27 ms·

Takeaways from looking for a new senior role in tech

431 points by braza 5y ago

mqnfred 5y ago
Thank you for the wisdom!
whichdan 5y ago
Keeping a spreadsheet is such a good idea - during my last search I was talking to a dozen different companies initially, and it would have been impossible to keep on top of everything without some sort of organization.
- mgkimsal 5y ago
  years ago I went further and created a full web app to manage/track. it could manage email templates, send out emails with link tracking, had some ways to keep track of opportunities, let me keep multiple versions of a resume on hand, etc. Was moderately useful, as years before, I'd done 'spreadsheet' stuff, and that was painful. 3-4 weeks, 120+ outreaches, very few replies, etc.
- lordnacho 5y ago
  I've got a big Trello from my most recent search. It's the perfect mix of flexible structure, ease of use, and easy to scan.
  - adjkant 5y ago
    Why not have them both and use Notion? It allows you to flip between both views of the same data :) Zero affiliation just a very happy user. As an example, here's my TV show tracker in both forms: Sheet Style: https://www.notion.so/b7da6a3929624f0c9d30e248111eff2a?v=df6ffa8a82554ac59056d73fc6a5e41c https://www.notion.so/b7da6a3929624f0c9d30e248111eff2a?v=df6... Kanban Style: https://www.notion.so/b7da6a3929624f0c9d30e248111eff2a?v=fd9a91f522d0443fb38cabf950e675cb https://www.notion.so/b7da6a3929624f0c9d30e248111eff2a?v=fd9...
    - lordnacho 5y ago
      Think it needs a login
      - adjkant 5y ago
        Those work for me on private browsing / it's set up to work for public viewing I think. What do you see when you try to click them?
- pm90 5y ago
  Same. Especially if you’re also working your present job; all the recruiter calls and scheduling can get absolutely chaotic.
master_yoda_1 5y ago
I ignore all of this. The OP is coming from a no name company and don't have any expertises. If you are senior and you don't have any expertises or deep experience in a domain, you will have tough time getting a job even in this hot market.
- martinky24 5y ago
  How is SeatGeek a no name company?
  - lkbm 5y ago
    I hadn't heard of it, but he also had Director titles at Meetup, WeWork, and DigitalOcean, which I very much have. (Also Buoyant, but I don't recognize that one either.)
- daok 5y ago
  You should a little negative but I read you twice and there is some truth in your message. I am actually working in one of the popular FANG company. I receive solicitations every day (3-10). I have no time to answer everyone. I have over 15 years of experience and the few times I decided to reply I realized two things. First, once you start giving a range of compensation the discussion stop rapidly for 90% of the recruiters. The market is "hot" but for folks that are not that senior (or with lower expectation that I have maybe). The second thing is that when it goes well and we start the process that everything is super slow motion. Positive feedbacks but every step take weeks to move on. At a point where I lost any excitement. Hence, I suppose my field is not such in demand... that engineers with less years of experience get these positions faster than me since I am strict about my expectation. I might have the wrong conclusion here but I found that this "hot market" is not "hot" for the whole range of expertises and years of experience.
  - lkbm 5y ago
    Yes, I suspect there's a lot of title inflation going on in the industry. I have a Senior title (at a "no name" company) and can probably get a Senior title elsewhere (I also get recruitment emails for those all the time), but perhaps only for some values of "Senior".
master_yoda_1 5y ago
- whiplash451 5y ago
  A more constructive approach would be to elaborate on what you find misleading in the article.
thr0wawayf00 5y ago
> Independent headhunters and recruiters are a valuable resource I had an experience with an independent recruiter that went so poorly that I haven’t been able to take those kinds of people seriously since. A few years back, I was recruited to an up-and-coming startup in the healthcare space in a senior role. It was a massive pay increase, meaningful equity, and a company name I was proud to put on my resume. An independent firm reached out to me about the role and I was definitely interested. One thing I noticed while doing my independent research was that lots of people had very poor Glassdoor reviews of the company, basically comparing it to Theranos in terms of its culture, constant firings, cult-like CEO, etc. I reached out to several former employees to discuss their experience and could not get one to talk to me about working there. Meanwhile, I was hearing from the recruiters that they hired a new exec team and most complaints were not relevant to the current situation there. I brought the complaints up with the recruiter and the company during my interview process, and they both told me it was just a couple disgruntled former employees trying to make the company look bad. The recruiter offered to put me in touch with others they placed at the company, but I couldn’t view them as objective sources. I started the gig and it took me all of two weeks to realize the company was in fact firing people constantly and I had been completely lied to by the recruiter and the company. As much as I want to believe that there are recruiters out there that look out for devs, the reality is that software talent is the product in that relationship and there aren’t a lot of financial incentives to ensure transparency going into these professional relationships. Recruiters get paid when you sign, which creates an inherent conflict of interest when you’re looking to them as a trusted resource.
- theowaway87 5y ago
  Was this collective health?
- throwaway75787 5y ago
  You could have done worse than two weeks. The former employees who would not talk were probably under a non-disparagement agreement from their severance - and that agreement under a non-disclosure agreement.
  - 5y ago
qrohlf 5y ago
> Recruiters love phone calls and don’t like doing things over email or text. This means that it is very easy to get overwhelmed by the number of recruiters trying to call you, and we will explore time management a little further down the text. This has been my experience as well, and while I understand the desire for introductory "sales mode" type calls, I think it's progressed past that point to something nearly pathological. As an example, I recently had a recruiter that I was previously in contact with over email cold-call me while I was skiing, trying to schedule a meeting with a hiring manager (I picked up the call because I thought it might be one of the people in my group that I didn't have in my contacts). When I requested she please send me an email to schedule the meeting, as I was out of the office, I got an email where she sent an email to schedule the phone call, to then schedule the meeting over the phone. It was 100% the least efficient way to do this, and only happened because of this illogically strong preference for phone calls that recruiters seem to have...
- afarrell 5y ago
  The goal isn't to maximize efficiency. It is to increase human connection. Why? 1. They want you to feel a sense of trust to increase the probability of taking additional steps in the process. 2. They are mostly extroverts who want to hear someone talk about their career aspirations -- for the same emotional reasons that coaches want to see people learn.
  - hunglee2 5y ago
    great analysis. though for 1) in a way, it IS about maximising efficiency. The recruiter wants to place candidates, and those with whom s/he has a strong human connection are more likely to convert into placements. Hence, efficiency is the ultimate driver for this behaviour
- lordnacho 5y ago
  Phone calls are synchronous. You have each others attention, questions can be answered quickly. Also the big one is that hard to answer questions will die in an async setting. What's your current salary, why did you leave your last job so soon, anything that creates a desire to procrastinate with an answer.
smolder 5y ago
I did the exact same thing with a spreadsheet. Pursuing only the few roles I could keep in my head at a time was not keeping me busy and was letting a lot slip through the cracks. It was incredibly helpful to take a systematic approach, to track who I'd talked to, save references to job descriptions and background information, and to separate by tech stack, locale, etc.
whiplash451 5y ago
The article is sound but I am on the fence regarding external headhunters. The arguments supporting their use (e.g. hiring company does want to leak information) seem weak. I would tend to think that a strong hiring company should be able to bypass this information leakage on their own and own the process. Using an external headhunter does not prevent the leakage that much and removes ownership and control from the hiring company’s hands. As a senior lead, being approached by an external head hunter has always triggered a knee-jerk negative reaction with me. I would not mind being proven wrong.
- nickff 5y ago
  I am not a big fan of head-hunters, as the ones I've talked to seem to act like used-car salesmen (deceptive and plain slimy). That said, external recruiters do make sense for small and growing companies who haven't sorted out an internal recruiting system yet.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  My experience with the candidates introduced to us by well known recruitment firms here in Tokyo has been fairly positive. Of course I have no idea how many equally great candidates they filter out before they get to us.
  - post_from_work 5y ago
    Such as Michael Page? That's one of the few recruiters that ever has interesting-looking jobs at decent salaries in Japan.
- gen220 5y ago
  It's very similar to financial/wealth managers. You don't want to work with a "Financial Manager", but you would probably happily give your portfolio to Warren Buffet or Seth Klarman (there's 1000s of other people in this sphere, whose names we don't know). I think it's close to the 80/20 principle: 80% of people whose job title would be "third party recruiter" are not (or are just barely) worth your time, but 20% will do wonders for your career and network. Good recruiters are primarily skilled at building a wide but high-quality professional network, keeping information flowing through it, and, generally, significantly raising the signal:noise ratio of the connection process for both sides. This earns them repeat customers on both sides. Hires convert into hiring managers convert into founders, and good reputation for quality on both ends goes a long way. It's actually not too dissimilar from good LPs in a VC firm, and there's some VC firms that function pretty explicitly as recruiting hubs. The practical differences: good third party recruiters invest in long-term relationships, with an incrementally increasing quality bar for people and companies admitted into those relationships. Mediocre third party recruiters are more transactional (maybe they see it as an in-between gig, or don't get/want to get the bigger picture) and follow the money with minimal attention paid to quality. The latter are more numerous and more vocal. The good ones exist, but there's probably not a lot of them, and they don't reach out as often. IME, you can usually distinguish between the two based on the portfolio of companies they work with, if you're familiar with the companies you can draw your own opinions. However, with anything qualitatively-differentiated like this, it is hard to persuade somebody that this thing exists. You would know it when you see it.
lordnacho 5y ago
Definitely get comfortable with independent recruiters. I've written a few blurbs about this to people who've contacted me here on HN. Basically the incentives make sense, to a point. They get paid a quarter of your first annual compensation. So they want to place someone, and they will do a lot for you if you are a profile that seems like a match for the roles they are covering. Note it's important that you find people who actually have the goods. There are a lot of recruiters who seem to think spamming peoplev with crap is a way to get placements. The thing to do is look at the jobs you like, for finance that's on efinancial and one or two others, and then call the most pertinent recruiters. Don't use the application systems, they're a black hole. Get the person on the phone, sell yourself, hopefully get some interviews lined up. The really good recruiters will keep the relationship open. They call me now and again to check my status (I'm also a hiring manager prospect), they call to ask me technical questions, and they get me to refer people I know as well. It's actually a lot of work if you consider the average candidate is only going to change jobs a few times in their life. And yes, keep organised, try to know where you are with each firm. It's important not to get introduced by different recruiters to the same firm, it messes with that incentive I mentioned and the recs are scared of being the second person to intro someone.
- tdeck 5y ago
  I've always avoided independent recruiters because they charge a big commission (30% of my salary?) to the employer, and I worry that with smaller startups this will put meaningful downward pressure on the salary I can negotiate. Also, I did once go through a 3P recruiter by mistake and they insisted on intermediaries every part of the process in a way that felt inefficient (e.g. send recruiter a list of times, they send them to company, company picks one and tells recruiter, who tells me). Also > The really good recruiters will keep the relationship open. They call me now and again to check my status (I'm also a hiring manager prospect), they call to ask me technical questions, and they get me to refer people I know as well. That sounds like it's not for everyone. I'd probably find those check-ins mildly disruptive and the other parts feel like I'm doing someone's job for them. Curious to know if other folks have encountered these issues or have thoughts on them.
  - 5y ago
libraryofbabel 5y ago
To clarify, “senior role” here means a senior management role (the author is a Senior Director Of Engineering) rather than Senior Software Engineer, as probably most folks will read it. Might want to update the title to “senior management role” to make that plain.
- throwanem 5y ago
  Almost all of the advice is good either way. I don't use a spreadsheet yet, but there was very little else that was inapplicable to the recruiter relationships and hiring processes in which I've thus far participated as a senior engineer.
  - redisman 5y ago
    For an IC it should just be 10 points of grind leetcode and system design interviews
baskethead 5y ago
When looking at his LinkedIn, I only see one job with tenure over 4 years almost 10 years back and most other jobs are well below 2 years. It seems like he definitely is able to find new jobs very efficiently so I think his advice here is valuable. However if I were hiring for an engineering leader, I would probably pass him over. I don’t see anyone being an effective leader by only sticking around for less than 2 years. Having tenures less than 2 years especially at senior roles doesn’t give a lot of positive feelings of leadership in my opinion.
- decafninja 5y ago
  If we were talking about SWEs, I'd say short tenures are now considered a pro, not a con. Likewise, staying too long at a company (say, 5+ years), seems to be considered a big red flag now. Exceptions given if company is FAANGMULA or similar caliber. For a managerial or leadership position? I can't say, to be honest, but what you say makes sense. Then again, I'd say long tenures as a SWE ought to be considered a positive too (or at least not a negative), but it isn't, so...
  - VirusNewbie 5y ago
    I think the opposite. Usually a short (sub 2 years) tenure at a company means they're on the chopping block, bonuses didn't come through, refreshers weren't granted, stock options didn't continue, etc.
    - novok 5y ago
      Or stock performance has been bad for the past 2 years? Or they got a bad team and its time to move on?
    - decafninja 5y ago
      I mean, I agree, personally. But my encounters in the wild while interviewing, plus comments on Blind, etc. would indicate the wider consensus is that short tenures are preferable to long tenures.
    - 5y ago
duxup 5y ago
> Independent headhunters and recruiters are a valuable resource I wish, I find that there seems to be an infinite amount of recruiters collecting names and resumes willing to waste infinite amounts of time… and then you discover they don’t know Java and JavaScript aren’t the same thing.
austincheney 5y ago
> 5. Do not waste your time, but part as friends It’s completely counter intuitive but that was my biggest take away from interviewing this year. You would think it’s the unqualified candidate that were the time waster. Prospective employers will lead you on and waste your time with nonsense and hope of employment with numerous interviews until their bias either qualifies or filters you. My recommendation: put your cards on the table at the very beginning and filter yourself out. There is no point in pretending it will be a beautiful marriage when they are an old man undergoing midlife crisis looking for a hot teenager. If, as an actual senior, that’s not what you want to be then it’s not going to work.
sdrothrock 5y ago
> Recruiters love phone calls and don’t like doing things over email or text. This has really hindered me as a person with a severe hearing impairment. It's annoying how pushy some people can be about it too, insisting that there has to be SOME way to make it work.
MattGaiser 5y ago
My big gripe with the phone calls is that it is 30 minutes to just have your resume presented to someone and likely rejected (I am on the low end of experienced, so get recruiters pitching my 2 years of experience for senior roles). While I have worked with some great third-party recruiters in the past and actually got my current job through one, most of the time the phone call is equivalent to the resume submission stage. It would literally be faster to apply directly than have a conversation.
- zenlikethat 5y ago
  Sounds like you could probably vet recruiters/opps a bit more heavily. You have to place your chips on the best bets and screen aggressively to make sure there's a mutual fit. You can hang up on them quickly if things don't seem right.
  - decafninja 5y ago
    This. I'm at a point where I can get the feel for a third party recruiter, especially on whether they can sell me to a hiring manager with whom they have a personal relationship with. Those are the third party recruiters you want to work with. They are pretty rare though.
    - MattGaiser 5y ago
      Please share a few sentences on how to do this, as I really don't know how to do that.
      - zenlikethat 5y ago
        Before you take a call, make sure they have done their homework and are presenting a role that is the right fit for you. If they won’t tell you the company or basic information through email, throw them out — they’re not acting in good faith. On the call, cut right to the chase and ask for salary range and what the role will actually entail. They should tell you. Make sure they have a specific hiring manager in mine. A targeted role will be more promising than a general one.
cletus 5y ago
So I worked in London for several years. Over 15 years I still get emails from these people. It was the most soul-destroying experience of my professional life and I could talk about this a lot eg fake interviews, not being put up for roles they said they would put you up for, modifying your resume, pricing you out of contention by adding a markup to your rate they never told you about, submitting you for positions you never authorized. It's not as bad in the US now but I get a ton of cold emails (and even phone calls). I've seen similar advice here on HN about how you should respond to these and make a personal connection even if you aren't looking now. Do people really do this? I think this would take me hours each week. I'm not even a superstar. Far from it so please don't take it that way. I'm an introvert. I'm far from alone in this as a software engineer. Now this, contrary to popular belief, doesn't mean you want to avoid social interactions. It simply means those social interactions have a cost. For some people (ie extroverts) the opposite is true. They feed on those interactions. I imagine you'd need to be that sort of person to be a recruiter. The author here posits that independent recruiters are "valuable". Now this could be London colouring my view but I've found the complete opposite to be true. I've only looked for a job twice in the last 10 years and each time I quite deliberately only ever spoke to a company's recruiters. I've found independent recruiters and agencies to simply make a difficult process even more difficult. My advice for any recruiter thinking of cold calling is: 1. I've long since stopped picking up unrecognized numbers. If you call me instead of emailing me, it's going to get ignored; 2. If your email doesn't look personalized it just gets immediately binned. I'm talking something like: > Hi, I came across your profile and like the look of your skills and experience... 3. My experience has been that even sending a polite "I'm not currently looking" or even just a thank you is far too often taken as an invitation for follow up contact to "get to know you" or "discuss [whatever] further" so it's best for my personal sanity to simply ignore pretty much every email; 4. Just because I don't respond or respond immediately, it doesn't mean I haven't read it. The last time I looked for a job I ended up contacting a recruiter who'd sent me an email months earlier. This may not be how you as a likely extrovert deals with communication but you're not me and you inserted yourself into my inbox. It's not personal; 5. If you aren't able to cater the hiring pipeline to my experience then seriously don't even bother. What I mean by this is I've worked at Google and Facebook for >10 years. Do you or your client really think I can't code? If you are going to get someone a year out of college to give me a test on bisection search because "that's their process" then that tells me a lot about their culture and/or how they value your input. You want to talk systems design? Coding philosophy? Tech leadership? All of those are fair game. Bring it on. Happy to do it; 6. Realize that many of us engineers find phone calls to be disruptive and a profound waste of time, particularly when it usually entails a 30 minute "getting to know you" chat before you even start the process; 7. Do yourself a favour and if we must chat, send your calendar so I can pick a slot when you're available. I know my own schedule. I don't want scheduling to be a conversation; 8. If you reschedule or cancel once we've agreed to talk you'd better have a good reason or at least don't lie about it. Tech is a small world. If you tell me an emergency came up and you actually went skiing, don't think the candidate won't find that out from a friend or a friend of a friend who can check. Trust matters; 9. If you send the same email more than three times, it gets binned; and 10. There are certain areas I simply have no interest in (eg finance, Blookchain Andys). You're not to know that. It's not your fault. Everyone differs on this. Again, it's not personal.
elesbao 5y ago
[OFF] Isn't this one of the guys mentioned at the soundcloud post a long ago about Brazilians and their engineering culture (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14712840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14712840) ? Curious if these takeaways can be sort of a protection for that kind of situation.
- soneca 5y ago
  I read this as something related to the engineering culture of Brazilian people. Just to clarify to other reading this, it’s about a particular group of Brazilians that used to work at SoundCloud and the referred post made claims about them being protagonists in some sort of divisive infighting.
igetspam 5y ago
This article does not echo my personal experience. I recently left a company. Prior to leaving but after making it know to a few key people that I wasn't likely to stay, I had two exploratory contracts lined up. (Exploratory for me, not them.) Within two weeks, I had a massive offer in front of me from a third company. When I let them others know I was going to take that, there was a minor bidding war. I landed a senior (Head of ...) role with little to no effort and negotiated maintaining advisory roles with non competitive orgs. I have two decades in my specific eng field. I (very intentionally) have little name recognition but I come highly recommended and have a proven track record. Getting senior roles is not all that difficult, if you have proven yourself and know how to network. I don't look for jobs any more, I consider offers. To me, that's how senior roles should and do work.
- tsunamifury 5y ago
  Massive and senior are relative. XXXk or Xm senior and massive?
  - throwawaygh 5y ago
    Particularly confusing because "Senior X" is a job title in big tech cos where it actually means "mid-career" or even "early mid-career". Certainly not Xm massive, but maybe the upper half/third of XXXk massive. On the + side, at least "senior" in tech is not nearly as bad as "VP" in the banking world, where a "VP" at a household name bank might be lucky to scrape out 200K and is probably an IC salesperson or low mid-level manager :p
    - lrem 5y ago
      This is wildly inaccurate. Senior in Google is 350k, in Microsoft 260k, in Amazon 340k. "Early mid-career" is also wildly inaccurate. While the ladder in Google goes up to 11, 90% of people never exceed 5 (senior). It's also the last level where your primary responsibility is designing and developing software, everything above that is about influencing.
      - 5y ago
Waterluvian 5y ago
I’m done with recruiters. They’re only looking out for themselves. They basically rent seek and make things more difficult. They never have the information I need. And they never seem all that interested in the relationship if it doesn’t serve to fill their desired quota of candidates in a pipeline. I made a boilerplate page on my personal site to send back to the occasional job that looks interesting and some recruiters have legitimately been offended by getting a form response.
- digianarchist 5y ago
  Huge waste of space both sides of the Atlantic. Some of the crap I’ve had pulled on me: - Salary expectations not shared with the company. Went through the entire process only to get lowballed. - Bait and switch by offering one enticing job only to inform me that’s no longer available and would you be interested in working for a body shop? - Phone calls at work. Emails at work. The list goes on. Also them insisting on phone calls is easy to explain. It’s because people are pressured easily over the phone.
  - zenlikethat 5y ago
    Nah, it's because in order to convince you to make a major life change, you have to speak to them on the phone first. Tell me, have you ever interviewed for and accepted a job 100% through email?
    - digianarchist 5y ago
      We’re talking about recruiters not the interviewers.
- zenlikethat 5y ago
  They rent seek and look out for themselves? So do you. Capitalism, baby. In order to build companies, we have to hire people. In order to hire people, we have walk them through interviewing. Devs don't exist in a vacuum, so you won't ever be done with recruiters.
walrus01 5y ago
At 20+ years into my career is it super weird that I've never once worked with a recruiter? Everything I've done in the past 10 years has not been from a job that was advertised as an opening anywhere, but through industry contacts.
- waiseristy 5y ago
  You might want to mention your industry though, IIRC yours is quite esoteric (backbone/wholesale/IXP's). Generic software engineering roles have an incredibly high signal-to-noise ratio. Recruiting was pretty much required at my previous gigs to try and cut through some of the fluff
  - walrus01 5y ago
    I guess any industry seems less esoteric if you're in the middle of it - to me it doesn't seem esoteric, there's a LOT of ASNs globally and they all need network engineers... Or other people who work in the various specialities in the telecom business. I've never worked for a cellular carrier so as an example there's whole swathes of telecom stuff I only have a passing familiarity with. But I suppose that software engineering in general, there probably are a lot more coders out there. At least judging by what I see in Seattle. The isp community in and mid to large sized city is probably still small enough that most people know each other.
    - waiseristy 5y ago
      Could also be an aberration caused by the generally poor hiring practices used by these software companies. I have no idea what the talent pool actually looks like for these two industries. I have noticed there appears to be a huge divide between the FAANG'ers and the FAANG'nots from my perspective. The smaller companies in the area, all generally know each other. Similar to your experience
    - d0gsg0w00f 5y ago
      The networking world is...weird. Very different from the coder world. I think it comes down to the fundamental truth that the network cannot fail while code can fail fast. Therefore, networking hasn't undergone the multiple seismic shifts that software has and tends to be populated with a more conservative cast of characters.
gcampos 5y ago
> And this is something to keep in mind working with recruiters: they work for the hiring company, not for you. This is something I always wonder, why there are no recruiters who are paid by the candidate rather than the hiring company? Kinda like an agent-client relationship. Probably wouldn’t work for junior people, but it could be a good fit for seniors
- rayshan 5y ago
  There is https://www.freeagency.com/ https://www.freeagency.com/. I haven't used it but the model makes sense to me.
  - gcampos 5y ago
    I saw their ads on Blind in the past, but I wasn’t sure how legit they are.
kstenerud 5y ago
I see a lot of comments here talking about how many recruiter messages and calls and bidding wars they get, and I'm seriously wondering how much of these are tall tales... I've been a professional software dev for 25 years, spanning five countries (edit: including 5 years in San Francisco) and almost every part of the industry from embedded to enterprise, startups to multinationals, hardware to finance. I have written software in almost all major languages for multiple years, have worked with many major software stacks, and delivered major 6-month-to-multi-year projects. None of this is hyperbole. I have hundreds of github projects that are not forks, ranging up to tens of thousands of LOC, some that companies have built entire businesses out of (for example https://github.com/kstenerud/KSCrash https://github.com/kstenerud/KSCrash). I receive one, maybe two recruiter emails per year (only from Facebook - I think whenever my contact info goes to a new person), and that's about it. I've never been in a bidding war, and I can't remember a single job search that's completed in under 4 months. Are people ACTUALLY getting inundated like this so badly that they need a SPREADSHEET to keep things in order? Or is this just bragging?
- jchonphoenix 5y ago
  You've had a lot of experience in all the wrong places for this type of recruiter inbound. Join Meta. Move to Silicon Valley. Then tell me what you're experiencing 2 years later.
  - kstenerud 5y ago
    I lived in San Francisco from 2011 to 2016 (9th and Folsom, right above the corner store). Same thing.
  - Groxx 5y ago
    I've been getting ~2-5 recruiter emails per week for the past several months. Silicon Valley is a bit weird. That said, I'm also still getting periodic offers for unpaid summer internships from out of state. Maybe it's because I never finished my degree, and they're finding me from my college's records?
- kevin_nisbet 5y ago
throwDec21 5y ago
How many jobs is normal to consider at a time? I saw he had 50ish in 2 weeks which is an awful lot for senior jobs. Even as an IC I can only really handle a fraction of that. Should I be applying for 100 roles/month? I'm not sure what is normal or a good strategy.
codeisawesome 5y ago
15 years of waiting for a green card. 15 years of being on a visa that can have you kicked out anytime no matter how much you’ve invested into life there. Hats off to the folks who put up with this.
- lonesword 5y ago
  Yeah that's what stood out for me as well. I wonder how long it takes to get a citizenship in the US. I immigrated to Germany and the experience has been surprisingly smooth and flexible: 1. Got a student visa to come study a masters in Germany 2. Did an internship and got a job offer before I completed my studies. 3. This is the part that blew my mind - my employer asked me if I can start working in May 2021 and I said I would like to (I was almost done with my masters thesis) but I don't have a masters degree yet and I can't work full time on my student visa. They simply applied for an EU Blue card based on my bachelors degree that I got from my home country (Computer Science) and I started working. The immigration office ("Ausländerbehörde") did not even care that I was currently enrolled as a student in Germany and that I haven't graduated yet. Germany gets a bad rep for its bureaucracy but this was one instance where it was surprisingly flexible.
justinlloyd 5y ago
Using a spreadsheet as a cheap CRM to track your job search and where you are in the process, cold leads, warm leads, follow-ups, and so forth is precisely what I do. I thought I was the only one who did that. Nice to know I am not crazy. :-) And the article is on-point with the "you get 30 minutes of my time otherwise you are wasting my time." Recruiters love their phone calls because they are trying to sell you something.
jdthedisciple 5y ago
I specifically removed my phone number from my CV when I noticed companies like to call and scheduele a meeting immediately. Such things gotta be done in an async manner e.g. by email.
jll29 5y ago
Key sentence: > And this is something to keep in mind working with recruiters: they work for the hiring company, not for you. Perhaps there's a new venture opportunity here: recruiters that find jobs that are on the employee side. They get the same money (e.g. paid by the employee's sign on bonus) as those working for the other side, but try to find a good role for the employee.
durnygbur 5y ago
As an alternative to the spreadsheet I maintain dedicated repository for job search with directory for every company I apply to, then one dedicated CalDAV calendar where most important remote and onsite interviews go.

431 points by braza 5y ago

Thank you for the wisdom!

Keeping a spreadsheet is such a good idea - during my last search I was talking to a dozen different companies initially, and it would have been impossible to keep on top of everything without some sort of organization.

mgkimsal 5y ago
years ago I went further and created a full web app to manage/track. it could manage email templates, send out emails with link tracking, had some ways to keep track of opportunities, let me keep multiple versions of a resume on hand, etc. Was moderately useful, as years before, I'd done 'spreadsheet' stuff, and that was painful. 3-4 weeks, 120+ outreaches, very few replies, etc.
lordnacho 5y ago
I've got a big Trello from my most recent search. It's the perfect mix of flexible structure, ease of use, and easy to scan.
- adjkant 5y ago
  Why not have them both and use Notion? It allows you to flip between both views of the same data :) Zero affiliation just a very happy user. As an example, here's my TV show tracker in both forms: Sheet Style: https://www.notion.so/b7da6a3929624f0c9d30e248111eff2a?v=df6ffa8a82554ac59056d73fc6a5e41c https://www.notion.so/b7da6a3929624f0c9d30e248111eff2a?v=df6... Kanban Style: https://www.notion.so/b7da6a3929624f0c9d30e248111eff2a?v=fd9a91f522d0443fb38cabf950e675cb https://www.notion.so/b7da6a3929624f0c9d30e248111eff2a?v=fd9...
  - lordnacho 5y ago
    Think it needs a login
    - adjkant 5y ago
      Those work for me on private browsing / it's set up to work for public viewing I think. What do you see when you try to click them?
pm90 5y ago
Same. Especially if you’re also working your present job; all the recruiter calls and scheduling can get absolutely chaotic.

master_yoda_1 5y ago

I ignore all of this. The OP is coming from a no name company and don't have any expertises. If you are senior and you don't have any expertises or deep experience in a domain, you will have tough time getting a job even in this hot market.

martinky24 5y ago
How is SeatGeek a no name company?
- lkbm 5y ago
  I hadn't heard of it, but he also had Director titles at Meetup, WeWork, and DigitalOcean, which I very much have. (Also Buoyant, but I don't recognize that one either.)
daok 5y ago
You should a little negative but I read you twice and there is some truth in your message. I am actually working in one of the popular FANG company. I receive solicitations every day (3-10). I have no time to answer everyone. I have over 15 years of experience and the few times I decided to reply I realized two things. First, once you start giving a range of compensation the discussion stop rapidly for 90% of the recruiters. The market is "hot" but for folks that are not that senior (or with lower expectation that I have maybe). The second thing is that when it goes well and we start the process that everything is super slow motion. Positive feedbacks but every step take weeks to move on. At a point where I lost any excitement. Hence, I suppose my field is not such in demand... that engineers with less years of experience get these positions faster than me since I am strict about my expectation. I might have the wrong conclusion here but I found that this "hot market" is not "hot" for the whole range of expertises and years of experience.
- lkbm 5y ago
  Yes, I suspect there's a lot of title inflation going on in the industry. I have a Senior title (at a "no name" company) and can probably get a Senior title elsewhere (I also get recruitment emails for those all the time), but perhaps only for some values of "Senior".

master_yoda_1 5y ago

whiplash451 5y ago
A more constructive approach would be to elaborate on what you find misleading in the article.

thr0wawayf00 5y ago

> Independent headhunters and recruiters are a valuable resource I had an experience with an independent recruiter that went so poorly that I haven’t been able to take those kinds of people seriously since. A few years back, I was recruited to an up-and-coming startup in the healthcare space in a senior role. It was a massive pay increase, meaningful equity, and a company name I was proud to put on my resume. An independent firm reached out to me about the role and I was definitely interested. One thing I noticed while doing my independent research was that lots of people had very poor Glassdoor reviews of the company, basically comparing it to Theranos in terms of its culture, constant firings, cult-like CEO, etc. I reached out to several former employees to discuss their experience and could not get one to talk to me about working there. Meanwhile, I was hearing from the recruiters that they hired a new exec team and most complaints were not relevant to the current situation there. I brought the complaints up with the recruiter and the company during my interview process, and they both told me it was just a couple disgruntled former employees trying to make the company look bad. The recruiter offered to put me in touch with others they placed at the company, but I couldn’t view them as objective sources. I started the gig and it took me all of two weeks to realize the company was in fact firing people constantly and I had been completely lied to by the recruiter and the company. As much as I want to believe that there are recruiters out there that look out for devs, the reality is that software talent is the product in that relationship and there aren’t a lot of financial incentives to ensure transparency going into these professional relationships. Recruiters get paid when you sign, which creates an inherent conflict of interest when you’re looking to them as a trusted resource.

theowaway87 5y ago
Was this collective health?
throwaway75787 5y ago
You could have done worse than two weeks. The former employees who would not talk were probably under a non-disparagement agreement from their severance - and that agreement under a non-disclosure agreement.
- 5y ago

qrohlf 5y ago

> Recruiters love phone calls and don’t like doing things over email or text. This means that it is very easy to get overwhelmed by the number of recruiters trying to call you, and we will explore time management a little further down the text. This has been my experience as well, and while I understand the desire for introductory "sales mode" type calls, I think it's progressed past that point to something nearly pathological. As an example, I recently had a recruiter that I was previously in contact with over email cold-call me while I was skiing, trying to schedule a meeting with a hiring manager (I picked up the call because I thought it might be one of the people in my group that I didn't have in my contacts). When I requested she please send me an email to schedule the meeting, as I was out of the office, I got an email where she sent an email to schedule the phone call, to then schedule the meeting over the phone. It was 100% the least efficient way to do this, and only happened because of this illogically strong preference for phone calls that recruiters seem to have...

afarrell 5y ago
The goal isn't to maximize efficiency. It is to increase human connection. Why? 1. They want you to feel a sense of trust to increase the probability of taking additional steps in the process. 2. They are mostly extroverts who want to hear someone talk about their career aspirations -- for the same emotional reasons that coaches want to see people learn.
- hunglee2 5y ago
  great analysis. though for 1) in a way, it IS about maximising efficiency. The recruiter wants to place candidates, and those with whom s/he has a strong human connection are more likely to convert into placements. Hence, efficiency is the ultimate driver for this behaviour
lordnacho 5y ago
Phone calls are synchronous. You have each others attention, questions can be answered quickly. Also the big one is that hard to answer questions will die in an async setting. What's your current salary, why did you leave your last job so soon, anything that creates a desire to procrastinate with an answer.

smolder 5y ago

I did the exact same thing with a spreadsheet. Pursuing only the few roles I could keep in my head at a time was not keeping me busy and was letting a lot slip through the cracks. It was incredibly helpful to take a systematic approach, to track who I'd talked to, save references to job descriptions and background information, and to separate by tech stack, locale, etc.

whiplash451 5y ago

The article is sound but I am on the fence regarding external headhunters. The arguments supporting their use (e.g. hiring company does want to leak information) seem weak. I would tend to think that a strong hiring company should be able to bypass this information leakage on their own and own the process. Using an external headhunter does not prevent the leakage that much and removes ownership and control from the hiring company’s hands. As a senior lead, being approached by an external head hunter has always triggered a knee-jerk negative reaction with me. I would not mind being proven wrong.

nickff 5y ago
I am not a big fan of head-hunters, as the ones I've talked to seem to act like used-car salesmen (deceptive and plain slimy). That said, external recruiters do make sense for small and growing companies who haven't sorted out an internal recruiting system yet.
Aeolun 5y ago
My experience with the candidates introduced to us by well known recruitment firms here in Tokyo has been fairly positive. Of course I have no idea how many equally great candidates they filter out before they get to us.
- post_from_work 5y ago
  Such as Michael Page? That's one of the few recruiters that ever has interesting-looking jobs at decent salaries in Japan.
gen220 5y ago
It's very similar to financial/wealth managers. You don't want to work with a "Financial Manager", but you would probably happily give your portfolio to Warren Buffet or Seth Klarman (there's 1000s of other people in this sphere, whose names we don't know). I think it's close to the 80/20 principle: 80% of people whose job title would be "third party recruiter" are not (or are just barely) worth your time, but 20% will do wonders for your career and network. Good recruiters are primarily skilled at building a wide but high-quality professional network, keeping information flowing through it, and, generally, significantly raising the signal:noise ratio of the connection process for both sides. This earns them repeat customers on both sides. Hires convert into hiring managers convert into founders, and good reputation for quality on both ends goes a long way. It's actually not too dissimilar from good LPs in a VC firm, and there's some VC firms that function pretty explicitly as recruiting hubs. The practical differences: good third party recruiters invest in long-term relationships, with an incrementally increasing quality bar for people and companies admitted into those relationships. Mediocre third party recruiters are more transactional (maybe they see it as an in-between gig, or don't get/want to get the bigger picture) and follow the money with minimal attention paid to quality. The latter are more numerous and more vocal. The good ones exist, but there's probably not a lot of them, and they don't reach out as often. IME, you can usually distinguish between the two based on the portfolio of companies they work with, if you're familiar with the companies you can draw your own opinions. However, with anything qualitatively-differentiated like this, it is hard to persuade somebody that this thing exists. You would know it when you see it.

lordnacho 5y ago

Definitely get comfortable with independent recruiters. I've written a few blurbs about this to people who've contacted me here on HN. Basically the incentives make sense, to a point. They get paid a quarter of your first annual compensation. So they want to place someone, and they will do a lot for you if you are a profile that seems like a match for the roles they are covering. Note it's important that you find people who actually have the goods. There are a lot of recruiters who seem to think spamming peoplev with crap is a way to get placements. The thing to do is look at the jobs you like, for finance that's on efinancial and one or two others, and then call the most pertinent recruiters. Don't use the application systems, they're a black hole. Get the person on the phone, sell yourself, hopefully get some interviews lined up. The really good recruiters will keep the relationship open. They call me now and again to check my status (I'm also a hiring manager prospect), they call to ask me technical questions, and they get me to refer people I know as well. It's actually a lot of work if you consider the average candidate is only going to change jobs a few times in their life. And yes, keep organised, try to know where you are with each firm. It's important not to get introduced by different recruiters to the same firm, it messes with that incentive I mentioned and the recs are scared of being the second person to intro someone.

tdeck 5y ago
I've always avoided independent recruiters because they charge a big commission (30% of my salary?) to the employer, and I worry that with smaller startups this will put meaningful downward pressure on the salary I can negotiate. Also, I did once go through a 3P recruiter by mistake and they insisted on intermediaries every part of the process in a way that felt inefficient (e.g. send recruiter a list of times, they send them to company, company picks one and tells recruiter, who tells me). Also > The really good recruiters will keep the relationship open. They call me now and again to check my status (I'm also a hiring manager prospect), they call to ask me technical questions, and they get me to refer people I know as well. That sounds like it's not for everyone. I'd probably find those check-ins mildly disruptive and the other parts feel like I'm doing someone's job for them. Curious to know if other folks have encountered these issues or have thoughts on them.
- 5y ago

libraryofbabel 5y ago

To clarify, “senior role” here means a senior management role (the author is a Senior Director Of Engineering) rather than Senior Software Engineer, as probably most folks will read it. Might want to update the title to “senior management role” to make that plain.

throwanem 5y ago
Almost all of the advice is good either way. I don't use a spreadsheet yet, but there was very little else that was inapplicable to the recruiter relationships and hiring processes in which I've thus far participated as a senior engineer.
- redisman 5y ago
  For an IC it should just be 10 points of grind leetcode and system design interviews

baskethead 5y ago

When looking at his LinkedIn, I only see one job with tenure over 4 years almost 10 years back and most other jobs are well below 2 years. It seems like he definitely is able to find new jobs very efficiently so I think his advice here is valuable. However if I were hiring for an engineering leader, I would probably pass him over. I don’t see anyone being an effective leader by only sticking around for less than 2 years. Having tenures less than 2 years especially at senior roles doesn’t give a lot of positive feelings of leadership in my opinion.

decafninja 5y ago
If we were talking about SWEs, I'd say short tenures are now considered a pro, not a con. Likewise, staying too long at a company (say, 5+ years), seems to be considered a big red flag now. Exceptions given if company is FAANGMULA or similar caliber. For a managerial or leadership position? I can't say, to be honest, but what you say makes sense. Then again, I'd say long tenures as a SWE ought to be considered a positive too (or at least not a negative), but it isn't, so...
- VirusNewbie 5y ago
  I think the opposite. Usually a short (sub 2 years) tenure at a company means they're on the chopping block, bonuses didn't come through, refreshers weren't granted, stock options didn't continue, etc.
  - novok 5y ago
    Or stock performance has been bad for the past 2 years? Or they got a bad team and its time to move on?
  - decafninja 5y ago
    I mean, I agree, personally. But my encounters in the wild while interviewing, plus comments on Blind, etc. would indicate the wider consensus is that short tenures are preferable to long tenures.
  - 5y ago

duxup 5y ago

> Independent headhunters and recruiters are a valuable resource I wish, I find that there seems to be an infinite amount of recruiters collecting names and resumes willing to waste infinite amounts of time… and then you discover they don’t know Java and JavaScript aren’t the same thing.

austincheney 5y ago

> 5. Do not waste your time, but part as friends It’s completely counter intuitive but that was my biggest take away from interviewing this year. You would think it’s the unqualified candidate that were the time waster. Prospective employers will lead you on and waste your time with nonsense and hope of employment with numerous interviews until their bias either qualifies or filters you. My recommendation: put your cards on the table at the very beginning and filter yourself out. There is no point in pretending it will be a beautiful marriage when they are an old man undergoing midlife crisis looking for a hot teenager. If, as an actual senior, that’s not what you want to be then it’s not going to work.

sdrothrock 5y ago

> Recruiters love phone calls and don’t like doing things over email or text. This has really hindered me as a person with a severe hearing impairment. It's annoying how pushy some people can be about it too, insisting that there has to be SOME way to make it work.

MattGaiser 5y ago

My big gripe with the phone calls is that it is 30 minutes to just have your resume presented to someone and likely rejected (I am on the low end of experienced, so get recruiters pitching my 2 years of experience for senior roles). While I have worked with some great third-party recruiters in the past and actually got my current job through one, most of the time the phone call is equivalent to the resume submission stage. It would literally be faster to apply directly than have a conversation.

zenlikethat 5y ago
Sounds like you could probably vet recruiters/opps a bit more heavily. You have to place your chips on the best bets and screen aggressively to make sure there's a mutual fit. You can hang up on them quickly if things don't seem right.
- decafninja 5y ago
  This. I'm at a point where I can get the feel for a third party recruiter, especially on whether they can sell me to a hiring manager with whom they have a personal relationship with. Those are the third party recruiters you want to work with. They are pretty rare though.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    Please share a few sentences on how to do this, as I really don't know how to do that.
    - zenlikethat 5y ago
      Before you take a call, make sure they have done their homework and are presenting a role that is the right fit for you. If they won’t tell you the company or basic information through email, throw them out — they’re not acting in good faith. On the call, cut right to the chase and ask for salary range and what the role will actually entail. They should tell you. Make sure they have a specific hiring manager in mine. A targeted role will be more promising than a general one.

cletus 5y ago

So I worked in London for several years. Over 15 years I still get emails from these people. It was the most soul-destroying experience of my professional life and I could talk about this a lot eg fake interviews, not being put up for roles they said they would put you up for, modifying your resume, pricing you out of contention by adding a markup to your rate they never told you about, submitting you for positions you never authorized. It's not as bad in the US now but I get a ton of cold emails (and even phone calls). I've seen similar advice here on HN about how you should respond to these and make a personal connection even if you aren't looking now. Do people really do this? I think this would take me hours each week. I'm not even a superstar. Far from it so please don't take it that way. I'm an introvert. I'm far from alone in this as a software engineer. Now this, contrary to popular belief, doesn't mean you want to avoid social interactions. It simply means those social interactions have a cost. For some people (ie extroverts) the opposite is true. They feed on those interactions. I imagine you'd need to be that sort of person to be a recruiter. The author here posits that independent recruiters are "valuable". Now this could be London colouring my view but I've found the complete opposite to be true. I've only looked for a job twice in the last 10 years and each time I quite deliberately only ever spoke to a company's recruiters. I've found independent recruiters and agencies to simply make a difficult process even more difficult. My advice for any recruiter thinking of cold calling is: 1. I've long since stopped picking up unrecognized numbers. If you call me instead of emailing me, it's going to get ignored; 2. If your email doesn't look personalized it just gets immediately binned. I'm talking something like: > Hi, I came across your profile and like the look of your skills and experience... 3. My experience has been that even sending a polite "I'm not currently looking" or even just a thank you is far too often taken as an invitation for follow up contact to "get to know you" or "discuss [whatever] further" so it's best for my personal sanity to simply ignore pretty much every email; 4. Just because I don't respond or respond immediately, it doesn't mean I haven't read it. The last time I looked for a job I ended up contacting a recruiter who'd sent me an email months earlier. This may not be how you as a likely extrovert deals with communication but you're not me and you inserted yourself into my inbox. It's not personal; 5. If you aren't able to cater the hiring pipeline to my experience then seriously don't even bother. What I mean by this is I've worked at Google and Facebook for >10 years. Do you or your client really think I can't code? If you are going to get someone a year out of college to give me a test on bisection search because "that's their process" then that tells me a lot about their culture and/or how they value your input. You want to talk systems design? Coding philosophy? Tech leadership? All of those are fair game. Bring it on. Happy to do it; 6. Realize that many of us engineers find phone calls to be disruptive and a profound waste of time, particularly when it usually entails a 30 minute "getting to know you" chat before you even start the process; 7. Do yourself a favour and if we must chat, send your calendar so I can pick a slot when you're available. I know my own schedule. I don't want scheduling to be a conversation; 8. If you reschedule or cancel once we've agreed to talk you'd better have a good reason or at least don't lie about it. Tech is a small world. If you tell me an emergency came up and you actually went skiing, don't think the candidate won't find that out from a friend or a friend of a friend who can check. Trust matters; 9. If you send the same email more than three times, it gets binned; and 10. There are certain areas I simply have no interest in (eg finance, Blookchain Andys). You're not to know that. It's not your fault. Everyone differs on this. Again, it's not personal.

elesbao 5y ago

[OFF] Isn't this one of the guys mentioned at the soundcloud post a long ago about Brazilians and their engineering culture (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14712840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14712840) ? Curious if these takeaways can be sort of a protection for that kind of situation.

soneca 5y ago
I read this as something related to the engineering culture of Brazilian people. Just to clarify to other reading this, it’s about a particular group of Brazilians that used to work at SoundCloud and the referred post made claims about them being protagonists in some sort of divisive infighting.

igetspam 5y ago

This article does not echo my personal experience. I recently left a company. Prior to leaving but after making it know to a few key people that I wasn't likely to stay, I had two exploratory contracts lined up. (Exploratory for me, not them.) Within two weeks, I had a massive offer in front of me from a third company. When I let them others know I was going to take that, there was a minor bidding war. I landed a senior (Head of ...) role with little to no effort and negotiated maintaining advisory roles with non competitive orgs. I have two decades in my specific eng field. I (very intentionally) have little name recognition but I come highly recommended and have a proven track record. Getting senior roles is not all that difficult, if you have proven yourself and know how to network. I don't look for jobs any more, I consider offers. To me, that's how senior roles should and do work.

tsunamifury 5y ago
Massive and senior are relative. XXXk or Xm senior and massive?
- throwawaygh 5y ago
  Particularly confusing because "Senior X" is a job title in big tech cos where it actually means "mid-career" or even "early mid-career". Certainly not Xm massive, but maybe the upper half/third of XXXk massive. On the + side, at least "senior" in tech is not nearly as bad as "VP" in the banking world, where a "VP" at a household name bank might be lucky to scrape out 200K and is probably an IC salesperson or low mid-level manager :p
  - lrem 5y ago
    This is wildly inaccurate. Senior in Google is 350k, in Microsoft 260k, in Amazon 340k. "Early mid-career" is also wildly inaccurate. While the ladder in Google goes up to 11, 90% of people never exceed 5 (senior). It's also the last level where your primary responsibility is designing and developing software, everything above that is about influencing.
    - 5y ago

Waterluvian 5y ago

I’m done with recruiters. They’re only looking out for themselves. They basically rent seek and make things more difficult. They never have the information I need. And they never seem all that interested in the relationship if it doesn’t serve to fill their desired quota of candidates in a pipeline. I made a boilerplate page on my personal site to send back to the occasional job that looks interesting and some recruiters have legitimately been offended by getting a form response.

digianarchist 5y ago
Huge waste of space both sides of the Atlantic. Some of the crap I’ve had pulled on me: - Salary expectations not shared with the company. Went through the entire process only to get lowballed. - Bait and switch by offering one enticing job only to inform me that’s no longer available and would you be interested in working for a body shop? - Phone calls at work. Emails at work. The list goes on. Also them insisting on phone calls is easy to explain. It’s because people are pressured easily over the phone.
- zenlikethat 5y ago
  Nah, it's because in order to convince you to make a major life change, you have to speak to them on the phone first. Tell me, have you ever interviewed for and accepted a job 100% through email?
  - digianarchist 5y ago
    We’re talking about recruiters not the interviewers.
zenlikethat 5y ago
They rent seek and look out for themselves? So do you. Capitalism, baby. In order to build companies, we have to hire people. In order to hire people, we have walk them through interviewing. Devs don't exist in a vacuum, so you won't ever be done with recruiters.

walrus01 5y ago

At 20+ years into my career is it super weird that I've never once worked with a recruiter? Everything I've done in the past 10 years has not been from a job that was advertised as an opening anywhere, but through industry contacts.

waiseristy 5y ago
You might want to mention your industry though, IIRC yours is quite esoteric (backbone/wholesale/IXP's). Generic software engineering roles have an incredibly high signal-to-noise ratio. Recruiting was pretty much required at my previous gigs to try and cut through some of the fluff
- walrus01 5y ago
  I guess any industry seems less esoteric if you're in the middle of it - to me it doesn't seem esoteric, there's a LOT of ASNs globally and they all need network engineers... Or other people who work in the various specialities in the telecom business. I've never worked for a cellular carrier so as an example there's whole swathes of telecom stuff I only have a passing familiarity with. But I suppose that software engineering in general, there probably are a lot more coders out there. At least judging by what I see in Seattle. The isp community in and mid to large sized city is probably still small enough that most people know each other.
  - waiseristy 5y ago
    Could also be an aberration caused by the generally poor hiring practices used by these software companies. I have no idea what the talent pool actually looks like for these two industries. I have noticed there appears to be a huge divide between the FAANG'ers and the FAANG'nots from my perspective. The smaller companies in the area, all generally know each other. Similar to your experience
  - d0gsg0w00f 5y ago
    The networking world is...weird. Very different from the coder world. I think it comes down to the fundamental truth that the network cannot fail while code can fail fast. Therefore, networking hasn't undergone the multiple seismic shifts that software has and tends to be populated with a more conservative cast of characters.

gcampos 5y ago

> And this is something to keep in mind working with recruiters: they work for the hiring company, not for you. This is something I always wonder, why there are no recruiters who are paid by the candidate rather than the hiring company? Kinda like an agent-client relationship. Probably wouldn’t work for junior people, but it could be a good fit for seniors

rayshan 5y ago
There is https://www.freeagency.com/ https://www.freeagency.com/. I haven't used it but the model makes sense to me.
- gcampos 5y ago
  I saw their ads on Blind in the past, but I wasn’t sure how legit they are.

kstenerud 5y ago

I see a lot of comments here talking about how many recruiter messages and calls and bidding wars they get, and I'm seriously wondering how much of these are tall tales... I've been a professional software dev for 25 years, spanning five countries (edit: including 5 years in San Francisco) and almost every part of the industry from embedded to enterprise, startups to multinationals, hardware to finance. I have written software in almost all major languages for multiple years, have worked with many major software stacks, and delivered major 6-month-to-multi-year projects. None of this is hyperbole. I have hundreds of github projects that are not forks, ranging up to tens of thousands of LOC, some that companies have built entire businesses out of (for example https://github.com/kstenerud/KSCrash https://github.com/kstenerud/KSCrash). I receive one, maybe two recruiter emails per year (only from Facebook - I think whenever my contact info goes to a new person), and that's about it. I've never been in a bidding war, and I can't remember a single job search that's completed in under 4 months. Are people ACTUALLY getting inundated like this so badly that they need a SPREADSHEET to keep things in order? Or is this just bragging?

jchonphoenix 5y ago
You've had a lot of experience in all the wrong places for this type of recruiter inbound. Join Meta. Move to Silicon Valley. Then tell me what you're experiencing 2 years later.
- kstenerud 5y ago
  I lived in San Francisco from 2011 to 2016 (9th and Folsom, right above the corner store). Same thing.
- Groxx 5y ago
  I've been getting ~2-5 recruiter emails per week for the past several months. Silicon Valley is a bit weird. That said, I'm also still getting periodic offers for unpaid summer internships from out of state. Maybe it's because I never finished my degree, and they're finding me from my college's records?
kevin_nisbet 5y ago

throwDec21 5y ago

How many jobs is normal to consider at a time? I saw he had 50ish in 2 weeks which is an awful lot for senior jobs. Even as an IC I can only really handle a fraction of that. Should I be applying for 100 roles/month? I'm not sure what is normal or a good strategy.

codeisawesome 5y ago

15 years of waiting for a green card. 15 years of being on a visa that can have you kicked out anytime no matter how much you’ve invested into life there. Hats off to the folks who put up with this.

lonesword 5y ago
Yeah that's what stood out for me as well. I wonder how long it takes to get a citizenship in the US. I immigrated to Germany and the experience has been surprisingly smooth and flexible: 1. Got a student visa to come study a masters in Germany 2. Did an internship and got a job offer before I completed my studies. 3. This is the part that blew my mind - my employer asked me if I can start working in May 2021 and I said I would like to (I was almost done with my masters thesis) but I don't have a masters degree yet and I can't work full time on my student visa. They simply applied for an EU Blue card based on my bachelors degree that I got from my home country (Computer Science) and I started working. The immigration office ("Ausländerbehörde") did not even care that I was currently enrolled as a student in Germany and that I haven't graduated yet. Germany gets a bad rep for its bureaucracy but this was one instance where it was surprisingly flexible.

justinlloyd 5y ago

Using a spreadsheet as a cheap CRM to track your job search and where you are in the process, cold leads, warm leads, follow-ups, and so forth is precisely what I do. I thought I was the only one who did that. Nice to know I am not crazy. :-) And the article is on-point with the "you get 30 minutes of my time otherwise you are wasting my time." Recruiters love their phone calls because they are trying to sell you something.

jdthedisciple 5y ago

I specifically removed my phone number from my CV when I noticed companies like to call and scheduele a meeting immediately. Such things gotta be done in an async manner e.g. by email.

jll29 5y ago

Key sentence: > And this is something to keep in mind working with recruiters: they work for the hiring company, not for you. Perhaps there's a new venture opportunity here: recruiters that find jobs that are on the employee side. They get the same money (e.g. paid by the employee's sign on bonus) as those working for the other side, but try to find a good role for the employee.

durnygbur 5y ago

As an alternative to the spreadsheet I maintain dedicated repository for job search with directory for every company I apply to, then one dedicated CalDAV calendar where most important remote and onsite interviews go.