowing off a whole day. Alternatively (and in my opinion, more importantly), manage your 'at work' time. It's very, very easy to let working become your whole self. Get out of the working space and SEPARATE your working space from your living and thriving space from your working space is absolutely vital to avoid burnout. Everyone is different. I'd love to be able to work for 5-8 hours per day consistently. I have the opposite problem that you're talking about. I do agree what you say is very important for many people. > Be ready to manage your time, it's very easy to let 15 minutes off for chores turn into blowing off a whole day. nice, self discipline like a 12 year old :P Uniformly terrible. I started looking casually for a new position last July, then in earnest last October, and then my previous contract ended in middle of February and I "lucked" into a new contract in middle of March. ("Lucked" because I was contacted out of the blue by a good recruiter for a good firm, but also that contact was somewhat the result of a lot of prep work I had done.) I'm a generalist developer with small-firm management experience, 45, still picking up new stuff all the time despite working in tech for over 20 years, and with some decent extracurriculars. I sent out many, many applications. A percentage of them required homework of varying kinds -- tests or generating and filling out a profile that contained all the same data as my resume. Most of those never resulted in an interview, so it was all wasted effort. I had several promising leads evaporate at some point during the interview process because the company changed their mind about the position. Other interviews never provided any feedback whatsoever. My current contract is for a firm that needed someone with extensive PHP experience, which I have, but they were a Ruby-only shop and needed to do a technical evaluation on me. So, I spent a week preparing for that interview until I was reasonably comfortable with basic Ruby, only for it never to come up during the interview after all. And, like, these seem to be pretty good people overall -- it's just emblematic of the state of things. I very, very nearly quit tech to start working towards becoming a personal trainer, and may still do so at the end of this contract. In my view, getting hired right now is in some ways even harder than it was during the dotcom bust of the early 2000s. If you are a specific kind of person -- 20s, maybe some college, and experience at a FAANG, and "senior" or "lead" after just a couple of years in the industry -- then you might have some options. Hiring processes are fractally broken though. People are getting hired, there are jobs available, but there are also hundreds of applicants for any position within a few hours of the position opening, and because hiring processes are so broken, it's quite hard to stand out as an applicant. There's a huge push to get everyone back into the office 5 days a week. Be prepared to be told NO remote work. I have a similar experience to the previous comment, applied to about 50 jobs and got 2 interviews. Removed all dates from my resume and now I'm getting interviews left and right because they can't tell how "senior" I am. Did you also remove some roles so that it looks like you're younger? I've heard that is the only way to get interviews these days as senior cvs are getting thrown out (too old, too expensive) I thought they weren't hiring entry level devs anymore because the higher ups think that AI can do those jobs? They hire people in their 20s to do senior roles on the cheap, they throw away people that are 30s or older (if you’re 40 you might as well be dead) as they are seen as expensive This would raise a lot of eyebrows in the UK. Hiring managers might wonder what you’re hiding. Let them wonder. They're wondering on paid time, the potential candidates aren't They just wouldn't put you forward most of the time. Having gaps larger than 6 months here (especially if it's in the last decade) is a big red flag. I don't know why, but this has been my experience and others I've spoken to. Was laid off at the end of '22. Started looking around March of '23. Had maybe 10 interviews over the course of 4 months. Got to the 3rd round at one place, but then they ghosted. Quit looking in June to focus on other stuff. Got a call from a recruiter in late September '23 about a gig - got to the 3rd round again, but they went with someone else. I dip my toes in every month or so to see what's out there, but basically I decided to retire since I just don't care to do the whole tech-interview/hazing ritual anymore. Recently a friend hooked me up with a friend of his who is working on an AI accelerator chip startup on a shoestring. So I guess I'm about to start working on that. No pay, just equity, but there's a huge amount of money sloshing around in this space right now and who knows, maybe he can get some funding? Interesting stuff to work on, anyway, even if it doesn't pan out. I guess the takeaway here is that it's surprisingly easy to find a gig that only pays in equity. In Canada, it seems like there’s a large and growing number of remote jobs available at US software firms through employer-of-record startups like Deel and Remote. Canadian software engineers are surprisingly cheap, relatively speaking, especially when you hire outside the Toronto area. Economic realities mean there’s quite a bit of downward pressure on CAD right now, so this is likely to continue to be a good deal on both sides for quite a while. I’m still getting approached by recruiters for Canadian-based remote roles like it’s 2021. I'm a Canadian resident already working for a US company. I've been out of the job-hopping game since COVID so curious what recruiters and platforms to start poking around on? LinkedIn, etc? My advice is to check LinkedIn for listings but don’t apply that way. “Easy Apply” lowers application friction so effectively that every posting gets ~1000 applicants of which few are actually qualified. I don’t think I ever heard back on a LinkedIn-submitted application even for jobs where I had rare and directly applicable experience. In the last six months I’ve been hired once after applying (on the website of the company itself) to s job posting I first saw on LinkedIn. I was poached shortly after via inbound from recruiter on LinkedIn > For those that have gone remote, any specific insights? Make sure that your contract specifically mentions that you'll work remotely. Otherwise your boss can always change their mind down the line. Yeah, if they say "remote opportunities" or "hybrid" it's just a carrot that they can take away at any time. Has happened to me more than once. It’s bad. I’m looking for a front end position - it’s never taken me more than four or five months in the past, and I have more experience and sharper skills now than ever before… and it’s been almost eight months currently. Maybe only 50% of applications out of hundreds even prompt a “thank you but no” form email. It’s almost never personal either, since everyone proxies their hiring process through big job board sites. It’s insane how little personal engagement with actual humans is happening, I’ve never experienced a job hunt like this before, it’s really making me wonder what I’m doing wrong. Usually I do a few interviews, find a spot that seems promising, and jump right into another contract. I don’t know why it should be different this round. If I may give the perspective from the other side of the job board, here in France: We pay hundreds or thousands per month, and are flooded with immigrants applications, none of which we can drop before ensuring that they do, indeed, need a visa. When I say flooded, it’s 99% of applications from foreign people who need a visa (and discrimination by address is equally illegal). So yes, we have quantity over quality with those job boards, LinkedIn and so on, and we had to hire someone to deal with the flow. Genuine clarification question: Is that "hundreds of thousands" per month, as in salaries >$1.2 million per year? or do you pay some developers less than $1000/month? Or are you paying "hundreds or thousands per month" to applicant filtering services? Or do you have "hundreds or thousands" of different employees receiving a salary every month? I got sacked at a W2 contract position at the end of December. It took me 2 full months to secure something. I have 20 years experience in C++. Lots of time-wasting overseas recruiters using scammy tactics, had 3 interviews total, and got one offer. It was scary because I couldn't tell if the slowness was due to my resume (I appear as a job hopper), normal wintertime slowdown in hiring, or a depression in the market. I took my only offer that is weaker on salary than I would like, but it seems relatively stable and I'm just thankful to have an income. FWIW being a "job hopper" doesn't seem to be a negative anymore, and may even be seen as a positive now. From what I've read, if your application makes it to human eyeballs at all, they're more likely to view a long role at one company as stagnation. Yeah in theory if my average tenure has been 1-2 years, I should be desirable because I won't stay long enough to want a raise or try to take any leadership roles from anyone. I'm basically a contractor but without the higher pay. Pretty freaking terrible. I've never before had to send out more than a handful of resumes to get a new job... but right now I'm getting nothing back. Well, not quite nothing - I've gotten a few recruiters asking me to commute 2 hours for hourly body shop gigs. But nothing realistic. My advice is to just keep working on it - send out resumes, write cover letters for the ones that look promising, A/B test different resume formats, and just keep at it. Something will work eventually. > A/B test different resume formats I've heard this advice a few times now, but how can you possibly know whether any differences in your resume actually result in different outcomes? Unless you notice a really extreme difference in success rate over a long period of time, it seems like the sample size is just too small to draw any conclusions. I do it via LinkedIn - I track how many views and search hits I get in a week, then switch up the resume, see if I get more the next week. I have zero guarantee that this works, btw. But I figure if I'm not getting the results I want, I may as well change things up and see if anything changes. I applied to over 70 jobs at Hampshire college, UMass Amherst, Mt Holyoke College and Amherst College. All open positions, not 1 interview. I'm a white man. I finally took my race, and gender off the application and got 3 interviews right away Honest question: why was race and gender even /on/ your application in the first place? Do you mean the EEO questions that they ask -- because those are absolutely not supposed to be part of the application. Or do you mean you have it on your resume? Because... why? IDK about this guy, maybe just trolling, but when I was hiring I realized you can really tell from indirect information. Name and college name will give you a real strong guess. It was weird because I was just trying to avoid h1-b applicants since I was told we weren't doing that, but I quickly realized that I was optimizing against indian people and also that taking bias out of the hiring process is a lie that HR tells itself for legal liability reasons. AFAIK, he is not trolling. Right now, in Academia, there is a very strong movement towards hiring diversity candidates. For example, some faculty openings are advertised as women or minorities only. In EU, some have sued and successfully overturned this kind of bias, as it is in principle not legal to discriminate by sex or race. Yeah, you can’t really filter based on resume without risking legal liability. There are plenty of people who look like they would need a visa sponsorship but don’t necessarily (e.g. spouses of H1B or green card holders) ...or children of Indian immigrants. For the vast majority of people you can tell by given name and surname. You get around this by picking a gender-ambiguous nickname and using that as your given name. Ariel, Logan, Dakota, Drew, Jordan, etc. Surnames are harder, but you're aiming for ambiguity. Williams, Johnson, Smith, Jones and Brown -- e.g., the five most common African American surnames. Other options like Kim and Lee will also get you far here. I could see a different given name, but a different surname? Won't that throw up some red flags once HR starts on boarding you? Or what about referrals, gotta make sure to coordinate with them. I said harder. Like change your name hard. One company I worked for hired a woman once who had a completely fraudulent identity and gave different identification entirely to the person we were interviewing/hired and she justified it to HR saying she was running away from an abusive relationship. Her paychecks were even different than the name in the employee directory! We only found out long after she'd stopped working with us when she made the news for trying to murder a stranger while high on drugs. She had made the news and was on camera with a completely unfamiliar name to us. As you can tell these are College jobs and they have a race and gender aspect to every application. You're not required by law to fill it out, but they do use it as part of the screening process Did you re-apply to the same places with and without those factors? Because if you didn’t, it’s hard to be sure what you’re implying is true. Alternative explanation: you applied for competitive roles and didn’t hear back because there were better candidates, then you applied for less competitive roles and got interviews. Oh yes I should have made that clear. I resubmitted my application to all of the original jobs Why did you include your race and gender in your application? This is a fair point. Including them is a little weird in the first place and totally a red flag. I can find plenty of Indeed postings that won't let you submit the application without specifying ... Could it be a USA thing? I'm not in HR; but I imagine they're very averse to anything that might reflect bias in employment and putting your gender, current ability to get pregnant, religion, etc, on a resume would absolutely count in that way, I imagine. Definitely not US. We have voluntary self identification. Yea that's how it's supposed to be, right? However, I am sure that I've seen applications which don't categorize that input as optional. Such is life. Not only do they not want to hire you from a dei perspective, many of the foreign engineers from India/China, also do not want to hire you. They want to hire their overseas brethren. You were downvoted, and while I think DEI has some good aspects, your 2nd point is spot on because I've seen it in person at a largish, household name tech company. You see Indian managers who only have Indian engineers working for them and you see Chinese managers who only have Chinese engineers working for them. Go through the cafeteria at lunchtime and you see it pretty much ethnically sorted - the Indians aren't sitting with the Chinese, and vice versa. Now it wasn't 100%, I worked for a guy who was ethnically Chinese from Malaysia and he had Indians and whities like me working for him. But if I saw in internal job listing that looked interesting and the manager was Indian, for example, I'd look at the org chart to see the names of the people working for them to see if it was an all-Indian group. If it was then there wasn't much point in applying. I got lucky in that I have a pretty good network of ex colleagues. One coffee with a ex colleague led me to reach out to another ex colleague who sang my praises to a recruiter. Once that happened I did my best to crush every interview through to a very good offer. Cold applying just doesn’t work unless you can be one of the first to apply and be seen by a recruiter when they first look at the queue. Networking is the #1 way to go. My experience was I was 100% ignored by companies using Lever or Greenhouse for their applications. I don't know if that's a sign of their company processes, some bit of info on my resume, or if those tools offer the recruiter girls a quick way to ignore/filter out certain people, but FYI. I don't bother with applying to those anymore. > recruiter girls wtf mate? When it comes to internal recruiting this has been mostly true at every company I've worked for or interviewed with for decades. Male representation in internal recruiting orgs is maybe 20% at best.
Probably closer to 10%. In regular bog-standard (non-outsourced-overseas) HR organizations, men are unicorns. No harm meant, many/most companies I've dealt recently with have young women doing their recruiting. I suppose calling them “girls” seems very strange to me, presumably they’re all adults. It’s colloquially And often seem to be selected according to Western "beauty standards". Was laid off last April. After around 100 resumes, it took me about 5 months to land another position through a recruiter. It was contract to hire, but due to budget cuts I was laid off again in December. Found another contract gig that lasted 3 months, and just started another 6 month contract to hire gig. 10+ years experience in infra, very well rounded, lots of projects to show off my skills. Out of the hundreds of apps I've put in in the last year, maybe 5 call backs, got passed on in 2 interviews (was legitimately not what they were looking for, can't blame them). It's brutal out there. I wouldn't waste your time tailoring resumes or cover letters. The call back ratio is so low it's just not worth it. I left big tech in September of last year and began my search maybe a couple of months before I quit. Talked to perhaps 6 companies, was more interested in some roles than others, all were remote however which was my goal. I didn’t have too difficult of a time engaging with companies, though it really helps to have that initial contact with a recruiter or an introduction, as applications to companies are just a blackhole I’m convinced. Ultimately found my new company and role from a HN who’s hiring thread, and reached out to the recruiter via email. Feel free to message if you have questions. Best of luck! It's been pretty brutal recently, as someone who's been applying to jobs in the last few months or so. Requirements for roles seem to be far higher than they used to be, with even Frontend or Backend specific ones requiring knowledge of 2-3 languages or frameworks associated with the other side. Salaries seem to be lower than they were a few years ago, with many terrible jobs being advertised with salaries that no one could live on in the areas they're based (London from my experience). The actual process has been just as bad too. Lots of jobs have hundreds of applicants, regardless of the amount of experience or number of skills required. Many won't get back to you at all after applying, meaning the only way to tell if the job has been filled is if it vanishes from online portals. And even for those that do respond, it feels there are a lot more companies rejecting candidates at the drop of a hat, or ghosting them after the first or second stage of the interview process. Recruiters do seem to have started calling more often than earlier though, so it seems like there may be a tiny bit of improvement compared to the end of 2023/start of 2024. But still, in this climate, my advice would be to only change job if you're very confident things will work out, and to rely on contacts and networking rather than formal application processes. Any option to skip the 'apply to an online listing with hundreds of other candidates and pray' setup is going to be a lifeline about now. Haven't told The Current Place yet but I start somewhere new next month. Announcing my departure has been consuming my thoughts - co-dependency here runs deep. Anyway: I was poached by a former peer for his new department. I marked my interest on business social media and the requirement for remote. "Interviewed" with one place, the new one, as a formality. Networks have never failed me, but they aren't very communicable/useful to others... either. Plant seeds regardless of the sun I'm an edge case, but I recently found a part time dev job at a web game that I had been playing for about 2.5 years prior. In the news header of the game they had an headline that came up every few weeks that said "We are always looking for good devs to join the team". When I was finally ready to commit, I emailed them, had a couple email exchanges and two interviews. One interview over slack and one video interview with the two people I'm most directly working with. Now I'm working there, very happy to be part time, and I'll work there for as long as the game stays popular. Very cool, congratulations on the position! I'm a fan of web based games, out of pure curiosity is there any chance you can shoot me a link to the game in a DM? Mixed bag. 2020 was my best year ever job wise, I was making a stupid amount of money. In 2023 I took a massive pay cut, we're talking over 50k, but it's still better than nothing. Now I'm somewhat close to my peak, fully remote. Not the most I've ever earned, but in very comfortable. I was over employed in '21 and 22. First 2 then 3 jobs. Then got laid off from all 3 before '23. Make hay while the sun shines Did you take the paycut to go fully remote, or were there other circumstances leading to that change? So many factors, but the gist is the market was really really bad last year. Now I'm making more and I'm pretty comfortable. Honestly, you are gonna lose your mind unless you get lucky. Just get recs and do contracting on some projects. It’s a clusterfuck now. I started about two months ago and it has been....slower. I am searching for Engineering Manager/Sr. Engineering Manager positions. I have noticed that larger companies take (if at all) longer to respond to and found that smaller/mid-size companies respond faster. I'm optimistic that the closer we get to summer, the better the response rates will be. TL;DR: Mixed bag While I nuked my LinkedIn about 8 years ago because I was 1-2 from 96% of Silicon Valley and spammed by un-targeted recruiters incessantly... more importantly, my contacts and I didn't talk so keeping it was meaningless performative business theater. MAANG companies (excluding N) are requiring relocation and RTO (hybrid, near an office). Also, their tone has shifted to where their recruiters feel like they hold a monopoly on in the business relationship power dynamic. Perhaps shrinking corporate real estate holdings of properties and lease should be prioritized over burdening employees with additional relocation, commuting, and housing costs. JS jobs are always an overpaid race to the bottom, but now they are looking for minimum 8 years of experience. I have way more experience than that, which causes recruiters to foam at the mouth, but I got tired of the unnecessary fashion and stupidity even though I was laid off. Fortunately somebody found me and offered me something different. I am making far less than I could as a lead fullstack engineer, but I am also not working with entitled children or Dunning-Kruger nonsense. It's brutal. I'm in a more selected field- cybersecurity & GRC governance & getting interviews has been scarce. I have deep domain expertise in GRC and am technical enough to challenge on technical roles or business operations roles & while I've sent out hundreds of applications, I've only had a handful of interviews or first round screening invites that I consider promising. I finally accepted a GRC position with a local company offering full-time remote work because most of the startup opportunities I was looking at were only hiring senior engineering (Which is fine, but indicative of the market). Offered pay or benefits seem lower too. I've dismissed a few companies for being below my range & have seen others here say the same. I have had two companies basically admit they have never had the outpouring of candidates they have had lately but I question the real value & experience of those candidates. When I'm looking at GRC roles, a fairly niche field, that have had 150 - 350 applicants, I can't help but feel the market is being flooded by juniors or maybe just resume-spamming tools. I really believe companies are trying to be too picky because of the pure inflated applicant numbers. For example, one particular company refused to even consider me for the position because of a hybrid 3 day requirement imposed by their leadership. That's despite me having a shared military background with a current team member, again, deep domain expertise & project ownership, and an interest in the company so that I would have likely been on the lower of their salary range just to work with them. They are still hiring for that role so I'll be honest, I don't get it. Another company got to the interview with their internal recruiter (& of which I had been invited too by their Head of Application Security) and they then decided to list their must haves for the position in their first round, something which wasn't listed on the job post (and their must-have language requirement was a barely a familiarity note on the job post). But all in all salaries seem lower, I saw a government Information Security Assurance role for 50k - 75k the other day, for 3 - 5 years experience-- I was making that at entry level with 0 years of experience. Heck, at that point I would take a junior SWE position which would probably pay more & then just go do either software engineering again or look outside of tech for management roles. I don't know, all I can say is I'm not personally lowering my own standards just because companies are. I think my next position will see me entrenched awhile, until this job market changes or until I find my next unicorn role that meets my demands. Like someone else said here, it just isn't worth tailoring your resume anymore- the time commitment is too great & its all about beating the ATS system. Internal recruiters & HR barely understand our resume anyway, a fact which has made the first rounds a real pain. Case in point, the eventual position I accepted I interviewed with the CTO first-round & it was a much more productive interview for both sides then any of my other HR first rounds have been. Bad. Interviews far enough apart that experienced gain diminishes by the time I had another one