7 ms·

I literally can’t relate to this on any level. I’m an HM at a company that pays on the order of a FANG and at best matches one of these credentialist barriers a

I literally can’t relate to this on any level. I’m an HM at a company that pays on the order of a FANG and at best matches one of these credentialist barriers and yet we can’t come close to hiring targets on devs. I don’t get how people can see the plethora of individuals under 10yrs experience in SWE and other tech roles in SV/NYC/SEA with incomes of $250-600k/yr and think this happens without a “shortage” of talent. Shortage in quotes because it’s hard to define in context of supply/demand but it’s clearly the case that devs have a lot of bargaining power.

Aeolun 5y ago
As a perfectly competent dev having immense difficulty getting anyone to consider me for any position, I cannot see this as anything other than false. I have a job now (and by all accounts my employer is really happy with me), but the interview gauntlet I had to run to get here was absolutely ridiculous.
- creddit 5y ago
  You're in Japan, yeah? Seems like that might be a barrier if you're applying for SV jobs.
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    Not applying to those eh. Then again, remote positions suffer from exactly the same symptoms.
    - creddit 5y ago
      Then it seems like your replying to me with your experience not matching isn’t very reasonable, eh? I’m being very explicit about the US SV/NYC/SEA experience.
ARandomerDude 5y ago
I think the author is talking about pretty large, well-known companies (e.g., FAANG -- see his first point). Many people applying to these well-known companies are auto-filtered by resume software, which artificially decreases supply. Small and mid-size companies have a different problem: people haven't heard of them and don't know to apply. My company is in this situation. We have a good culture, I think, and pay very well but people don't know about us or don't think of us as a "tech" company, even though we do quite a bit of innovative software development.
- dntrkv 5y ago
  Except none of his points apply to FAANG companies either. >A bad interview is when you ask them the definition of some specific thing in some specific framework like “Tell me what a closure in javascript is.” then treat them like they’re stupid if they don’t know. FAANG companies do not interview like this. I've done interviews with most of them twice in the last 5 years and all questions are the typical algo stuff. Then his whole rant about credentials... I am a self-taught dev with no degree, none of my interviewers ever cared about that. Every interview is about whether or not you can solve the algo question.
- tracer4201 5y ago
  Out of curiosity what do you define as being paid well? What country and region or state and what’s the compensation? I had a recruiter try to lure me for a $130K “senior” role on the east coast in the US. I earn several times that.
  - JMTQp8lwXL 5y ago
    I was recently contacted about a "principal" role at $125k. I did not proceed.
  - JAlexoid 5y ago
    NYC senior engineers typically earn $150k-$250k in salary. Unless you want to be a lifeless drone for a HFT fund. But then living expenses aren't that high in NYC, compared to Bay area.
speeder 5y ago
If you accept non-US people, tell me what company you work for so I can send my resume. Because all the issues the guy pointed out I am on receiving end of them right now. And although I've been in leadership roles before and started programming when I was 6 years old (my dad taught me), I started lately to see if sending my applications to junior developer roles will get me any replies (people don't even tell me they got my application, except the occasional robot).
- creddit 5y ago
  I'm pseudonymous for a reason but here's a list of companies, none of which I am employed at, that have similar pay and issues with staffing: Uber, Doordash, Asana, AirBnB, Pinterest, LinkedIn and literally so many more. Especially if you are willing to accept mature but not yet liquid equity and then there's Stripe, Airtable, Robinhood and so many more. Post your resume. Tried to go to your personal website but it wouldn't load.
  - speeder 5y ago
    I updated recently my LinkedIn profile, seeing if changing the wording of stuff helps. https://www.linkedin.com/in/gamedesigner https://www.linkedin.com/in/gamedesigner
    - JAlexoid 5y ago
      Your profile lacks clear coding experience. And your highlighted recent experience as a game designer would just make me disqualify from any engineering role.
      - pwdisswordfish8 5y ago
        You're all over this thread throwing out quick comments, some of them pretty dubious. Can you stop?
      - trainsplanes 5y ago
        Discarding applicants for game dev experience and claiming there's a dev shortage is completely bizarre. It's like starting a restaurant and banning chefs with baking experience.
zug_zug 5y ago
If your place pays FANG ish and allows full remote (as Facebook does) feel free to hit me up. Preparing final round at facebook but it's a crapshoot (philosophecles0@gmail.com)
dntrkv 5y ago
Me neither. Every single point the author makes does not match my (or any other dev I know) experience. The only explanation is the guy is in a really bad tech market, in which case, move.
SkyPuncher 5y ago
I'm also a HM. It's unbelievable to see the number of people who are "Senior" after 12 months of actual experience. Some of them are actually legitimately senior, despite short tenures on paper - but many are barely entry level qualified.
- opportune 5y ago
  "Senior" is just a title. It doesn't mean anything unless it's at a big company with known standards.
  - JAlexoid 5y ago
    Em... I just interviewed someone with a "senior" in their title from a big company, that was more like a junior.
    - opportune 5y ago
      Just because it means something, doesn't mean it means much :)
    - Cheecheepoopoo 5y ago
      You do realize adding a title is as simple as typing a few words right.
    - markmark 5y ago
      We had a junior who was _barely_ a net positive contributor leave us to be a senior at LinkedIn. He knew his algorithms though.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  I know a company where "Senior" is anyone non intern.
spankyspangler 5y ago
Paying that much for a tech worker doesn't mean there is a shortage of them, it means FANG companies are gambling on "rockstars" to try get an edge. Flood the market with very good but not exceptional workers, and the top salaries won't change much. Flood the market with exceptional workers and it probably won't change much either, FANG will just be even more selective with their top salaries. Top devs have a lot of bargaining power not because companies need some "X amount" of development work done but can't find anybody who will do it. They have bargaining power because those companies are competing against one another and they're hoping the next billion dollar idea will come from one of _their_ employees first. If you aren't playing this kind of roulette, I don't understand why you would try to compete in the same job markets. You can get developers for far less. And yes that may mean moving elsewhere, SV is obviously heavily selecting for such developers (people who can get those salaries will tend to move there, those who can't will tend to be pushed out). If you are playing in that space but you just can't afford to pay for its inputs then it doesn't automatically mean those inputs are in a state of shortage, sometimes it just means your business does not create enough value to to pay for said inputs. This is the market's way of telling you to fold. Capitalism is a harsh mistress.
- mavelikara 5y ago
  > If you aren't playing this kind of roulette, I don't understand why you would try to compete in the same job markets. Ever since Blockbuster failed dramatically, large brick and mortar company execs are worried that SV will take their market. And, for good reasons too, I'd say. Software is eating the world etc.
pwdisswordfish8 5y ago
> I’m an HM > I literally can’t relate to this on any level Well that would be the expected outcome, no? The author claims a problem exists in hiring and sets out articulate what that problem is. If the problem exists, then as a hiring manager, it's a good bet that you are, at some level, involved with that problem. For your stance/perspective to lie anywhere from a harsh opposing view to merely unable to unable to endorse the author's perspective ("what is water?") would be unsurprising. (Note that this is true just as a matter of logical consistency and is not particular in any way to hiring itself; try replacing "hiring" here with "skub" and it's still true.)
austincheney 5y ago
Because the shortage is self induced. First of all you mentioned only super expensive locations. I would need 600k in SV to equal the mediocrity I enjoy in Texas. So while that sounds like an insanely huge number it doesn’t really say anything. Second, at this point in my career developers at large companies aren’t expected to write code. Save that for startups. Instead developers are expected to debug things and string tools together like a homemade necklace. If you are an established company and want somebody to write original code you have a lot extra work to do to ensure a good cultural fit.
ditonal 5y ago
I've mentioned this on HN before, but I have 10+ years experience, a BS in CS from a top 10 school, worked as SWE at Google for over 3 years, I've done 100+ leetcode questions, studied grokking the systems interview/designing data intensive applications, I live in the Bay Area, and I've _still_ failed 90% of my onsites last few years at the top tech companies (Stripe, Lyft, AirBnB, Square, Dropbox, etc). Reasons for failure vary, you don't get much feedback but when I've gotten it it's been distributed across coding/systems/behavioral. I've also been rejected at resume round by companies like Instacart and Coinbase. The interview bar has gotten insanely high it seems. And I left Google way back without anything lined up assuming in this job market I could waltz into a good job with some modest prep but that has not been the case. I objectively have top credentials, and I find tech interviewing an absolute nightmare. The standards have gone through the roof and one slip up and you get dinged. And the system is way more arbitrary and subjective than anyone admits. Now, this isn't a woe-is-me story becasue to your point, there's a lot of companies paying top dollar and I have a decently paid job. Furthermore, I'm not failing interviews at random startups but as senior engineer at top companies that would probably offer $400k if they made an offer. They have the right to be extremely picky and subjective, but let's at least admit that they _are_ extremely picky and subjective. The "I'm a HM and can't hit dev targets", reeks of ignorance as to your own process. I wonder if you do things like tell your interviewers "a false negative is better than a false positive" ? Or let one interviewer use some arbitrary criteria to dock a candidate and then pass on them because of one bad score? Because you probably do lack perspective on how many good devs your company is rejecting if you're only sitting on the HM chair and not seeing what it feels like to go through these rounds as an IC SWE.
- adventured 5y ago
  > The interview bar has gotten insanely high it seems. Software developers are starting to commonly earn doctor-like salaries. Doctors typically burn ~12-15 years between school and residency before they start getting paid serious salaries. A top 20%-30% software developer can be earning $150k in their mid to late 20s, outside of the Bay Area. It's no surprise that the hurdles are going up for such high compensation. Software devs in the US as a mass employment field (1.5m people) are the best paid large group of people in world history. Combined wages (not total compensation, that's far higher) for the 1.5 million software devs in the US is in the neighborhood of $215 to $250 billion per year. It's doubtful anything like this concentration of huge globally important industry dominance + very high pay will ever been seen again anywhere else in the world, it's an outlier economically to put it mildly. Enjoy it while it lasts.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
_delirium 5y ago
> devs have a lot of bargaining power Employees don't seem to have enough bargaining power to meaningfully control working conditions, though. Maybe these are worth a ton of money to the company, or such desires are an outlier. But here is my experience: I'm a professor of computer science, and frequently get recruiters trying to get me to jump ship to industry. I'm open to it in principle. I'm reasonably happy in my job, but there are certainly things I don't like about academia, and the pay is not industry-level. But it's generally a rewarding job, and has various perks, like private offices and considerable control over your own schedule. A question I ask recruiters: I have a private office... could you match that? So far, the answer has always been no. They can double or occasionally triple my salary, but they can't offer me a private office. I am not sure what to make of that. They are willing to offer me $100k+ over my current salary, but are absolutely unable to offer me an office with a door.
- chris11 5y ago
  > They can double or occasionally triple my salary, but they can't offer me a private office. You might have more luck if instead you asked about working remotely full-time. It's not the same if you want to go into an office, but companies are seriously thinking about their post-covid office plans.
  - _delirium 5y ago
    True, that's an interesting possibility with the current trend towards remote work. With enough of a pay raise, I could solve the private office problem by just renting the office myself out-of-pocket...
- 0xB31B1B 5y ago
  The hiring managers don't have that power. Not sure if you have done an interview loop but I assume that as a tenure track/tenured professor you're going to be L6+ individual contributor in a research group. In that interview loop you're probably going to have a decent amount of face time with a director level or VP. IMO if you're actually interested in making the jump the right play is to get the job, and then negotiate the office with the director/vp that you'd be reporting to, they will 99% of the time not let office access be something that stops them from hiring a staff+ engineer. Feel free to ping me directly if you want to ask more questions.
mattkrause 5y ago
Is there a university nearby? Grad students and postdocs seem like a fairly untapped source for tech recruiting, especially outside of the CS department. Physics, neuroscience, econ, biology, and many other fields now involve lots of programming and data analysis, sometimes under demanding conditions (real-time or huge, noisy data sets). Many of the people are smart and highly-motivated, but making a tenth of the numbers you quoted (and with rubbish job security to boot). It should be like shooting fish in a barrel. And yet.... they don't seem to be on many company's radars. I'm the only one in my group who is ever contacted by recruiters, and it's an undergrad CS degree. Yes, you'll have to screen to figure who tweaks "the script that gives the numbers" and who's more like a developer. Recruiters might need to put in a little legwork to figure out how different kinds of researchers map onto open reqs. You might want to somehow prep non-traditional candidates for a developer interview, or figure out an on-boarding track. But you can afford a whole heck of a lot of that if a $250k/year job is sitting open.
- jackdawed 5y ago
  From talking with my PhD and MS friends, it's mainly about time. PhDs work around 40-60 hours a week. Full time MS students are juggling courses, research, and part time work, also around 40 hours a week. That usually leaves little time and energy to apply for jobs and practice interviewing. As a terminal MS student, most of the interviews and offers I've gotten were from professor recommendations to their industry colleagues. I researched computational linguistics and dynamical systems in my undergrad, and in grad school I researched HPC and distributed systems. I still interview poorly because I don't invest enough time practicing/applying compared to reading papers or doing grad student grunt work. On paper, having an MS can also be a negative signal.

Aeolun 5y ago

As a perfectly competent dev having immense difficulty getting anyone to consider me for any position, I cannot see this as anything other than false. I have a job now (and by all accounts my employer is really happy with me), but the interview gauntlet I had to run to get here was absolutely ridiculous.

creddit 5y ago
You're in Japan, yeah? Seems like that might be a barrier if you're applying for SV jobs.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  Not applying to those eh. Then again, remote positions suffer from exactly the same symptoms.
  - creddit 5y ago
    Then it seems like your replying to me with your experience not matching isn’t very reasonable, eh? I’m being very explicit about the US SV/NYC/SEA experience.

ARandomerDude 5y ago

I think the author is talking about pretty large, well-known companies (e.g., FAANG -- see his first point). Many people applying to these well-known companies are auto-filtered by resume software, which artificially decreases supply. Small and mid-size companies have a different problem: people haven't heard of them and don't know to apply. My company is in this situation. We have a good culture, I think, and pay very well but people don't know about us or don't think of us as a "tech" company, even though we do quite a bit of innovative software development.

dntrkv 5y ago
Except none of his points apply to FAANG companies either. >A bad interview is when you ask them the definition of some specific thing in some specific framework like “Tell me what a closure in javascript is.” then treat them like they’re stupid if they don’t know. FAANG companies do not interview like this. I've done interviews with most of them twice in the last 5 years and all questions are the typical algo stuff. Then his whole rant about credentials... I am a self-taught dev with no degree, none of my interviewers ever cared about that. Every interview is about whether or not you can solve the algo question.
tracer4201 5y ago
Out of curiosity what do you define as being paid well? What country and region or state and what’s the compensation? I had a recruiter try to lure me for a $130K “senior” role on the east coast in the US. I earn several times that.
- JMTQp8lwXL 5y ago
  I was recently contacted about a "principal" role at $125k. I did not proceed.
- JAlexoid 5y ago
  NYC senior engineers typically earn $150k-$250k in salary. Unless you want to be a lifeless drone for a HFT fund. But then living expenses aren't that high in NYC, compared to Bay area.

speeder 5y ago

If you accept non-US people, tell me what company you work for so I can send my resume. Because all the issues the guy pointed out I am on receiving end of them right now. And although I've been in leadership roles before and started programming when I was 6 years old (my dad taught me), I started lately to see if sending my applications to junior developer roles will get me any replies (people don't even tell me they got my application, except the occasional robot).

creddit 5y ago
I'm pseudonymous for a reason but here's a list of companies, none of which I am employed at, that have similar pay and issues with staffing: Uber, Doordash, Asana, AirBnB, Pinterest, LinkedIn and literally so many more. Especially if you are willing to accept mature but not yet liquid equity and then there's Stripe, Airtable, Robinhood and so many more. Post your resume. Tried to go to your personal website but it wouldn't load.
- speeder 5y ago
  I updated recently my LinkedIn profile, seeing if changing the wording of stuff helps. https://www.linkedin.com/in/gamedesigner https://www.linkedin.com/in/gamedesigner
  - JAlexoid 5y ago
    Your profile lacks clear coding experience. And your highlighted recent experience as a game designer would just make me disqualify from any engineering role.
    - pwdisswordfish8 5y ago
      You're all over this thread throwing out quick comments, some of them pretty dubious. Can you stop?
    - trainsplanes 5y ago
      Discarding applicants for game dev experience and claiming there's a dev shortage is completely bizarre. It's like starting a restaurant and banning chefs with baking experience.

zug_zug 5y ago

If your place pays FANG ish and allows full remote (as Facebook does) feel free to hit me up. Preparing final round at facebook but it's a crapshoot (philosophecles0@gmail.com)

dntrkv 5y ago

Me neither. Every single point the author makes does not match my (or any other dev I know) experience. The only explanation is the guy is in a really bad tech market, in which case, move.

SkyPuncher 5y ago

I'm also a HM. It's unbelievable to see the number of people who are "Senior" after 12 months of actual experience. Some of them are actually legitimately senior, despite short tenures on paper - but many are barely entry level qualified.

opportune 5y ago
"Senior" is just a title. It doesn't mean anything unless it's at a big company with known standards.
- JAlexoid 5y ago
  Em... I just interviewed someone with a "senior" in their title from a big company, that was more like a junior.
  - opportune 5y ago
    Just because it means something, doesn't mean it means much :)
  - Cheecheepoopoo 5y ago
    You do realize adding a title is as simple as typing a few words right.
  - markmark 5y ago
    We had a junior who was _barely_ a net positive contributor leave us to be a senior at LinkedIn. He knew his algorithms though.
MattGaiser 5y ago
I know a company where "Senior" is anyone non intern.

spankyspangler 5y ago

Paying that much for a tech worker doesn't mean there is a shortage of them, it means FANG companies are gambling on "rockstars" to try get an edge. Flood the market with very good but not exceptional workers, and the top salaries won't change much. Flood the market with exceptional workers and it probably won't change much either, FANG will just be even more selective with their top salaries. Top devs have a lot of bargaining power not because companies need some "X amount" of development work done but can't find anybody who will do it. They have bargaining power because those companies are competing against one another and they're hoping the next billion dollar idea will come from one of _their_ employees first. If you aren't playing this kind of roulette, I don't understand why you would try to compete in the same job markets. You can get developers for far less. And yes that may mean moving elsewhere, SV is obviously heavily selecting for such developers (people who can get those salaries will tend to move there, those who can't will tend to be pushed out). If you are playing in that space but you just can't afford to pay for its inputs then it doesn't automatically mean those inputs are in a state of shortage, sometimes it just means your business does not create enough value to to pay for said inputs. This is the market's way of telling you to fold. Capitalism is a harsh mistress.

mavelikara 5y ago
> If you aren't playing this kind of roulette, I don't understand why you would try to compete in the same job markets. Ever since Blockbuster failed dramatically, large brick and mortar company execs are worried that SV will take their market. And, for good reasons too, I'd say. Software is eating the world etc.

pwdisswordfish8 5y ago

> I’m an HM > I literally can’t relate to this on any level Well that would be the expected outcome, no? The author claims a problem exists in hiring and sets out articulate what that problem is. If the problem exists, then as a hiring manager, it's a good bet that you are, at some level, involved with that problem. For your stance/perspective to lie anywhere from a harsh opposing view to merely unable to unable to endorse the author's perspective ("what is water?") would be unsurprising. (Note that this is true just as a matter of logical consistency and is not particular in any way to hiring itself; try replacing "hiring" here with "skub" and it's still true.)

austincheney 5y ago

Because the shortage is self induced. First of all you mentioned only super expensive locations. I would need 600k in SV to equal the mediocrity I enjoy in Texas. So while that sounds like an insanely huge number it doesn’t really say anything. Second, at this point in my career developers at large companies aren’t expected to write code. Save that for startups. Instead developers are expected to debug things and string tools together like a homemade necklace. If you are an established company and want somebody to write original code you have a lot extra work to do to ensure a good cultural fit.

ditonal 5y ago

I've mentioned this on HN before, but I have 10+ years experience, a BS in CS from a top 10 school, worked as SWE at Google for over 3 years, I've done 100+ leetcode questions, studied grokking the systems interview/designing data intensive applications, I live in the Bay Area, and I've _still_ failed 90% of my onsites last few years at the top tech companies (Stripe, Lyft, AirBnB, Square, Dropbox, etc). Reasons for failure vary, you don't get much feedback but when I've gotten it it's been distributed across coding/systems/behavioral. I've also been rejected at resume round by companies like Instacart and Coinbase. The interview bar has gotten insanely high it seems. And I left Google way back without anything lined up assuming in this job market I could waltz into a good job with some modest prep but that has not been the case. I objectively have top credentials, and I find tech interviewing an absolute nightmare. The standards have gone through the roof and one slip up and you get dinged. And the system is way more arbitrary and subjective than anyone admits. Now, this isn't a woe-is-me story becasue to your point, there's a lot of companies paying top dollar and I have a decently paid job. Furthermore, I'm not failing interviews at random startups but as senior engineer at top companies that would probably offer $400k if they made an offer. They have the right to be extremely picky and subjective, but let's at least admit that they _are_ extremely picky and subjective. The "I'm a HM and can't hit dev targets", reeks of ignorance as to your own process. I wonder if you do things like tell your interviewers "a false negative is better than a false positive" ? Or let one interviewer use some arbitrary criteria to dock a candidate and then pass on them because of one bad score? Because you probably do lack perspective on how many good devs your company is rejecting if you're only sitting on the HM chair and not seeing what it feels like to go through these rounds as an IC SWE.

adventured 5y ago
> The interview bar has gotten insanely high it seems. Software developers are starting to commonly earn doctor-like salaries. Doctors typically burn ~12-15 years between school and residency before they start getting paid serious salaries. A top 20%-30% software developer can be earning $150k in their mid to late 20s, outside of the Bay Area. It's no surprise that the hurdles are going up for such high compensation. Software devs in the US as a mass employment field (1.5m people) are the best paid large group of people in world history. Combined wages (not total compensation, that's far higher) for the 1.5 million software devs in the US is in the neighborhood of $215 to $250 billion per year. It's doubtful anything like this concentration of huge globally important industry dominance + very high pay will ever been seen again anywhere else in the world, it's an outlier economically to put it mildly. Enjoy it while it lasts.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

_delirium 5y ago

> devs have a lot of bargaining power Employees don't seem to have enough bargaining power to meaningfully control working conditions, though. Maybe these are worth a ton of money to the company, or such desires are an outlier. But here is my experience: I'm a professor of computer science, and frequently get recruiters trying to get me to jump ship to industry. I'm open to it in principle. I'm reasonably happy in my job, but there are certainly things I don't like about academia, and the pay is not industry-level. But it's generally a rewarding job, and has various perks, like private offices and considerable control over your own schedule. A question I ask recruiters: I have a private office... could you match that? So far, the answer has always been no. They can double or occasionally triple my salary, but they can't offer me a private office. I am not sure what to make of that. They are willing to offer me $100k+ over my current salary, but are absolutely unable to offer me an office with a door.

chris11 5y ago
> They can double or occasionally triple my salary, but they can't offer me a private office. You might have more luck if instead you asked about working remotely full-time. It's not the same if you want to go into an office, but companies are seriously thinking about their post-covid office plans.
- _delirium 5y ago
  True, that's an interesting possibility with the current trend towards remote work. With enough of a pay raise, I could solve the private office problem by just renting the office myself out-of-pocket...
0xB31B1B 5y ago
The hiring managers don't have that power. Not sure if you have done an interview loop but I assume that as a tenure track/tenured professor you're going to be L6+ individual contributor in a research group. In that interview loop you're probably going to have a decent amount of face time with a director level or VP. IMO if you're actually interested in making the jump the right play is to get the job, and then negotiate the office with the director/vp that you'd be reporting to, they will 99% of the time not let office access be something that stops them from hiring a staff+ engineer. Feel free to ping me directly if you want to ask more questions.

mattkrause 5y ago

Is there a university nearby? Grad students and postdocs seem like a fairly untapped source for tech recruiting, especially outside of the CS department. Physics, neuroscience, econ, biology, and many other fields now involve lots of programming and data analysis, sometimes under demanding conditions (real-time or huge, noisy data sets). Many of the people are smart and highly-motivated, but making a tenth of the numbers you quoted (and with rubbish job security to boot). It should be like shooting fish in a barrel. And yet.... they don't seem to be on many company's radars. I'm the only one in my group who is ever contacted by recruiters, and it's an undergrad CS degree. Yes, you'll have to screen to figure who tweaks "the script that gives the numbers" and who's more like a developer. Recruiters might need to put in a little legwork to figure out how different kinds of researchers map onto open reqs. You might want to somehow prep non-traditional candidates for a developer interview, or figure out an on-boarding track. But you can afford a whole heck of a lot of that if a $250k/year job is sitting open.

jackdawed 5y ago
From talking with my PhD and MS friends, it's mainly about time. PhDs work around 40-60 hours a week. Full time MS students are juggling courses, research, and part time work, also around 40 hours a week. That usually leaves little time and energy to apply for jobs and practice interviewing. As a terminal MS student, most of the interviews and offers I've gotten were from professor recommendations to their industry colleagues. I researched computational linguistics and dynamical systems in my undergrad, and in grad school I researched HPC and distributed systems. I still interview poorly because I don't invest enough time practicing/applying compared to reading papers or doing grad student grunt work. On paper, having an MS can also be a negative signal.