9 ms·

Unraveling of the tech hiring market

98 points by luu 11y ago

minimaxir 11y ago
Helpful context, since Jane Street may be an unfamiliar company to HN users: Jane Street is known as one of the companies with the most technically difficult interview processes, so that gives then a unique perspective regarding tech hiring.
- tosseraccount 11y ago
  How do their hedge funds perform compared to benchmarks?
  - elemeno 11y ago
    They're proprietary traders (that is, they trade with their own money and don't have clients - unlike a hedge fund), so they're very unlikely to tell the world what their performance looks like. If it's bad, they'd not want you to know, if it's good they'd not want their competitors to know!
    - tosseraccount 11y ago
      It looks like they are a high frequency trading outfit. It would be interesting to know how these private black box firms actually performed compared with the returns on a transparent security like the Vanguard S&P 500 fund.
      - tikhonj 11y ago
        They're not really a high-frequency firm by most definitions. They use some high-level strategies that high-frequency firms also use (ie market making) and have some automation, but don't optimize for latency. Nothing about that is high-frequency trading per se—in many securities, you can make markets manually or semi-manually. Market making as a strategy is more like providing a service on the markets than it is like investing. You don't make money by holding a security until the price moves; indeed, you try to limit you exposure to the security as much as possible. Instead, you maintain offers to both buy and sell a security at any given time and make money on the differences between them (the "spread"). The main value you provide is liquidity, making it easier for other people to buy and sell the security quickly, rather than price discovery or the like. While Jane Street does a lot of different things, they're mostly known for market making on ETFs. This makes them more a normal company that happens to operate on public markets than a fund of some sort.
        Retric 11y ago
        Depends, you can make more money as a market maker by expanding the spread than collapsing it. Though this is obviously a risky move.
        auntienomen 11y ago
        How is your comment related to tikhonj's? It seems like a non-sequitur.
        Retric 11y ago
        Market making as a strategy is more like providing a service on the markets than it is like investing. I was pointing out that 'Market Making' is not always a good thing. In the broadest ters it increases costs for some trades, and decrease costs for others. So, it's not always good for the market.
        dllthomas 11y ago
        This doesn't make sense to me. Say I'm a market maker. How do I make the spread bigger than it would have been if I was absent? I suppose I can hit any orders anyone else places inside my larger spread, but that just gives anyone the opportunity to pump money out of my accounts...
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- akhilcacharya 11y ago
  Not only this, but they are well known to only recruit at a very particular set of top schools as well.
  - vram22 11y ago
    Meaning they are very selective? Their blog post says they consider anyone who applies.
    - rhizome 11y ago
      The word "consider" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
      - caseydurfee 11y ago
        Considering how much the school you attended is a proxy for your race, gender, veteran status, socioeconomic status, etc., it would be incredibly dumb for them to say anything different.
        rhizome 11y ago
        Yes, but "consider" also implies a lot of things not so sinister. In that way, the discriminatory aspects you bring up are being euphemized and hidden within an otherwise positive or innocuous term.
    - akhilcacharya 11y ago
      Consider, yes. Seriously consider? No. In comparison to the Duke, Harvard, CMU (or similar level) grads the number of state school grads working there is minimal, especially with respect to who is hired out of school. Which is a shame, really - I'd be really interested in working in fintech/trading someday.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- vram22 11y ago
  Also, they work a lot in OCaml. There have been a few posts about OCaml and Jane Street here on HN, IIRC. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=OCaml%20Jane%20Street&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=OCaml%20Jane%20Street&sort=byP...
aptimpropriety 11y ago
"But this year it seems like the seal is broken, and we've seen major companies delivering internship and full-time offers with 2 week (and less) hard deadlines. Other companies now routinely deliver expiring bonus offers for signing early. Many of these offers circumvent or outright break the guidelines set down by schools, and if past matching markets are a model for this one, next year will come with even earlier offers and worse conditions." Will you name the companies, and give further specifics? Otherwise it's hard to tell what really has changed. I'd say this is not new, nor unique to tech. Finance, consulting et. al have been dealing with this for years - both with new grad offers, and with banking/consulting to PE/HF offers (often analysts have their next job within 6mo of starting their first job).
- Arcten 11y ago
  From personal experience, I can say that Google was only willing to extend an internship offer a week past their initial two week deadline. This is despite the fact that I was still interviewing with other companies at the time. From speaking with my university's career center I am not the only person this happened to.
  - sharpy 11y ago
    It really depends on how much they want you, and how you negotiate. I recently changed jobs. I ended up getting multiple offers, and for all but 1 of them, they were willing to wait 3 weeks for me to make a decision. I was very upfront about that if they were not, I wasn't interested in them, however.
  - erehweb 11y ago
    Interesting. From "Work Rules" by Google's head of People Analytics. "I think they [exploding offers] put a lot of unfair pressure on the candidate, who should be free to make the best decision for herself without duress. After all, companies have lots of employees, but each person holds only one job. It should be one they are sure of."
  - amazon_thr0way 11y ago
    Same with Amazon for the most part. Returning internships are only allowed 2 weeks. Full time offers after internships are given 2 weeks, but you can ask for an extension which does last a couple months. However, you're given a questionnaire on the type of team you want to be on and the longer you wait to accept your offer, the lower on the queue you will be for getting the team you want.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
roymurdock 11y ago
For anyone interested in a deeper dive into how labor matching and employee/employer bargaining is taught in macroeconomics: http://coin.wne.uw.edu.pl/wincenciak/adv_macro_made/adv_macro_lw_lecture_5.pdf http://coin.wne.uw.edu.pl/wincenciak/adv_macro_made/adv_macr...
joshavant 11y ago
This has always been a difficult challenge when job hunting for me, and I'd be curious to hear how others deal with this in their careers. Nearly every job offer I've encountered expects a response within a few days. In practice, I'm usually interviewing at multiple places and at different stages of the interview process at each. The 'exploding offer' system makes applying to multiple companies near impossible for the job seeker. Sure, I see how it creates leverages for the job offerers to get candidates to accept. However, the flip side is that turns the hiring process into a game of forced, snap decision making, which doesn't necessarily seem to be in everyone's interest, either.
- pandaman 11y ago
  It depends on the job. For a rare skillset the rational strategy is to ignore the explosive nature since it's very unlikely there are any other candidates lined up and the explosiveness is just a way to make you take a worse offer than the current market. In fact, getting this offer is a big clue to shop for better offers. There is no rational reason to go through with rescinding the offer after the deadline so, if it actually happened, you could be relieved that you have dodged the bullet of working at a crazy house. For a commodity skill it can be legitimate. There are likely other candidates who will take the offer if you pass the deadline. However, the market for these skills is also more transparent so there is usually enough information to decide if the offer any good.
- bcbrown 11y ago
  The one time I've been offered an exploding offer, I told them that I couldn't respond in the next two days as I was interviewing elsewhere, and that I was also concerned at the level of compensation. They came back with a higher offer with a longer timeline. I would suggest refusing exploding offers as a matter of principle, and if they merely "expect" a response soon, it's totally fair to push back, say you're still interviewing elsewhere, and give them a rough timeline as to when you think you'll be able to give a response.
- sjcrank 11y ago
  If the offer is one you are seriously interested in it is best to not flat out refuse an exploding offer. An alternative I have found effective is to stall a few days through further negotiation of the offer, with steps such as: - I have some more questions about the work environment, can we setup a phone call with one of the developers - I would like to learn more about company benefits, can you send me the relevant information about healthcare options and prices for my review - the salary offer is slightly below my target, but I am willing to consider it if we can improve the PTO offer: is this a possibility
hackaflocka 11y ago
The blogger is writing about what's happening in maybe 4 (top) schools. The rest of the country doesn't have this "problem." Why the downvotes?
- busterarm 11y ago
  It's happening outside of schools. In my own network I know roughly 100 or so junior to mid level devs who have sought jobs in the last year and roughly 25% of them have dealt with exploding offers from NY and SF companies -- most frequently from the smallest and/or lowest-paying companies. One of my friends saw an offer explode in less than an hour. They had emailed him at 3pm on a Friday and had made another offer and received an acceptance from somebody else by 3:45 and didn't tell him till he emailed his acceptance around 6pm. I've never seen someone so pissed off.
  - kafkaesq 11y ago
    What makes it really fun sometimes is when a company ignores you or just dithers for months and months... and then out of nowhere comes at you with "Ummmm, so we'd like to hire you, can you decide in the next 48 hours?"
    - busterarm 11y ago
      Yes! Even better than that is when you turn them down (for offer or interview) because you have another job already and then a month or two later you receive _their_ rejection letter saying that you're not the right candidate. And I was an employee referral that time -- thanks Mattermark!
  - newman314 11y ago
    While that absolutely sucks, I would say that he dodged a bullet there. If a company is willing to pull an offer in a hour, there's a very good chance you don't want to work for them.
    - busterarm 11y ago
golemotron 11y ago
> In a matching market each person wants only one of each item, each item is unique, and each item can be given to at most one person at a time. Jobs are a classic matching market, and just like any market, matching markets can work well, or poorly. People may be unique but the dynamics of unraveling are showing either that they are fungible or that recruiters can convince themselves quickly that they are seeing someone better. The latter psychological dynamic is more of the problem but fungibility is too. Unraveling probably happens in dating too. Dating is a matching market. Maybe the job market is Tinderizing.
- nostrademons 11y ago
  "Unraveling probably happens in dating too." Absolutely does, but in my observations, this has lead to the dating market bifurcating. There are some people who are seemingly always in a new relationship, two weeks after they got out of the last one, which often exploded in flames 1-2 years after it started. And then there are some people who are really picky, who go years single before finding their soulmate, who also went years single. The two groups largely don't intersect. When someone from the latter meets someone from the former, the former person tends to end up in a relationship with someone else well before the latter has made up their mind. I wonder if something similar is happening in the job market. One set of candidates can't afford to be jobless long, and so they will pick the offer in hand without waiting to see if a better one is around the corner. Another set can afford to be picky, so every job search involves multiple competing offers, and they'll hold out for the job that they really, really want even if it means passing up good immediate opportunities. Oftentimes, because they hold out for a job that both compensates them well and makes them happy, they can afford to be picky in their next job search. I wonder if Jane Street is trying to position itself in the latter camp and attract more candidates who are picky about their employer with this article.
pklausler 11y ago
Is this not a self-correcting problem? The companies that impose the unrealistic deadlines are going to be more likely to miss out on the better candidates, who are more likely to have other offers, and in the long term that will be self-defeating for those companies.
- ap22213 11y ago
  Maybe eventually. But, usually such things take a long time to play out. People generally don't act independently, but more like a flock of birds. Occasionally, a singleton will appear to successfully break the equilibrium, but it doesn't happen often.
- browseatwork 11y ago
  You would think. I remember reading about how finance firms and maybe also consultants increasingly interview and make offers earlier to college seniors. If you have lots of debt and the company is a good enough name and they're paying good enough money, people take the offer. People are increasingly anxious, and this helps them know they have a pretty good job, for sure, next year. This trend helps bigger, more established companies. E.g. Google or Microsoft know they will need many someones next year, and they have the resources and hopefully the desire to train up the people they hire. Startuply Inc may not be around in 9 months, and doesn't really know what they'll need then. Maybe the current sentiment of startups = good helps counterbalance this a little.
bradleyjg 11y ago
If anyone wants to do a case study into how a matching process can utterly break down take a look at how federal judges select clerks and how that's changed over the last 15 years or so.
p4wnc6 11y ago
I've been facing the opposite problem. I've been in a lengthy job search and despite being in a situation where I really need a job, I've been forced to reject all the offers that have been made -- because the working conditions are just too unhealthy. The article mentions that a side effect of exploding offers is that you don't get to see the full landscape of opportunities and trade-offs you're facing before you make your decision. On the other hand, after a year of job searching, hundreds of technical phone interviews, dozens of take-home & interactive code tests, and a significant number of job offers that I have turned down, what I can say is that I think I have a pretty good picture of the overall tech job market, and it is exceedingly depressing. For instance, I have a mild case of misophonia, and so being seated in an open-plan office layout is simply not doable for me, physiologically, and listening to headphones obviously doesn't make sense if the problem is misophonia. Many companies have been excited about my skills, experience, work ethic, and my ability to communicate. But they have been 100% no-questions-asked outright indignant at the idea of a candidate negotiating the ability to work in a private office. Even if I explain that it is related to misophonia, and the extreme aversion I have to ambient noises, conversations, small movements, and so forth, they don't seem to care. In all previous jobs, my teamwork ability and my effort spent collaborating was always praised as one of my best attributes. But in today's job market, collaboration == sitting in an open-plan office. Far from worrying about exploding offers, I am worried about the overall industry shift that has happened to make it so that it is effectively impossible to work in a private space as a developer. I feel bad for all of the intrinsically introverted people who are nonetheless excellent collaborators and developers -- the very nature of physical workspaces is harmful to their cognitive health, yet employers outright, under all circumstances, refuse to negotiate about it. I've never been very interested in the idea of a software union. But the egregious lack of privacy in the workspace has made me start to feel like a union would be truly the only possible solution.
- nostrademons 11y ago
  How about consulting? Since consultants contract for the work they produce and not their availability to do the boss's bidding, most companies that hire them are much more amenable to remote work. It seems tailor-made for your situation - someone with good development and communication skills who doesn't want to work in an office.
stegosaurus 11y ago
The idea of an 'exploding offer' seems a bit odd to me. What makes it one-sided exploding? Are people being asked to actually start work in three days time, or just accept the offer? What happens if you say 'yes' and continue interviewing? Does a big guy with a sword turn up at your front door and chop your head off? Are people just trying to be polite and not burn bridges? Why would you want to be polite towards such a ridiculous employer? 'Negotiating' in this situation just feels really odd to me. Reply: "Okay, I can start in a few weeks' time". Phone down. I am exceedingly uninterested in bending my life around employers - that's a world I left behind when I left my job as a retail clerk.
- chipsy 11y ago
  This may be the best advice in the whole thread. Once in the Real World, you are free to be an asshole about how you negotiate and just...not stick to your statements of obligation. You suffer consequences only if you have to deal with the exact same person again. But if the org is big they won't really notice. We're just all so used to schools setting up all the obligations for us and monitoring everything, that taking a more freeform approach is unsettling at first.

98 points by luu 11y ago

Helpful context, since Jane Street may be an unfamiliar company to HN users: Jane Street is known as one of the companies with the most technically difficult interview processes, so that gives then a unique perspective regarding tech hiring.

tosseraccount 11y ago
How do their hedge funds perform compared to benchmarks?
- elemeno 11y ago
  They're proprietary traders (that is, they trade with their own money and don't have clients - unlike a hedge fund), so they're very unlikely to tell the world what their performance looks like. If it's bad, they'd not want you to know, if it's good they'd not want their competitors to know!
  - tosseraccount 11y ago
    It looks like they are a high frequency trading outfit. It would be interesting to know how these private black box firms actually performed compared with the returns on a transparent security like the Vanguard S&P 500 fund.
    - tikhonj 11y ago
      They're not really a high-frequency firm by most definitions. They use some high-level strategies that high-frequency firms also use (ie market making) and have some automation, but don't optimize for latency. Nothing about that is high-frequency trading per se—in many securities, you can make markets manually or semi-manually. Market making as a strategy is more like providing a service on the markets than it is like investing. You don't make money by holding a security until the price moves; indeed, you try to limit you exposure to the security as much as possible. Instead, you maintain offers to both buy and sell a security at any given time and make money on the differences between them (the "spread"). The main value you provide is liquidity, making it easier for other people to buy and sell the security quickly, rather than price discovery or the like. While Jane Street does a lot of different things, they're mostly known for market making on ETFs. This makes them more a normal company that happens to operate on public markets than a fund of some sort.
      - Retric 11y ago
        Depends, you can make more money as a market maker by expanding the spread than collapsing it. Though this is obviously a risky move.
        auntienomen 11y ago
        How is your comment related to tikhonj's? It seems like a non-sequitur.
        Retric 11y ago
        Market making as a strategy is more like providing a service on the markets than it is like investing. I was pointing out that 'Market Making' is not always a good thing. In the broadest ters it increases costs for some trades, and decrease costs for others. So, it's not always good for the market.
        dllthomas 11y ago
        This doesn't make sense to me. Say I'm a market maker. How do I make the spread bigger than it would have been if I was absent? I suppose I can hit any orders anyone else places inside my larger spread, but that just gives anyone the opportunity to pump money out of my accounts...
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
akhilcacharya 11y ago
Not only this, but they are well known to only recruit at a very particular set of top schools as well.
- vram22 11y ago
  Meaning they are very selective? Their blog post says they consider anyone who applies.
  - rhizome 11y ago
    The word "consider" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
    - caseydurfee 11y ago
      Considering how much the school you attended is a proxy for your race, gender, veteran status, socioeconomic status, etc., it would be incredibly dumb for them to say anything different.
      - rhizome 11y ago
        Yes, but "consider" also implies a lot of things not so sinister. In that way, the discriminatory aspects you bring up are being euphemized and hidden within an otherwise positive or innocuous term.
  - akhilcacharya 11y ago
    Consider, yes. Seriously consider? No. In comparison to the Duke, Harvard, CMU (or similar level) grads the number of state school grads working there is minimal, especially with respect to who is hired out of school. Which is a shame, really - I'd be really interested in working in fintech/trading someday.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
vram22 11y ago
Also, they work a lot in OCaml. There have been a few posts about OCaml and Jane Street here on HN, IIRC. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=OCaml%20Jane%20Street&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=OCaml%20Jane%20Street&sort=byP...

aptimpropriety 11y ago

"But this year it seems like the seal is broken, and we've seen major companies delivering internship and full-time offers with 2 week (and less) hard deadlines. Other companies now routinely deliver expiring bonus offers for signing early. Many of these offers circumvent or outright break the guidelines set down by schools, and if past matching markets are a model for this one, next year will come with even earlier offers and worse conditions." Will you name the companies, and give further specifics? Otherwise it's hard to tell what really has changed. I'd say this is not new, nor unique to tech. Finance, consulting et. al have been dealing with this for years - both with new grad offers, and with banking/consulting to PE/HF offers (often analysts have their next job within 6mo of starting their first job).

Arcten 11y ago
From personal experience, I can say that Google was only willing to extend an internship offer a week past their initial two week deadline. This is despite the fact that I was still interviewing with other companies at the time. From speaking with my university's career center I am not the only person this happened to.
- sharpy 11y ago
  It really depends on how much they want you, and how you negotiate. I recently changed jobs. I ended up getting multiple offers, and for all but 1 of them, they were willing to wait 3 weeks for me to make a decision. I was very upfront about that if they were not, I wasn't interested in them, however.
- erehweb 11y ago
  Interesting. From "Work Rules" by Google's head of People Analytics. "I think they [exploding offers] put a lot of unfair pressure on the candidate, who should be free to make the best decision for herself without duress. After all, companies have lots of employees, but each person holds only one job. It should be one they are sure of."
- amazon_thr0way 11y ago
  Same with Amazon for the most part. Returning internships are only allowed 2 weeks. Full time offers after internships are given 2 weeks, but you can ask for an extension which does last a couple months. However, you're given a questionnaire on the type of team you want to be on and the longer you wait to accept your offer, the lower on the queue you will be for getting the team you want.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

roymurdock 11y ago

For anyone interested in a deeper dive into how labor matching and employee/employer bargaining is taught in macroeconomics: http://coin.wne.uw.edu.pl/wincenciak/adv_macro_made/adv_macro_lw_lecture_5.pdf http://coin.wne.uw.edu.pl/wincenciak/adv_macro_made/adv_macr...

joshavant 11y ago

This has always been a difficult challenge when job hunting for me, and I'd be curious to hear how others deal with this in their careers. Nearly every job offer I've encountered expects a response within a few days. In practice, I'm usually interviewing at multiple places and at different stages of the interview process at each. The 'exploding offer' system makes applying to multiple companies near impossible for the job seeker. Sure, I see how it creates leverages for the job offerers to get candidates to accept. However, the flip side is that turns the hiring process into a game of forced, snap decision making, which doesn't necessarily seem to be in everyone's interest, either.

pandaman 11y ago
It depends on the job. For a rare skillset the rational strategy is to ignore the explosive nature since it's very unlikely there are any other candidates lined up and the explosiveness is just a way to make you take a worse offer than the current market. In fact, getting this offer is a big clue to shop for better offers. There is no rational reason to go through with rescinding the offer after the deadline so, if it actually happened, you could be relieved that you have dodged the bullet of working at a crazy house. For a commodity skill it can be legitimate. There are likely other candidates who will take the offer if you pass the deadline. However, the market for these skills is also more transparent so there is usually enough information to decide if the offer any good.
bcbrown 11y ago
The one time I've been offered an exploding offer, I told them that I couldn't respond in the next two days as I was interviewing elsewhere, and that I was also concerned at the level of compensation. They came back with a higher offer with a longer timeline. I would suggest refusing exploding offers as a matter of principle, and if they merely "expect" a response soon, it's totally fair to push back, say you're still interviewing elsewhere, and give them a rough timeline as to when you think you'll be able to give a response.
sjcrank 11y ago
If the offer is one you are seriously interested in it is best to not flat out refuse an exploding offer. An alternative I have found effective is to stall a few days through further negotiation of the offer, with steps such as: - I have some more questions about the work environment, can we setup a phone call with one of the developers - I would like to learn more about company benefits, can you send me the relevant information about healthcare options and prices for my review - the salary offer is slightly below my target, but I am willing to consider it if we can improve the PTO offer: is this a possibility

hackaflocka 11y ago

The blogger is writing about what's happening in maybe 4 (top) schools. The rest of the country doesn't have this "problem." Why the downvotes?

busterarm 11y ago
It's happening outside of schools. In my own network I know roughly 100 or so junior to mid level devs who have sought jobs in the last year and roughly 25% of them have dealt with exploding offers from NY and SF companies -- most frequently from the smallest and/or lowest-paying companies. One of my friends saw an offer explode in less than an hour. They had emailed him at 3pm on a Friday and had made another offer and received an acceptance from somebody else by 3:45 and didn't tell him till he emailed his acceptance around 6pm. I've never seen someone so pissed off.
- kafkaesq 11y ago
  What makes it really fun sometimes is when a company ignores you or just dithers for months and months... and then out of nowhere comes at you with "Ummmm, so we'd like to hire you, can you decide in the next 48 hours?"
  - busterarm 11y ago
    Yes! Even better than that is when you turn them down (for offer or interview) because you have another job already and then a month or two later you receive _their_ rejection letter saying that you're not the right candidate. And I was an employee referral that time -- thanks Mattermark!
- newman314 11y ago
  While that absolutely sucks, I would say that he dodged a bullet there. If a company is willing to pull an offer in a hour, there's a very good chance you don't want to work for them.
  - busterarm 11y ago

golemotron 11y ago

> In a matching market each person wants only one of each item, each item is unique, and each item can be given to at most one person at a time. Jobs are a classic matching market, and just like any market, matching markets can work well, or poorly. People may be unique but the dynamics of unraveling are showing either that they are fungible or that recruiters can convince themselves quickly that they are seeing someone better. The latter psychological dynamic is more of the problem but fungibility is too. Unraveling probably happens in dating too. Dating is a matching market. Maybe the job market is Tinderizing.

nostrademons 11y ago
"Unraveling probably happens in dating too." Absolutely does, but in my observations, this has lead to the dating market bifurcating. There are some people who are seemingly always in a new relationship, two weeks after they got out of the last one, which often exploded in flames 1-2 years after it started. And then there are some people who are really picky, who go years single before finding their soulmate, who also went years single. The two groups largely don't intersect. When someone from the latter meets someone from the former, the former person tends to end up in a relationship with someone else well before the latter has made up their mind. I wonder if something similar is happening in the job market. One set of candidates can't afford to be jobless long, and so they will pick the offer in hand without waiting to see if a better one is around the corner. Another set can afford to be picky, so every job search involves multiple competing offers, and they'll hold out for the job that they really, really want even if it means passing up good immediate opportunities. Oftentimes, because they hold out for a job that both compensates them well and makes them happy, they can afford to be picky in their next job search. I wonder if Jane Street is trying to position itself in the latter camp and attract more candidates who are picky about their employer with this article.

pklausler 11y ago

Is this not a self-correcting problem? The companies that impose the unrealistic deadlines are going to be more likely to miss out on the better candidates, who are more likely to have other offers, and in the long term that will be self-defeating for those companies.

ap22213 11y ago
Maybe eventually. But, usually such things take a long time to play out. People generally don't act independently, but more like a flock of birds. Occasionally, a singleton will appear to successfully break the equilibrium, but it doesn't happen often.
browseatwork 11y ago
You would think. I remember reading about how finance firms and maybe also consultants increasingly interview and make offers earlier to college seniors. If you have lots of debt and the company is a good enough name and they're paying good enough money, people take the offer. People are increasingly anxious, and this helps them know they have a pretty good job, for sure, next year. This trend helps bigger, more established companies. E.g. Google or Microsoft know they will need many someones next year, and they have the resources and hopefully the desire to train up the people they hire. Startuply Inc may not be around in 9 months, and doesn't really know what they'll need then. Maybe the current sentiment of startups = good helps counterbalance this a little.

bradleyjg 11y ago

If anyone wants to do a case study into how a matching process can utterly break down take a look at how federal judges select clerks and how that's changed over the last 15 years or so.

p4wnc6 11y ago

I've been facing the opposite problem. I've been in a lengthy job search and despite being in a situation where I really need a job, I've been forced to reject all the offers that have been made -- because the working conditions are just too unhealthy. The article mentions that a side effect of exploding offers is that you don't get to see the full landscape of opportunities and trade-offs you're facing before you make your decision. On the other hand, after a year of job searching, hundreds of technical phone interviews, dozens of take-home & interactive code tests, and a significant number of job offers that I have turned down, what I can say is that I think I have a pretty good picture of the overall tech job market, and it is exceedingly depressing. For instance, I have a mild case of misophonia, and so being seated in an open-plan office layout is simply not doable for me, physiologically, and listening to headphones obviously doesn't make sense if the problem is misophonia. Many companies have been excited about my skills, experience, work ethic, and my ability to communicate. But they have been 100% no-questions-asked outright indignant at the idea of a candidate negotiating the ability to work in a private office. Even if I explain that it is related to misophonia, and the extreme aversion I have to ambient noises, conversations, small movements, and so forth, they don't seem to care. In all previous jobs, my teamwork ability and my effort spent collaborating was always praised as one of my best attributes. But in today's job market, collaboration == sitting in an open-plan office. Far from worrying about exploding offers, I am worried about the overall industry shift that has happened to make it so that it is effectively impossible to work in a private space as a developer. I feel bad for all of the intrinsically introverted people who are nonetheless excellent collaborators and developers -- the very nature of physical workspaces is harmful to their cognitive health, yet employers outright, under all circumstances, refuse to negotiate about it. I've never been very interested in the idea of a software union. But the egregious lack of privacy in the workspace has made me start to feel like a union would be truly the only possible solution.

nostrademons 11y ago
How about consulting? Since consultants contract for the work they produce and not their availability to do the boss's bidding, most companies that hire them are much more amenable to remote work. It seems tailor-made for your situation - someone with good development and communication skills who doesn't want to work in an office.

stegosaurus 11y ago

The idea of an 'exploding offer' seems a bit odd to me. What makes it one-sided exploding? Are people being asked to actually start work in three days time, or just accept the offer? What happens if you say 'yes' and continue interviewing? Does a big guy with a sword turn up at your front door and chop your head off? Are people just trying to be polite and not burn bridges? Why would you want to be polite towards such a ridiculous employer? 'Negotiating' in this situation just feels really odd to me. Reply: "Okay, I can start in a few weeks' time". Phone down. I am exceedingly uninterested in bending my life around employers - that's a world I left behind when I left my job as a retail clerk.

chipsy 11y ago
This may be the best advice in the whole thread. Once in the Real World, you are free to be an asshole about how you negotiate and just...not stick to your statements of obligation. You suffer consequences only if you have to deal with the exact same person again. But if the org is big they won't really notice. We're just all so used to schools setting up all the obligations for us and monitoring everything, that taking a more freeform approach is unsettling at first.