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Visualizing a Job Search Or: How to Find a Job as a Software Engineer

162 points by Harj 10y ago

Harj 10y ago
This is the first time I've seen a data visualization of the job search process for a software engineer and it's amazing to see the variability in responsiveness between companies. This is actually the most surprising thing I've seen since we started Triplebyte. Originally I'd assumed that every company complaining about how difficult it is to hire engineers, would be moving every candidate through their process as quickly as possible. In practice we learnt to stop working with companies who were too dysfunctional to get back to candidates promptly - even if it's just to let them know they needed a few more days to make a decision. We'll also often see dysfunctional companies switch to the extreme opposite end of the responsiveness spectrum once they've made an offer and start pushing candidates to make a decision immediately. Better to have been responsiveness throughout the process. I suspect companies still underestimate how much that makes a candidate more positively inclined towards them once they're at the decision making stage.
- DanFeldman 10y ago
  What are reasonable time frames for a company then? What should we aim for with: 1) Phone Screens 2) Interview responses (moving to next interview?) 3) Final decisions 4) Negotiation/confirmations of receiving a response to an offer
  - Harj 10y ago
    They key thing is to minimize the amount of time a candidate is waiting back to hear from you on the next step. We see a strong correlation between the companies who have the highest closing rates on candidates (70% or more) and how responsive they are in every interaction. The best companies will respond to a candidate on next steps within 24 hours at every step of the process.
    - komali2 10y ago
      The best thing my boss way back when I was a recruiter told me - "Updating someone that there's no update yet is a hell of a lot better than not updating them because there's no update yet." In other words, a simple "the team is still discussing your interview but haven't made a decision yet" email can make all the difference in the world. That being said, and I'm swaying off topic here, candidates should never pause or slow down their job search, no matter how far along they are with a company. A rejection can come in a million forms for a million reasons, and how much would it suck to be back at square one across the board if it happens?
    - jdmichal 10y ago
      I suspect this is highly related to the ghosting mentioned in the article and by pjlegato in a top-level comment [0]. This is so much the norm at this point, that no response is typically seen as an implicit rejection and the candidate mentally moves on. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12764521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12764521
      - countingteeth 10y ago
        Agreed; I've futilely tried to mentor a recent grad who is applying to jobs he has no qualification for and then sitting around waiting for them to follow up.
  - wayn3 10y ago
    My opinion: If you do a phone screen with someone in a more or less 1on1 kind of setting and they can't tell you whether you passed that stage within an hour, their organization must be dysfunctional (they have the job of conducting the interview but not the authority to pass/fail you?) and, therefore, absolutely not worth working for. The only lengthy part of the "interviewing" should be the negotiation, and by that point you are actually already kind of hired. Unless you blow it. Things will be longer the bigger the company is because they have to involve legal and all this stupidity, but early stage YC companies don't get the benefit of the doubt here. There's this hubris of cultural fit, which is code for "is this guy conformist enough that we can give him an arms length of desk space next to another 50 developers without him flipping?". Its true, cultural fit is super important. But that's at least in part due to the insanity that is software engineer working conditions. Give your people actual offices to perform actual work in and all your culture issues will vanish.
    - jldugger 10y ago
      > If you do a phone screen with someone in a more or less 1on1 kind of setting and they can't tell you whether you passed that stage within an hour, their organization must be dysfunctional (they have the job of conducting the interview but not the authority to pass/fail you?) and, therefore, absolutely not worth working for. The university I work for has a fairly standardized process for full time hires. We schedule and sit in on all phone screens, individually evaluate candidates, and then promote some of them on to the next step. Sometimes we're in a position where more people "pass" the phone screen than we would want to bring in for onsites. There's an anxiety in immediately failing people we don't bring in, in case the batch we bring onsite does poorly.
      - wayn3 10y ago
        So you either tell them that they're on the waiting list or you end up in the dysfunctional basket.
    - davidgerard 10y ago
      "cultural fit" is in practice a code word for "illegal discrimination".
  - kafkaesq 10y ago
    The "ghosting" is just something you have to get used to as a candidate? Though the ideal upper bound seems to be about 3 weeks net turnaround (for steps 1-4, altogether) for smaller companies (perhaps longer for monster-sized companies), nearly any time can be "reasonable"... as long as you get back to people by the time you say you will, more or less, at each stage in the process. It's the "by the time you say you will" part that these companies seem to be having inordinate difficulty holding up to. And what people on the receiving end tend to find to be quite grating to be on the receiving end of, over and over and over again.
  - user5994461 10y ago
    What looks like a good, normal, expected pace to me: Day 0 - Candidate apply This week - Phone call Next week - On site interviews Next next week - Offer letter ready to sign Of course, we have to be in touch right away after each step to arrange the details for the next step. That means we're in touch within 24-48 hours after each step.
- komali2 10y ago
  It'd be fun to build a tool that does this. I still have ~170 companies I applied to more than two months ago that I haven't heard back from yet. Funnier still is that in the end, the 3 offers I was fortunate enough to receive in the same timeline all had at most a timeline of 2 weeks from initial communication/application to offer. Rejections came either within a half second (auto somehow) to two weeks.
  - pmiller2 10y ago
    170 companies and 3 offers? Why so many applications and so few offers? Were they just ignoring you?
    - cyorir 10y ago
      My guess is that a number of the applications were done via job boards rather than at each company. In my experience as someone still looking for a first job, job board applications seem to have incredibly low yields.
    - komali2 10y ago
      Because I chose an offer within a month. So approximately half of those were sent within 2-3 weeks before I accepted an offer, and of that half I had to turn down a good deal of follow-ups. Also, bootcamp-grad. I chose a shotgun approach. It worked. EDIT: to clarify, I haven't heard back from 170. I applied to ~300.
  - devonkim 10y ago
    I think we could use close.io as a job seeker's tool instead of a CRM and it could be interesting to use it from the other side of the intended parties.
  - cheriot 10y ago
    170 companies?! At what point does a resume become spam?
    - komali2 10y ago
- viraptor 10y ago
  I've done interviews with a number of companies lately and yes, the experience is just all over the place. The most annoying are the companies which don't do what they advertise - like mentioning on their site they will give you feedback if you ask for it and then never responding to the question. Just don't offer it and it's going to be fine. Surprisingly though, almost every recruitment company did send a proper rejection email. Internal HR - not so much. On the other hand internal recruitment is much simpler to prepare for. Recruiters often call back mentioning only their company and I have no idea which of the last 10 applications they happened to receive and what the position was about.
dhd415 10y ago
Having gone through this process recently, there's a lot of truth in this post. I experienced more companies "ghosting" during the process than slow turnaround times, but it is remarkable how short-sighted companies are during the recruiting phase. It's as if common courtesy has gone completely out the window in tech recruiting. Basic things like not missing phone interviews at times that have been previously scheduled or informing candidates politely that you've decided to move forward with other candidates can't even be taken for granted anymore. Candidates' initial experience with a company is typically through the recruiting organization and negative impressions during the recruiting phase are often applied to the company as a whole. I could see it being a competitive advantage to be known for having a good recruiting process even if it is very selective. For example, I have a very positive impression of DigitalOcean despite not receiving an offer because of the professional and courteous way they handled their interview process.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- ryandrake 10y ago
  The "ghosting" is just something you have to get used to as a candidate. Most companies do it. It's likely there are far, far more candidates than jobs, and companies simply can't get back to each and every person. Also, a lot of times, the company can't make a clear yes/no decision and will stall and delay on a borderline candidate in order to try to luck into a better one.
  - busterarm 10y ago
    Something that I'm seeing more and more these days are companies that are actually not trying to fill the positions they are posting. I've seen companies fully-contained within 4-person WeWork spaces showing pictures of their non-existant 20+ person team and listing as many or more open positions that don't exist. I've seen companies that list positions that aren't actively looking to hire but want to keep the funnel open in case that 'special snowflake' comes along. I don't know if it's 'wishful thinking' or something else, but it's fairly poisonous.
jacalata 10y ago
Interesting to see that they had one offer that they sat on for 30+ days - seems like a long time for the company to wait?
- busterarm 10y ago
  That was my immediate takeaway as well. What company was okay with this?
  - ryandrake 10y ago
    I remember a company contacting me about 2 months after the phone screen asking me to come in for a first round of on-site interviews. I had already accepted a different job and moved across the country to start with them by that point.
    - busterarm 10y ago
      Don't you hate that? That happens at least twice in every job search phase I make.
pjlegato 10y ago
Tip to shiny new CEOs: Ghosting a job candidate is not only grossly unprofessional, it's extremely rude at a personal level. The candidate went to all the trouble of engaging with you; you owe them (at the very least) a timely and professional rejection email if you don't want to proceed. Yes, a rejection letter, because that's what you're doing -- rejecting them. Ghosting is still a rejection; it's just a rude rejection. There is no way to candy coat that, and you shouldn't try. Grow a spine, and write that rejection letter in the kindest way you can.
- rhizome 10y ago
  LinkedIn and Apple both ghosted me, it's not just new CEOs.
  - busterarm 10y ago
    With Apple at least it depends on the group. I've been ghosted by one department and actively sought after with months-later followups from others. I can imagine it's likely the manager had someone in mind for the position but the company's policy required a posting. And there's always H1-B requirements to fill...
  - pjlegato 10y ago
    Maybe I should've written, "shiny new managers".
    - kafkaesq 10y ago
      Ah, but it's the CEO (or at least someone at the director of engineering level) who sets the tone, and sets priorities and guidelines for their underlings to follow. So when you get ghosted, it's not the engineers who fizz-buzzed you who "did" it... and it's certainly not the office manager (and/or "talent specialist") who's doing it. As with everything else a company does, "message"-wise -- it's coming from the top.
  - cyorir 10y ago
    I was ghosted by Google.
coldcode 10y ago
A related problem also hard to solve, how to find a job as a software engineer for a pleasant highly functional sane company. Let me know if there is a solution.
- skookum 10y ago
  Keep in touch with your pleasant highly functional sane ex-coworkers and use your network to vet companies/orgs/teams.
  - mooreds 10y ago
    No easy answers, I agree. Jobs are the opposite of a commodity(as are people) and so the solution to finding the right match will use technology, but can't be replaced by technology.
- logfromblammo 10y ago
  I have found the smaller subproblem of just finding a pleasant, highly functional, sane company to be almost intractable on its own.
- rdoherty 10y ago
  I've been thinking about this for a while. I think it would involve asking a highly focused set of questions to at least 3 different employees and see how much they correlate. I don't know what those questions are though :) One question that I think correlates low with a highly functional sane tech company is "Does your CEO still write code for the product?" if the answer is yes and the company is larger than 20 people, odds are high that the company/CEO is not highly functional.
- crpatino 10y ago
  Try to start one on your own? Most likely this will be anything but pleasant, but if you are very careful about not accepting VC financing you may try to optimize for sanity... highly functional will come mostly as you learn from your own errors.
- bonniemuffin 10y ago
pmiller2 10y ago
35 days, 23 companies, 4 offers. Is this typical? This, for me, was the key section of the article: > I had the luxury of having a few weeks free due to gaps in my consulting schedule. This time block is something that is a rare case in a job search. Performing such an exhaustive search must be nearly impossible if you also have a full-time job. (Emphasis added.) The amount of time off required to do this is insane. Is this how most people do it? Also, I agree that speed of communication is key. I want to be on site within 2-3 weeks if everything is going well. Take much longer than that, and I'll probably either have a job by the time you get back to me, or be too busy talking to people who actually want to talk to me.
- vdnkh 10y ago
  As a younger engineer (about 2 years of experience), trying to break from my post-college job into a "real" software job in NYC, it took me almost a year. You're not worth a lot until you're proven with a big name on the resume.
  - pmiller2 10y ago
    "proven" and "big name on the resume" are two entirely different things. I wish more hiring entities knew this.
- d4mi3n 10y ago
  I think it really depends a lot on the companies you interact with. If you're unlucky and hit a lot of companies with slow or unresponsive interview processes I can easily see 6 to 8 weeks of back and fourth. The last time I went job hunting, I applied to about 12 places over the course of about 4 weeks. Of those 12: 4 offers, 3 rejections, 5 ghosts (basically anyone who doesn't get back to me within a week of an on-site). I've been working in software for 8 years in SF and I'm told those numbers are pretty good, but I think there's a lot of variability in hit/miss rates for people depending on luck, professional network quality, and how people market themselves.
  - pmiller2 10y ago
um304 10y ago
Tried to sign up at TripleByte, got this: "Unfortunately we're only able to work with people with legal status permitting employment in the US. We hope in the future to help set up visa sponsorships." I appreciate that they cleared expectations upfront. I tried to sign up on Hired.com once, after going through effort of filling up their lengthy registration forms, which took me several hours, they conveniently told me that their services are not available in my country.
- Harj 10y ago
  We wish we could work with you :( In the meantime, we're working on making companies more aware of the H1-B transfer options (http://blog.triplebyte.com/gaming-the-h-1b-system-for-good http://blog.triplebyte.com/gaming-the-h-1b-system-for-good) and the recent OPT visa STEM extenstion (https://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/students-and-exchange-visitors/students-and-employment/stem-opt https://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/students-and-exc...).
  - mattferderer 10y ago
    I would love to hear a timeline on remote opportunities if you have one.
    - wayn3 10y ago
      Triplebyte only works with YC companies and YC tells its startups in pretty clear terms that remote employees don't work for early stage startups so go figure.
      - triplebit 10y ago
        > Unfortunately we’re only working with programmers who can be based in the SF Bay Area. Yeah, there's that too. :-(
        donretag 10y ago
        Seriously? There is no mention of either only YC companies or the Bay Area in their FAQ or on their website. Tacky.
donretag 10y ago
Is there more to the Google doc or has it been edited? Never heard of Triplebyte, so I looked into them. According to their candidate FAQ: "We save you time. ... Most candidates save hours that otherwise would be spent on phone screens. We turn an O(n) process into an O(1) process." The phone screen is where I can screen the companies, so this system will not work in my case. I reject more companies before getting to any actual interviewing when it is clear our shared goals are not being met. Most companies just want a warm body, whereas I am very specific in what I want.
- Harj 10y ago
  We save you the time of repeated technical phone screens across companies. Companies will do a pitch call with our candidates as the first step, where they pitch themselves to you and after that you decide if you'd like to move forward with them.
  - donretag 10y ago
    Perhaps the pitch call is done differently via Triplebyte, but for the most part, the initial non-interviewing phone call is with someone in HR or with little technical knowledge. Most questions are answered with "oh, let me find out and get back to you". I want the phone screen.
- dunkelheit 10y ago
  > The phone screen is where I can screen the companies Fair enough but remember that you may be screening not the company itself but some frazzled engineer who curses herself for agreeing to perform 4-th phone screen a week instead of insisting on writing code. Your impression of the company may be misleading.
  - cheriot 10y ago
    That's also exactly who will tell me how the company works without the sugarcoating HR and managers put on it. I don't want sugarplums and rainbows, I want an effective engineering organization :)
sambrand 10y ago
I find it interesting that the author doesn't mention anything about the product as priority during his job search. No mention of tech stack, product-market-fit, growth potential, or being convinced that a product is filling a genuine need. These are the things that I would prioritize when considering a job search. The author mentions as a priority responsiveness of the recruiter. Also: - How nice are the employees? - What’s the vibe in the office? Noisy? Quiet? - Do employees look happy? - How’s the food? - and so on and so on… Is this typical?
- wayn3 10y ago
  The author was a consultant before. Its usually our job to deal with the circumstances and to actively change them. We are not "good employees". We call bullshit and we get to call bullshit. We are not hired to help our bosses achieve things, we are hired to save their asses. We are hired because someone goofed up. We are hired because something went wrong and its our job to patch it up. We come in with the expectation of getting things back on track. We are meant to blend in with the "regular employees" but we never will, because we are free agents. We can walk away from this job and we WILL walk away if what had been promised does not happen. We will walk away unscathed because we have other gigs in the pipeline anyway. We do not conform. We come in with a plan, which we communicate in pretty clear terms - with the expectation that the person who hires us will, to some extent, play by our rules. Because that's what they brought us in for. That's the mindset. In some way, we are mercenaries. What remains is whether the people and amenities are nice. At my current gig, I'm fixing telecommunications software - highly concurrent stuff. Etching out another 20% of performance is actually important here. Today I've had an email about working for someone who wants to set up a new crypto currency and from someone who needs to port their badly engineered python code to awesome pretty shiny new Elixir code. They all know my rate and its certainly not cheap, but I'm going to reject most of them anyway. The average gig is 9 months but there won't be a week during which I don't have some kind of request in my inbox. And its all done remote. Most of my clients haven't even seen my face. Whether they've got product market fit is simply irrelevant. I pick the jobs that are intellectually challenging, because that's what I want to work on. Their business logic is irrelevant to me. Their stack is irrelevant to me. If their stack sucks, I'll tell them to switch technologies or I won't be available anyway. Sometimes I entertain the idea of working for some startup. Getting involved. But the reality is: 40 hour salary with a 60 hour expectation - no interesting work (we need to get this frontend thing fixed so heres your react native good luck not dying of boredom) - cramped office space; and I don't mean "crappy" office space, I mean cramped. Where you can't have a thought without someone being an idiot right next to you for no particular reason, etc. It just doesn't make any sense to be an employee in 2016.
znpy 10y ago
Two things are worse than ghosting: 1. A company ghosts and the comes back months after (when you already took another offer) and says: "wassup, you still down for that thing?" 2. A company ghosts and comes back a month and a half later saying "oh btw we hired a guy". Yeah thanks I figured it out.
- tjr 10y ago
  3. A company agrees to hire you and gives you a start date. The Friday before you're supposed to start, you send a quick email to confirm which of their several buildings you should show up at on Monday morning, and they reply, "Oops, we actually reorganized staff, and we no longer need you."
  - wott 10y ago
    Oh? I got the same. Well, almost, but the timing and weekdays match. It was "Er... sorry... the boss changed his mind... he went bonkers... that happens regularly, hem... he's... a lunatic. Sorry."
  - RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u 10y ago
    Assuming US, is this legal, even for an at-will state? Whether it's worth suing over, is a different matter...
    - user5994461 10y ago
      It's legal in all Europe I know about. There is a probation period, during which you can be fired in 24h without reason. Depending on the jurisdiction, The law might force to wait for the 1st day of employment to cancel the contract.
- mooreds 10y ago
  I agree with you about #1, but I think #2, while bad, isn't as bad as never responding at all. I mean, at least there's some kind of closure, belated though it may be. When I was hiring, I always tried to loop people in and say no or scoot them through the process as fast as possible. Better for the company, better for me, better for the candidate.
low_key 10y ago
After reading the article, I think it would be appropriate to mark it as "sponsored".
- kellysutton 10y ago
  Author here. Nope. I just genuinely enjoyed my experience with Triplebyte and Gusto enough to write about it.
lifeisstillgood 10y ago
This is close to what Inwant to build for my own personal CRM - something that just says "you last contacted person X 22 days ago". Somehow I can then overlay tagging for projects but it seems doable
- kellysutton 10y ago
  Author here. I actually built exactly this during some downtime, and you can sign up: https://personal.network https://personal.network
  - haldean 10y ago
    This is an awesome idea! I'd love to sign up but I feel uncomfortable giving all my email to a website with no privacy policy, any chance that's coming soon?
  - lifeisstillgood 10y ago
    Interesting - I am not signing up with Google but it looks similar to my thinking - grab gmail, LinkedIn etc and store centrally. I am planning on using the infrastructure for this as the base example for a book - so I am afraid this is going to become a duplicate project - but I hope it will be fun. Just need to get a few weeks free ...
FT_intern 10y ago
>They only source under-represented candidates via outbound recruiting efforts. Is this not a violation of the equal opportunity act?
- cyorir 10y ago
  As an applicant there isn't a whole lot you can do if you think a company is discriminatory in some way (either because you're a minority or because you aren't). As a transgender individual, I've learned to pre-screen the companies I apply to based on whether I think there's a risk the company will discriminate against me (either in the hiring process or after that). Location is the main factor I consider along these lines (no North Carolina employers for me).
- wayn3 10y ago
  Some people are more equal than others. Its just flipped directions. Deal with it. Be above this equality nonsense. People want to hire you or they do not. Nothing you can do about it.
  - ChemicalWarfare 10y ago
    +1 on the approach - I've been in situations where I wasted my time when later it became clear they were looking for an "under-represented" candidate. This is very visible in large companies where sometimes trying to move within the company you get blocked by the invisible HR quotas. Everyone knows who applied where and what kind of skills they have so it's very hard to hide, but still they won't admit this straight up. That said though - the very openness with which this institutionalized discrimination is taking place is more than a little annoying. Imagine if they went the other way around :)
LargeCompanies 10y ago
I assume this post is geared towards all those just starting their career? Once you have a few years of software dev experience or even less jobs just come to you (I love recruiters .. use them to get the best deal). If your smart with each new job you can give yourself a nice/big raise. Like 20 to 40k more with each new job especially govt. contracting gigs and at the big silly valley tech companies too.
welder 10y ago
Wish the author tried job search platforms, since I'm curious how they compare to old fashioned recruiting. Job platforms are those where the candidate is the customer.
31reasons 10y ago
I wish there was a One Day hiring process. From initial phone screen to offer all in one day. Wondering if interviews taking so many weeks is just a logistics failure.
- dudul 10y ago
  On the other hand, it means that, as a candidate, you need a full day off each time you start talking to a company. I'm happy to do a few phone calls here and there before taking half a day off to go on site.
cheriot 10y ago
With the similarities between job searches and dating, I wonder if a Tinder for Jobs can work. By lowering the barrier to entry it could get more of the passive not-really-looking-but-curious workers into the mix.
- haldean 10y ago
  That's kind of what Angel List is. I found my current contract through them and they were fantastic.
guessmyname 10y ago
> My job search lasted a total of 35 days [...] > I communicated with 23 different companies [...] > to receive 4 offers to make a single choice > I was rejected 9 times [...] I liked the article but with today's hiring procedures I can tell you that these numbers are baby steps. I have spent so much time during the last two months doing technical and non-technical interviews that if I were to write an article like that it would take me days to complete it. To be fair, it gets harder when you are a foreigner trying to apply for a position in a company who wants your skills but that expects you to be 2x smarter to justify the immigration process. I visit /r/cscareerquestions from time to time and it is sad to read the stories of recent graduates struggling to find their first job or even an internship. If that happens to American citizen with an university degree and fresh knowledge about algorithms and data structures, what can we (non-Americans with rusty algorithmic skills) expect? I would be happy to work remotely if it wasn't because many banks limit the transactions that come from foreign companies or simply don't let you create an account because you are from a risky country.
- cyorir 10y ago
  I'm American, I've been to a decent US university (Northwestern), and trying to get my first job has been an awful experience. I hear "there is so much demand for CS right now," but it honestly seems like employers only want people with professional experience instead of entry-level candidates like me.
pmiller2 10y ago
I wonder how much of the numbers reflect that the author seems to be a man with a typically female name (Kelly)?

162 points by Harj 10y ago

Harj 10y ago

This is the first time I've seen a data visualization of the job search process for a software engineer and it's amazing to see the variability in responsiveness between companies. This is actually the most surprising thing I've seen since we started Triplebyte. Originally I'd assumed that every company complaining about how difficult it is to hire engineers, would be moving every candidate through their process as quickly as possible. In practice we learnt to stop working with companies who were too dysfunctional to get back to candidates promptly - even if it's just to let them know they needed a few more days to make a decision. We'll also often see dysfunctional companies switch to the extreme opposite end of the responsiveness spectrum once they've made an offer and start pushing candidates to make a decision immediately. Better to have been responsiveness throughout the process. I suspect companies still underestimate how much that makes a candidate more positively inclined towards them once they're at the decision making stage.

DanFeldman 10y ago
What are reasonable time frames for a company then? What should we aim for with: 1) Phone Screens 2) Interview responses (moving to next interview?) 3) Final decisions 4) Negotiation/confirmations of receiving a response to an offer
- Harj 10y ago
  They key thing is to minimize the amount of time a candidate is waiting back to hear from you on the next step. We see a strong correlation between the companies who have the highest closing rates on candidates (70% or more) and how responsive they are in every interaction. The best companies will respond to a candidate on next steps within 24 hours at every step of the process.
  - komali2 10y ago
    The best thing my boss way back when I was a recruiter told me - "Updating someone that there's no update yet is a hell of a lot better than not updating them because there's no update yet." In other words, a simple "the team is still discussing your interview but haven't made a decision yet" email can make all the difference in the world. That being said, and I'm swaying off topic here, candidates should never pause or slow down their job search, no matter how far along they are with a company. A rejection can come in a million forms for a million reasons, and how much would it suck to be back at square one across the board if it happens?
  - jdmichal 10y ago
    I suspect this is highly related to the ghosting mentioned in the article and by pjlegato in a top-level comment [0]. This is so much the norm at this point, that no response is typically seen as an implicit rejection and the candidate mentally moves on. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12764521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12764521
    - countingteeth 10y ago
      Agreed; I've futilely tried to mentor a recent grad who is applying to jobs he has no qualification for and then sitting around waiting for them to follow up.
- wayn3 10y ago
  My opinion: If you do a phone screen with someone in a more or less 1on1 kind of setting and they can't tell you whether you passed that stage within an hour, their organization must be dysfunctional (they have the job of conducting the interview but not the authority to pass/fail you?) and, therefore, absolutely not worth working for. The only lengthy part of the "interviewing" should be the negotiation, and by that point you are actually already kind of hired. Unless you blow it. Things will be longer the bigger the company is because they have to involve legal and all this stupidity, but early stage YC companies don't get the benefit of the doubt here. There's this hubris of cultural fit, which is code for "is this guy conformist enough that we can give him an arms length of desk space next to another 50 developers without him flipping?". Its true, cultural fit is super important. But that's at least in part due to the insanity that is software engineer working conditions. Give your people actual offices to perform actual work in and all your culture issues will vanish.
  - jldugger 10y ago
    > If you do a phone screen with someone in a more or less 1on1 kind of setting and they can't tell you whether you passed that stage within an hour, their organization must be dysfunctional (they have the job of conducting the interview but not the authority to pass/fail you?) and, therefore, absolutely not worth working for. The university I work for has a fairly standardized process for full time hires. We schedule and sit in on all phone screens, individually evaluate candidates, and then promote some of them on to the next step. Sometimes we're in a position where more people "pass" the phone screen than we would want to bring in for onsites. There's an anxiety in immediately failing people we don't bring in, in case the batch we bring onsite does poorly.
    - wayn3 10y ago
      So you either tell them that they're on the waiting list or you end up in the dysfunctional basket.
  - davidgerard 10y ago
    "cultural fit" is in practice a code word for "illegal discrimination".
- kafkaesq 10y ago
  The "ghosting" is just something you have to get used to as a candidate? Though the ideal upper bound seems to be about 3 weeks net turnaround (for steps 1-4, altogether) for smaller companies (perhaps longer for monster-sized companies), nearly any time can be "reasonable"... as long as you get back to people by the time you say you will, more or less, at each stage in the process. It's the "by the time you say you will" part that these companies seem to be having inordinate difficulty holding up to. And what people on the receiving end tend to find to be quite grating to be on the receiving end of, over and over and over again.
- user5994461 10y ago
  What looks like a good, normal, expected pace to me: Day 0 - Candidate apply This week - Phone call Next week - On site interviews Next next week - Offer letter ready to sign Of course, we have to be in touch right away after each step to arrange the details for the next step. That means we're in touch within 24-48 hours after each step.
komali2 10y ago
It'd be fun to build a tool that does this. I still have ~170 companies I applied to more than two months ago that I haven't heard back from yet. Funnier still is that in the end, the 3 offers I was fortunate enough to receive in the same timeline all had at most a timeline of 2 weeks from initial communication/application to offer. Rejections came either within a half second (auto somehow) to two weeks.
- pmiller2 10y ago
  170 companies and 3 offers? Why so many applications and so few offers? Were they just ignoring you?
  - cyorir 10y ago
    My guess is that a number of the applications were done via job boards rather than at each company. In my experience as someone still looking for a first job, job board applications seem to have incredibly low yields.
  - komali2 10y ago
    Because I chose an offer within a month. So approximately half of those were sent within 2-3 weeks before I accepted an offer, and of that half I had to turn down a good deal of follow-ups. Also, bootcamp-grad. I chose a shotgun approach. It worked. EDIT: to clarify, I haven't heard back from 170. I applied to ~300.
- devonkim 10y ago
  I think we could use close.io as a job seeker's tool instead of a CRM and it could be interesting to use it from the other side of the intended parties.
- cheriot 10y ago
  170 companies?! At what point does a resume become spam?
  - komali2 10y ago
viraptor 10y ago
I've done interviews with a number of companies lately and yes, the experience is just all over the place. The most annoying are the companies which don't do what they advertise - like mentioning on their site they will give you feedback if you ask for it and then never responding to the question. Just don't offer it and it's going to be fine. Surprisingly though, almost every recruitment company did send a proper rejection email. Internal HR - not so much. On the other hand internal recruitment is much simpler to prepare for. Recruiters often call back mentioning only their company and I have no idea which of the last 10 applications they happened to receive and what the position was about.

dhd415 10y ago

Having gone through this process recently, there's a lot of truth in this post. I experienced more companies "ghosting" during the process than slow turnaround times, but it is remarkable how short-sighted companies are during the recruiting phase. It's as if common courtesy has gone completely out the window in tech recruiting. Basic things like not missing phone interviews at times that have been previously scheduled or informing candidates politely that you've decided to move forward with other candidates can't even be taken for granted anymore. Candidates' initial experience with a company is typically through the recruiting organization and negative impressions during the recruiting phase are often applied to the company as a whole. I could see it being a competitive advantage to be known for having a good recruiting process even if it is very selective. For example, I have a very positive impression of DigitalOcean despite not receiving an offer because of the professional and courteous way they handled their interview process.

deleted 10y ago
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ryandrake 10y ago
The "ghosting" is just something you have to get used to as a candidate. Most companies do it. It's likely there are far, far more candidates than jobs, and companies simply can't get back to each and every person. Also, a lot of times, the company can't make a clear yes/no decision and will stall and delay on a borderline candidate in order to try to luck into a better one.
- busterarm 10y ago
  Something that I'm seeing more and more these days are companies that are actually not trying to fill the positions they are posting. I've seen companies fully-contained within 4-person WeWork spaces showing pictures of their non-existant 20+ person team and listing as many or more open positions that don't exist. I've seen companies that list positions that aren't actively looking to hire but want to keep the funnel open in case that 'special snowflake' comes along. I don't know if it's 'wishful thinking' or something else, but it's fairly poisonous.

jacalata 10y ago

Interesting to see that they had one offer that they sat on for 30+ days - seems like a long time for the company to wait?

busterarm 10y ago
That was my immediate takeaway as well. What company was okay with this?
- ryandrake 10y ago
  I remember a company contacting me about 2 months after the phone screen asking me to come in for a first round of on-site interviews. I had already accepted a different job and moved across the country to start with them by that point.
  - busterarm 10y ago
    Don't you hate that? That happens at least twice in every job search phase I make.

pjlegato 10y ago

Tip to shiny new CEOs: Ghosting a job candidate is not only grossly unprofessional, it's extremely rude at a personal level. The candidate went to all the trouble of engaging with you; you owe them (at the very least) a timely and professional rejection email if you don't want to proceed. Yes, a rejection letter, because that's what you're doing -- rejecting them. Ghosting is still a rejection; it's just a rude rejection. There is no way to candy coat that, and you shouldn't try. Grow a spine, and write that rejection letter in the kindest way you can.

rhizome 10y ago
LinkedIn and Apple both ghosted me, it's not just new CEOs.
- busterarm 10y ago
  With Apple at least it depends on the group. I've been ghosted by one department and actively sought after with months-later followups from others. I can imagine it's likely the manager had someone in mind for the position but the company's policy required a posting. And there's always H1-B requirements to fill...
- pjlegato 10y ago
  Maybe I should've written, "shiny new managers".
  - kafkaesq 10y ago
    Ah, but it's the CEO (or at least someone at the director of engineering level) who sets the tone, and sets priorities and guidelines for their underlings to follow. So when you get ghosted, it's not the engineers who fizz-buzzed you who "did" it... and it's certainly not the office manager (and/or "talent specialist") who's doing it. As with everything else a company does, "message"-wise -- it's coming from the top.
- cyorir 10y ago
  I was ghosted by Google.

coldcode 10y ago

A related problem also hard to solve, how to find a job as a software engineer for a pleasant highly functional sane company. Let me know if there is a solution.

skookum 10y ago
Keep in touch with your pleasant highly functional sane ex-coworkers and use your network to vet companies/orgs/teams.
- mooreds 10y ago
  No easy answers, I agree. Jobs are the opposite of a commodity(as are people) and so the solution to finding the right match will use technology, but can't be replaced by technology.
logfromblammo 10y ago
I have found the smaller subproblem of just finding a pleasant, highly functional, sane company to be almost intractable on its own.
rdoherty 10y ago
I've been thinking about this for a while. I think it would involve asking a highly focused set of questions to at least 3 different employees and see how much they correlate. I don't know what those questions are though :) One question that I think correlates low with a highly functional sane tech company is "Does your CEO still write code for the product?" if the answer is yes and the company is larger than 20 people, odds are high that the company/CEO is not highly functional.
crpatino 10y ago
Try to start one on your own? Most likely this will be anything but pleasant, but if you are very careful about not accepting VC financing you may try to optimize for sanity... highly functional will come mostly as you learn from your own errors.
bonniemuffin 10y ago

pmiller2 10y ago

35 days, 23 companies, 4 offers. Is this typical? This, for me, was the key section of the article: > I had the luxury of having a few weeks free due to gaps in my consulting schedule. This time block is something that is a rare case in a job search. Performing such an exhaustive search must be nearly impossible if you also have a full-time job. (Emphasis added.) The amount of time off required to do this is insane. Is this how most people do it? Also, I agree that speed of communication is key. I want to be on site within 2-3 weeks if everything is going well. Take much longer than that, and I'll probably either have a job by the time you get back to me, or be too busy talking to people who actually want to talk to me.

vdnkh 10y ago
As a younger engineer (about 2 years of experience), trying to break from my post-college job into a "real" software job in NYC, it took me almost a year. You're not worth a lot until you're proven with a big name on the resume.
- pmiller2 10y ago
  "proven" and "big name on the resume" are two entirely different things. I wish more hiring entities knew this.
d4mi3n 10y ago
I think it really depends a lot on the companies you interact with. If you're unlucky and hit a lot of companies with slow or unresponsive interview processes I can easily see 6 to 8 weeks of back and fourth. The last time I went job hunting, I applied to about 12 places over the course of about 4 weeks. Of those 12: 4 offers, 3 rejections, 5 ghosts (basically anyone who doesn't get back to me within a week of an on-site). I've been working in software for 8 years in SF and I'm told those numbers are pretty good, but I think there's a lot of variability in hit/miss rates for people depending on luck, professional network quality, and how people market themselves.
- pmiller2 10y ago

um304 10y ago

Tried to sign up at TripleByte, got this: "Unfortunately we're only able to work with people with legal status permitting employment in the US. We hope in the future to help set up visa sponsorships." I appreciate that they cleared expectations upfront. I tried to sign up on Hired.com once, after going through effort of filling up their lengthy registration forms, which took me several hours, they conveniently told me that their services are not available in my country.

Harj 10y ago
We wish we could work with you :( In the meantime, we're working on making companies more aware of the H1-B transfer options (http://blog.triplebyte.com/gaming-the-h-1b-system-for-good http://blog.triplebyte.com/gaming-the-h-1b-system-for-good) and the recent OPT visa STEM extenstion (https://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/students-and-exchange-visitors/students-and-employment/stem-opt https://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/students-and-exc...).
- mattferderer 10y ago
  I would love to hear a timeline on remote opportunities if you have one.
  - wayn3 10y ago
    Triplebyte only works with YC companies and YC tells its startups in pretty clear terms that remote employees don't work for early stage startups so go figure.
    - triplebit 10y ago
      > Unfortunately we’re only working with programmers who can be based in the SF Bay Area. Yeah, there's that too. :-(
      - donretag 10y ago
        Seriously? There is no mention of either only YC companies or the Bay Area in their FAQ or on their website. Tacky.

donretag 10y ago

Is there more to the Google doc or has it been edited? Never heard of Triplebyte, so I looked into them. According to their candidate FAQ: "We save you time. ... Most candidates save hours that otherwise would be spent on phone screens. We turn an O(n) process into an O(1) process." The phone screen is where I can screen the companies, so this system will not work in my case. I reject more companies before getting to any actual interviewing when it is clear our shared goals are not being met. Most companies just want a warm body, whereas I am very specific in what I want.

Harj 10y ago
We save you the time of repeated technical phone screens across companies. Companies will do a pitch call with our candidates as the first step, where they pitch themselves to you and after that you decide if you'd like to move forward with them.
- donretag 10y ago
  Perhaps the pitch call is done differently via Triplebyte, but for the most part, the initial non-interviewing phone call is with someone in HR or with little technical knowledge. Most questions are answered with "oh, let me find out and get back to you". I want the phone screen.
dunkelheit 10y ago
> The phone screen is where I can screen the companies Fair enough but remember that you may be screening not the company itself but some frazzled engineer who curses herself for agreeing to perform 4-th phone screen a week instead of insisting on writing code. Your impression of the company may be misleading.
- cheriot 10y ago
  That's also exactly who will tell me how the company works without the sugarcoating HR and managers put on it. I don't want sugarplums and rainbows, I want an effective engineering organization :)

sambrand 10y ago

I find it interesting that the author doesn't mention anything about the product as priority during his job search. No mention of tech stack, product-market-fit, growth potential, or being convinced that a product is filling a genuine need. These are the things that I would prioritize when considering a job search. The author mentions as a priority responsiveness of the recruiter. Also: - How nice are the employees? - What’s the vibe in the office? Noisy? Quiet? - Do employees look happy? - How’s the food? - and so on and so on… Is this typical?

wayn3 10y ago
The author was a consultant before. Its usually our job to deal with the circumstances and to actively change them. We are not "good employees". We call bullshit and we get to call bullshit. We are not hired to help our bosses achieve things, we are hired to save their asses. We are hired because someone goofed up. We are hired because something went wrong and its our job to patch it up. We come in with the expectation of getting things back on track. We are meant to blend in with the "regular employees" but we never will, because we are free agents. We can walk away from this job and we WILL walk away if what had been promised does not happen. We will walk away unscathed because we have other gigs in the pipeline anyway. We do not conform. We come in with a plan, which we communicate in pretty clear terms - with the expectation that the person who hires us will, to some extent, play by our rules. Because that's what they brought us in for. That's the mindset. In some way, we are mercenaries. What remains is whether the people and amenities are nice. At my current gig, I'm fixing telecommunications software - highly concurrent stuff. Etching out another 20% of performance is actually important here. Today I've had an email about working for someone who wants to set up a new crypto currency and from someone who needs to port their badly engineered python code to awesome pretty shiny new Elixir code. They all know my rate and its certainly not cheap, but I'm going to reject most of them anyway. The average gig is 9 months but there won't be a week during which I don't have some kind of request in my inbox. And its all done remote. Most of my clients haven't even seen my face. Whether they've got product market fit is simply irrelevant. I pick the jobs that are intellectually challenging, because that's what I want to work on. Their business logic is irrelevant to me. Their stack is irrelevant to me. If their stack sucks, I'll tell them to switch technologies or I won't be available anyway. Sometimes I entertain the idea of working for some startup. Getting involved. But the reality is: 40 hour salary with a 60 hour expectation - no interesting work (we need to get this frontend thing fixed so heres your react native good luck not dying of boredom) - cramped office space; and I don't mean "crappy" office space, I mean cramped. Where you can't have a thought without someone being an idiot right next to you for no particular reason, etc. It just doesn't make any sense to be an employee in 2016.

znpy 10y ago

Two things are worse than ghosting: 1. A company ghosts and the comes back months after (when you already took another offer) and says: "wassup, you still down for that thing?" 2. A company ghosts and comes back a month and a half later saying "oh btw we hired a guy". Yeah thanks I figured it out.

tjr 10y ago
3. A company agrees to hire you and gives you a start date. The Friday before you're supposed to start, you send a quick email to confirm which of their several buildings you should show up at on Monday morning, and they reply, "Oops, we actually reorganized staff, and we no longer need you."
- wott 10y ago
  Oh? I got the same. Well, almost, but the timing and weekdays match. It was "Er... sorry... the boss changed his mind... he went bonkers... that happens regularly, hem... he's... a lunatic. Sorry."
- RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u 10y ago
  Assuming US, is this legal, even for an at-will state? Whether it's worth suing over, is a different matter...
  - user5994461 10y ago
    It's legal in all Europe I know about. There is a probation period, during which you can be fired in 24h without reason. Depending on the jurisdiction, The law might force to wait for the 1st day of employment to cancel the contract.
mooreds 10y ago
I agree with you about #1, but I think #2, while bad, isn't as bad as never responding at all. I mean, at least there's some kind of closure, belated though it may be. When I was hiring, I always tried to loop people in and say no or scoot them through the process as fast as possible. Better for the company, better for me, better for the candidate.

low_key 10y ago

After reading the article, I think it would be appropriate to mark it as "sponsored".

kellysutton 10y ago
Author here. Nope. I just genuinely enjoyed my experience with Triplebyte and Gusto enough to write about it.

lifeisstillgood 10y ago

This is close to what Inwant to build for my own personal CRM - something that just says "you last contacted person X 22 days ago". Somehow I can then overlay tagging for projects but it seems doable

kellysutton 10y ago
Author here. I actually built exactly this during some downtime, and you can sign up: https://personal.network https://personal.network
- haldean 10y ago
  This is an awesome idea! I'd love to sign up but I feel uncomfortable giving all my email to a website with no privacy policy, any chance that's coming soon?
- lifeisstillgood 10y ago
  Interesting - I am not signing up with Google but it looks similar to my thinking - grab gmail, LinkedIn etc and store centrally. I am planning on using the infrastructure for this as the base example for a book - so I am afraid this is going to become a duplicate project - but I hope it will be fun. Just need to get a few weeks free ...

FT_intern 10y ago

>They only source under-represented candidates via outbound recruiting efforts. Is this not a violation of the equal opportunity act?

cyorir 10y ago
As an applicant there isn't a whole lot you can do if you think a company is discriminatory in some way (either because you're a minority or because you aren't). As a transgender individual, I've learned to pre-screen the companies I apply to based on whether I think there's a risk the company will discriminate against me (either in the hiring process or after that). Location is the main factor I consider along these lines (no North Carolina employers for me).
wayn3 10y ago
Some people are more equal than others. Its just flipped directions. Deal with it. Be above this equality nonsense. People want to hire you or they do not. Nothing you can do about it.
- ChemicalWarfare 10y ago
  +1 on the approach - I've been in situations where I wasted my time when later it became clear they were looking for an "under-represented" candidate. This is very visible in large companies where sometimes trying to move within the company you get blocked by the invisible HR quotas. Everyone knows who applied where and what kind of skills they have so it's very hard to hide, but still they won't admit this straight up. That said though - the very openness with which this institutionalized discrimination is taking place is more than a little annoying. Imagine if they went the other way around :)

LargeCompanies 10y ago

I assume this post is geared towards all those just starting their career? Once you have a few years of software dev experience or even less jobs just come to you (I love recruiters .. use them to get the best deal). If your smart with each new job you can give yourself a nice/big raise. Like 20 to 40k more with each new job especially govt. contracting gigs and at the big silly valley tech companies too.

welder 10y ago

Wish the author tried job search platforms, since I'm curious how they compare to old fashioned recruiting. Job platforms are those where the candidate is the customer.

31reasons 10y ago

I wish there was a One Day hiring process. From initial phone screen to offer all in one day. Wondering if interviews taking so many weeks is just a logistics failure.

dudul 10y ago
On the other hand, it means that, as a candidate, you need a full day off each time you start talking to a company. I'm happy to do a few phone calls here and there before taking half a day off to go on site.

cheriot 10y ago

With the similarities between job searches and dating, I wonder if a Tinder for Jobs can work. By lowering the barrier to entry it could get more of the passive not-really-looking-but-curious workers into the mix.

haldean 10y ago
That's kind of what Angel List is. I found my current contract through them and they were fantastic.

guessmyname 10y ago

> My job search lasted a total of 35 days [...] > I communicated with 23 different companies [...] > to receive 4 offers to make a single choice > I was rejected 9 times [...] I liked the article but with today's hiring procedures I can tell you that these numbers are baby steps. I have spent so much time during the last two months doing technical and non-technical interviews that if I were to write an article like that it would take me days to complete it. To be fair, it gets harder when you are a foreigner trying to apply for a position in a company who wants your skills but that expects you to be 2x smarter to justify the immigration process. I visit /r/cscareerquestions from time to time and it is sad to read the stories of recent graduates struggling to find their first job or even an internship. If that happens to American citizen with an university degree and fresh knowledge about algorithms and data structures, what can we (non-Americans with rusty algorithmic skills) expect? I would be happy to work remotely if it wasn't because many banks limit the transactions that come from foreign companies or simply don't let you create an account because you are from a risky country.

cyorir 10y ago
I'm American, I've been to a decent US university (Northwestern), and trying to get my first job has been an awful experience. I hear "there is so much demand for CS right now," but it honestly seems like employers only want people with professional experience instead of entry-level candidates like me.

pmiller2 10y ago

I wonder how much of the numbers reflect that the author seems to be a man with a typically female name (Kelly)?