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Ask HN: How's the job hunt going? (For those laid off)

290 points by thunkle 4y ago

For those laid off, how is the job hunt going? I haven't been able to start yet, but likely this next week I'll start studying and getting ready.

jayde2767 4y ago
I have been laid off since August, the options I have in front of me are not positive (things have slowed to a trickle where I am in the US), and I hope the New Year will be better, but... Otherwise I will look into non-tech related work to meet expenses.
zeroonetwothree 4y ago
I am not laid off but interviewing since I don’t like my current job. Seems to be tons of jobs still if you are L6+. Below that it gets harder.
- AlotOfReading 4y ago
  It's the same reason many employers don't have meaningful programs for continuing education or conferences. The goal is to hire people who are perfectly suited for the role already (or the nearest approximation), not to train people into the job.
  - adamius 4y ago
    Which is why the same employers will later complain about the lack of suitable candidates.
revskill 4y ago
No longer hunt for work. Instead will spend 1 year to build product for my own customers. Again, software engineering is such a great career, when you can create valuable things for others in case of crisis.
- greenpeas 4y ago
  This is intriguing. Can you provide more details? Did you have customers prior to deciding to "no longer hunt for work"? Or do you plan to find customers/build a new product?
  - revskill 4y ago
    I actually have enough credits from "potential customers", who always ask me to build products for them. One of main reason is, i told them, cloud products are shit (due to pricing, customization, and quality of codebase they made), but got no time to actually focus on building the product. So this is the time i want to settle down and make the progress for them. One example, they have no idea on how to build fast, secure and cheap websites!
- moneywoes 4y ago
  How did you find customers? This is a long term goal of mine. Trying to fit in ideation between leetcode prep and applying for jobs
  - revskill 4y ago
    Hi, thanks for asking. I know this is a hard one. Firstly, build your connection based on quality software. Find the first customer is the most difficult task! One way, is through friend connection. If a friend's friend is a boss at a company, then it's first good step. The most important thing, is you need to deliver usable software!
  - AviationAtom 4y ago
    People actually run businesses selling businesses. They develop a turnkey solution to a problem, launch, then immediately start seeking out a buyer.
arthurcolle 4y ago
Not great. I have been to last rounds with several large companies and then just get ghosted. Honestly have been interviewing for like 9 months (7 months before getting laid off)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
JoelMcCracken 4y ago
I’d ask in a month. It’s still early since the layoffs. I’d guess that even for people who were laid off first, started looking immediately, and found plenty of hits, few have accepted jobs. I’m much more curious in 4-5 months. I assume VC funding is harder to get now, for example, but I don’t think that’ll make a massive impact for a little while.
- bhaney 4y ago
  "I've found plenty of hits but haven't accepted an offer yet" seems like a perfectly reasonable response to the question of "how's the job hunt going?"
  - JoelMcCracken 4y ago
    Sure, but I think the implicit question-behind-the-question-being-asked is "we're hearing about a recession and that the job market is a lot harder than it was, how are you finding it?"
    - bhaney 4y ago
      Right, and that seems like a question that can be usefully answered right now by the victims of the early layoffs who might have had time to get a few offers by now. If the responses are all "it's been a month and 90% of the feedback I get is 'sorry we aren't hiring anymore'" then that paints a much more dire picture than "it's been a month and I have 4 viable offers that I need to pick between," both of which are potential responses we could be seeing by now.
- nixgeek 4y ago
  I got connected to someone impacted at Twitter on Saturday, within 24 hours of them being notified they were impacted by the layoff. I talked with them for an hour that next Monday AM about the opportunities my teams have open, one of which was highly relevant to their skills, and by the time we chatted, they had 3-4 interviews with other companies scheduled. Joined the dots to the hiring manager and recruiters. They introduced us to lots of other Twitter engineers too which was amazing and very helpful to me. Our interviews happened with them 10 days later and we moved forward to make an offer; we are still working through offer details with them (and they have multiple companies making offers). We’ve also got several strong applicants for this role. I’m glad to see many of the impacted folks are quickly finding places to land because the cruelty of Twitter’s next chapter under Elon is a stain on the industry and the world.
marumari 4y ago
this is a terrible time of year for interviewing, most places won’t be adding headcount until january.
- blamazon 4y ago
  I recall the 'pandemic hiring spree' on my team did not start until Jan-Feb 2021. After that it took basically the whole year to complete. That company was famous for its speed and scale of pandemic hiring sprees. To anyone who is job hunting now and finding a slow market: things will change, we will get through this.
abadger9 4y ago
I'm not laid off but actively looking to change after spending a couple of years at my current employer. Despite being a staff engineer, managing 12 engineers, and having a solid revenue stream tied to my current team - I've mostly gotten rejections without interviews, 1-2 low ball offers, or radio silence. I cannot imagine how hard this must be for those laid-off, hopefully this storm passes soon. EDIT: you cannot make this up, it's a saturday and we got an email 1/3 of our team got laid off (I didn't yet, but I have a feeling it might happen soon).
- that_guy_iain 4y ago
  I've not been laid off either. I'm currently taking a break from jobs. I'm starting to think that it's time to go back to full-time employment. But I'm looking at the job market and think it might be better to give it 4-6 months. Let all the companies that are going to do layoffs have their layoffs and then join a company still looking for new devs in a few months.
  - 300bps 4y ago
    >But I'm looking at the job market and think it might be better to give it 4-6 months. I'm fascinated by this. How does one do this? Two options I can think of are being independently wealthy and being dependent on another. Are there other ways to accomplish being so comfortable with, "eh, gonna be unemployed another 4-6 months and see what happens"?
    - rjh29 4y ago
      I don't earn a huge US salary, but my rent and bills are less than a third of my salary. I don't have a family. If you do that for 5 years, you have 10 years of savings where you could potentially not work!
    - ummonk 4y ago
      If you're not saving money on a software engineer salary, you're being very frivolous with your spending.
addaon 4y ago
Disclaimer: This is 100% a plug (for a friend, no financial interest on my part). A good friend have mine who has been focusing on career coaching has started to put together a few articles [1, 2] targeted more at folks impacted by recent layoffs. Like so many of these articles, the intent isn't to have deep, novel ideas -- instead, it's to pull together things that you probably already know, think about them clearly, and get some comfort in the next steps of job search. If a small number of readers have just one thing "click", it has some value, in my mind. This is one of the rougher markets we've seen for engineers in a while, but in my opinion it's still a worker's market -- in almost every niche I interact with, hiring has slowed but we are still having a hard time filling the open positions we do have, and we're always looking! [1] https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7001201153686269952/ https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7001201... [2] https://alignedclarity.substack.com/p/streamline-your-resume-and-increase https://alignedclarity.substack.com/p/streamline-your-resume...
spike021 4y ago
I wasn't laid off but spent Jan-Aug taking time off and then interviewing for a while. Even before the layoffs started things were getting tricky. I was mid-process with multiple companies between June and August that pulled out because they were having freezes, or no longer hiring for the west coast due to budget constraints, etc. I was still getting a fair amount of interviews though. Fortunately I landed an offer in August, because without it I may still be jobless. But the layoffs, freezes, and continued whiteboarding style interviews and things are definitely a trifecta.
kevinconroy 4y ago
If you are job searching and reading the comments on this post, there’s a >90% chance that "An Engineering Leader's Job Search Algorithm" may help you: https://docs.google.com/document/d/19fr_36WOzKlq_zyGP2RdxMEsdNQMZdUqn1Vahncr2pY/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/19fr_36WOzKlq_zyGP2RdxMEs... Good luck!
techterrier 4y ago
any tweeps who've engineering experience with algo feeds, if you fancy a short stint in #techforgood i'd love to hear from you... dom@birda.org
xfactor973 4y ago
Pretty badly. I’m getting way more rejections than usual and positions are closing before I can get through the funnel
chihuahua 4y ago
I keep getting the same amount of emails from recruiters as before, mostly startups. Found a new job (non-startup) by responding to one of those. Signed the offer and was going to quit FB on a certain date, then got the FB layoff severance package a week before that date as a nice bonus. I also interviewed at Google and got the thumbs up to proceed to team matching, but no team matches after a month. This makes me believe that they have at least a partial hiring freeze, although their recruiters are pretending that this is not the case - they're just saying that team matching takes a bit longer. Google interviews were useful as practice for the other jobs, but not for actually getting an offer.
- VirusNewbie 4y ago
  Took me three months for team match. I had five team match interviews and three selected me, two lost headcount.
  - drdrey 4y ago
    What did you do during these 3 months?
    - VirusNewbie 4y ago
      What do you mean? I had a job the entire time, and I interviewed at MSFT and NFLX in the meantime. Otherwise i would just periodically check in with my G recruiter trying to balance some urgency with politeness. I didn’t get an offer from NFLX but they came across extremely well, i’m very bullish on the company solely based on the culture and talent I met. The MSFT experience was the exact opposite!
      - KennyBlanken 4y ago
        I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but referring to companies by their stock tickers in casual conversation does not impress anyone.
        4y ago
kache_ 4y ago
Not laid off, but company was recently affected by one. I got recruiter interest, but that died down pretty quickly (My theory is that I got marked as "not laid off"). It was reminiscent of recruiter spam during start of covid. Looks like startups without talent now have the ability to get some engineers.
throw1234651234 4y ago
For those who did get laid off from F(/M)AANG, are you considering "lower" end positions or looking for comparable total comp at comparably sized, tech-focused companies? Just curious, as a flyover midwesterner, it seems like no one here is affected, nor are we getting any interviewees from FAANG into the pipeline suddenly.
- oceanplexian 4y ago
  There are a lot of FAANG-adjacent companies that offer competitive comp, Stripe, AirBNB, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. I left Amazon a year ago to work for one, most of my peers are AWS or Google engineers and the quality of life is much better. I interviewed at smaller companies but the main problem was they were out of touch with TC and unwilling to offer equity, and at least one place was kind of rude about it when I asked. Unless you’re desperate, no one from FAANG is going to work below market for a place that doesn’t give employees a stake in the business. Unless you’re Netflix and you offer dump-trucks worth of cash, equity is where the upside is.
  - throw1234651234 4y ago
    Definitely interesting to see the perspective from the other side - thank you. It really is a different world. I am a (by all accounts decent) architect and a 23 year old junior (admittedly exceptionally talented) got higher TC at Amazon when he jumped ship after 3 months with us (his first job out of college). He did ask if he could come back within a week, stating that the work env was horrible, and we told him he is welcome to if he wants, but at the end he decided to stay at Amazon. It's also not like we have a chill team - I just try to make sure people don't work OT unless it's strictly necessary (about once or twice a year). Other than that though, we do expect people to put in their 8 hours on a semi-flexible schedule.
  - granshaw 4y ago
    We will see, but I think there’s a real chance the former FAANG “market rate” due to their high flying RSUs might be gone for good for Engineering ICs, unless you’re well known in your area
  - 4y ago
pubby 4y ago
I wasn't laid off, but am unemployed. I've found it very difficult to land any interviews, or even get a response from companies. Even what I thought were safe bets (like a job at a bank, writing CRUD apps) do not respond. I've only had one interview this year. It was with a FAANG. I easily passed and got an offer, but then layoffs were announced and they had to revoke.
- elwell 4y ago
  You easily passed a FAANG interview?
  - pubby 4y ago
    By easy I mean I didn't prep or study, and at the end they said I passed with flying colors. I reckon my answers could have been a lot better though. I've only had two software interviews in my life, so I don't have much to compare it to.
  - hnfong 4y ago
    Looking at GP's profile, lots of NES programming and general gaming work. I can totally see how HR in banks would prefer somebody with 10 years of Java or C# experience, familiar with {Vendor}SQL and an employment history in a related banking/finance sector (and screen out everyone else). At least FAANG don't really care about those things. On the other hand if you know your way around assembly on esoteric hardware, the stereotypical FAANG whiteboarding questions like "reverse a linked list" shouldn't be a problem.
ericmcer 4y ago
Quit voluntarily in April, have been working on my own project since then, if it doesn't work I will start interviewing in Jan/Feb/Mar based on how the job market is looking. I find it hard to believe there wont be some recovery and would rather apply during a time where job seekers have a bit more leverage.
jedberg 4y ago
For those of you feeling down about being ignored, keep in mind this is the slowest hiring time of the year, with holidays and vacations, and end of year budgets. Even in down markets, hiring tends to pick up in January as managers get their hiring budgets for the new year and are back in the office. Hang in there!
- cmckn 4y ago
  You’re totally right; but I’m nervous for my laid-off friends that will burn through 80% of their severance over the holiday season. :(
  - czbond 4y ago
    After that there is unemployment insurance for a while. They'll be fine.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      Depending on the state, unemployment can be a few hundred dollars per week.
- arandomJohn 4y ago
  For companies that do on-campus recruiting it is the busiest hiring time of year. But for experienced devs it might be a weird time to look.
  - jedberg 4y ago
    This is true but sort of different. Most of them are hiring out of next year's budgets with start dates in May/June. The last time we had a pull-back in tech, a lot of those offers ended up getting rescinded, so if you're in that boat, don't start spending the money until you actually start...
    - arandomJohn 4y ago
      We’ve got people starting every week and open headcount for seniors.
echelon 4y ago
I know this may not be the correct thread for this, and hope it doesn't come across as not being empathetic: I'm paying $100/hr (negotiable) for skills in { Rust/Actix webdev, Unreal Engine plugin development, computer vision, audio processing, signal processing, ML }. These roles will convert to salary/equity later on, once the project outgrows my ability to self-fund. We're building a cloud-based AI film and music production suite. https://storyteller.io https://storyteller.io In any case, I'm sorry to anyone impacted by this down tech cycle. The world will get back to its senses, and tech will continue to eat everything else not-tech. Edit: I broke the contact form. Email me directly. echelon@gmail.com
- vogt 4y ago
  Pretty cool product. I don't have any of the skills you listed or anything, just wanted to say this looks neat. Also looks like something built by people very familiar with the space they're in, which is always a huge plus in my book when evaluating startups.
- lukaesch 4y ago
  May I ask why you use rust/actix for web dev?
  - echelon 4y ago
    We do real time signal processing, 3D graphics, and other systems-y stuff, so we just decided to use Rust up and down the stack. It works well for us. Actix/sqlx isn't Rails, but it's 90% of the way there. The rich type system is liberating, and form validation is far easier with Actix/serde than rspec.
- erixM 4y ago
  Hi, your product looks great! I currently have 2 years of experience as a fullstack developer, mainly using React on the frontend side. I am not ready for your Rust/Actix webdev position at the moment, but, if I wanted to prepare for it in the next months, what advice would you give me? What would be the requirements to pass the interview?
the_only_law 4y ago
I was laid off from an over leveraged startup-type company you haven’t heard of. The search so far has been pretty bad. Probably in part because of the timing (a week before thanksgiving, but it’s the same story every time. Any job I want I won’t get and any job I don’t want I can get. I expect things to maybe pick up a little in early December, but I’m honestly kinda defeated. My last job was far from perfect, but I was planning on using to save up the industry afterwards which ofc won’t happen now, at least not in the timeframe I envisioned. Worst case I have to accept a pay cut that will nip those plans very quickly.
- killingtime74 4y ago
  Hang in there, it's only been one week?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
kristopolous 4y ago
Let me show you the backdoor: Find a company whose open source projects you are interested in. Dive in and and start fixing things. Then if you really like it after a couple weeks start nudging around for a job. If you do good work they'll just give it to you, no bullshit funnel required. I like this method because you aren't just doing l33t coding exercises to work on some sight unseen codebase that makes you suicidal and throw you into existential crisis. In this modality you are test driving each other.
- turdprincess 4y ago
  Curious if you have done this yourself
  - giomasce 4y ago
    Not GP, but I have and it worked. Pretty happy of the job I have, working of free software in a great environment.
  - kristopolous 4y ago
    Yep. More than once. I got frustrated by interviews where I told them I've been doing this for over 25 years and they're like "ok how do you show the list of files in this directory at the bash prompt" I've had the "what the hell job are you hiring for?" response in my head many times I've got no interest groveling my way up some kind of hierarchy to eventually get to a position I thought I was coming in to do in the first place. This has turned out to be a perfectly acceptable shortcut. You could say it's more like petitioning for a job as opposed to applying for one
- sva_ 4y ago
  This sounds like you're suggesting people work for free for the hope of potentially being hired by an employer. I think that is pretty pathetic.
  - briga 4y ago
    I mean, even if they don’t get hired they’re still contributing to open-source. Seems like a good outcome either way
cmrdporcupine 4y ago
TLDR: the job market (for senior talent) is much better than you'd think, from my observation. But if coming from FAANG expect compensation cut (and that's probably ok!) I didn't get laid off, but. Quit Google at the height of the frenzy last December. Coasted for a while doing my own thing and entertaining a job offer that fell through. After that through the spring and summer it was actually slow and difficult finding work. I signed a contract that was initially very exciting and promising but then found there was a crypto/eth association I was not comfortable with, so started looking immediately and was very worried because of the layoffs that were starting to blow up. But in the end I actually found it not bad and I had the choice of basically two excellent and exciting jobs. I'm still not 100% certain I picked the right one, but here goes! And holy crap am I tired of interviews. Similarly I have a friend who got laid off from Meta in the latest round, and she's already interviewing in boatloads of places. I think the key thing is that compensation that's out there won't match what is made at a FAANG, esp with the latest round of layoffs. But I'm personally fine with that. In exchange for getting my soul back.
IntFee588 4y ago
Just got hired doing firmware stuff. Core technologies seem to still be doing okay.
hw 4y ago
Curious on how many are taking this opportunity to start their own company. Would love to see a list
HNanony 4y ago
I'm gonna let the H1B folks take first crack at things...I'll start looking in a week or two.
throwaway20382 4y ago
I have 15 years experience, run large production sites, our company sold for near a billion dollars to a foreign company recently, and they are doing layoffs based on "order by salary desc" . My days are numbered. I do SRE mainly, but I code all day and run teams. Company 1: Terrible over-engineered music firm (no users). Full 7 rounds, exams (which were easy shit), but "VP" ghosted me, he was a former twitter guy, seems like he wants to hire a twitter guy. Company 2: Credit card company. Full 5 rounds. Four hours of exams. The recruiter feedback from team was "too much of a people manager", then ghosted. Someone lied and said I was non technical - yet i passed the technical exams. I used the term "we" too much explaining projects. Company 3 (automatic): Finished the exam in LUA for a openresty opensource project (didn't even know lua). Everything worked nicely. I was told he didn't like how i laid out the lua. Company 4: "Not enough of a people manager." Company 5,6,7,...: Recuriters make me do calls and exams then ghosted. I don't think they have jobs - just recruiting cause that is what they do. Exams: 1) using openrusty to create a application load balancer in lua 2) using python to create a url shortener 3) using php, complex input file, then output file (sorting, hasing, parsing) 4) using ruby, connect to an oracle db then do complex queries (outer joins etc). Just for hazing sake, they named the tables keywords eg: "join". I will say the take home tests at these companies are fun. I have a family and I am very nervous.
- kyleyeats 4y ago
  On a positive note, you seem to have greatly narrowed the range for how much of a people manager to be.
- nimchimpsky 4y ago
- bm3719 4y ago
  > Finished the exam in LUA for a openresty opensource project (didn't even know lua). Everything worked nicely. I was told he didn't like how i laid out the lua. I like take-home tests too, but am reluctant to do them in languages I don't have a lot of recent experience in. Not that I can't ramp up enough to get them working, but when someone who writes that language every day looks at the code of a guy who just read a few tutorials, he's going to be irked by lots of little things. Not the impression you want to give going forward. Only exception is if I can solve the problem in a more academic language, e.g. Scheme, or something else they don't use there. That's probably a deal-breaker at places that want to hire a developer with X years of experience in some specific language. So if I found that was the case, I'd probably just pass on it, as it's obviously not me they're looking for. Whether they realize/intend it or not, they're filtering for someone who has said language and tooling pre-loaded into their brain.
hizxy 4y ago
Looking to quit w/o anything lined up. Rejected a few offers before the shit hit the fan. Starting to hate the field and need some time to think.
- mancerayder 4y ago
  Wait til right before the summer, not only will the picture economically be more clear, but there's a summer to enjoy. Right now is a slower holiday season where you'd expect a more relaxed work experience, and a bad time to travel or enjoy life. That assumes you're in the northern hemisphere!
  - hizxy 4y ago
    Thanks for the tip! I’m in CA.
  - veidr 4y ago
    but i hate summer and love winter (but NorHemi FTW whooooo000000!!!)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
fatnoah 4y ago
I was laid off as part of a layoff large enough to trigger the WARN act, so I was put on garden leave for 60 days.. I was fortunate to find a new job and start it exactly as the garden leave expired. It was my first job search in the post-COVID era, aka the era of remote work, and wow was it different. Traditionally, I'd see a handful of jobs that looked interesting each week, and would be one of a handful of applicants. Now that geography isn't really a barrier, there were far more options, but far more applicants. I'd see 20+ roles per week that were a good fit, but each would have 40-200+ applicants, even for the senior (Director/VP) level roles I was looking for. I've got over 20 years experience from startup to massive tech companies, and applied to 58 jobs. 12 of those led to an initial discussiopn with a recruiter, and 3 of those led to a full interview loop and 1 job offer. Since accepting the job offer, I've heard from 4 more of the companies I applied to and they were interested in going forward with the process. For each, it was at least 5 weeks since my initial application.
- moneywoes 4y ago
  May I ask what job boards you are frequenting? Happy to hear you got back on your feat so quickly
  - fatnoah 4y ago
    It was pretty much 99% LinkedIn, but with the huge caveat that the job I accepted was one I found on Indeed. That said, I gave up on Indeed pretty quickly because it mostly showed irrelevant jobs (not software engineering, far too junior, etc). Sifting through the noise was tough. I resorted to a daily alert for each job title, since that kept the number to process each day down to a manageable level, and I made strong use of the "hide this job" function of LinkedIn to keep ones that didn't feel like a good fit from popping up again.
- relaxing 4y ago
  5 weeks! As a hiring manager, I cannot fathom expecting a candidate to wait around that long and still be available.
manish_gill 4y ago
Since this thread is the most relevant - my partner has been struggling for a long time to get going into the field as a Data Analyst/BI analyst doing SQL, Tableau, Excel and (beginner) Python/Pandas. She has been hunting for junior positions or even internships with no luck so far. Here in the EU, either her career gap (due to covid + country change + taking time to upskill herself) gets in the way, or C-level German language does, and if nothing else, they're hiring Seniors. If anyone is willing to hire a bright and hard-working beginner with an MBA in Finance, drop me an email at me [at] manishgill [dot] com
- holografix 4y ago
  It might very well be her basic German holding her back. Any chance of upskilling her quickly through some intensive German lessons over the Christmas break? From memory the German market can be surprisingly insular in its use of German. Not as tough as the French, but close. Also, maybe she can work remotely for a Dutch company? If she speaks good English the Dutch don’t care at all.
  - manish_gill 4y ago
    Thanks. Her German is A2 already. The problem is that companies here expect professional C1-C2 level, which will take some time. And yeah, great idea re: jobs for Dutch companies. Will definitely check that out!
MattDemers 4y ago
Garbage. I'm looking for marketing/communications/social media work. Those industries aren't really hiring right now, and despite changing/improving my resume/cover letter three times now (with help from a hiring manager friend, and a career coach), I'm still not getting any kind of non-automated response. Been searching for 6 months now. Strangely, I had one place basically self-flagellate at how bad they were at their response time (again, in an automated response), and never followed up again. I feel like part of my problem is that I worked in an industry previously that inflated my titles. I'm applying to entry-level/associated positions with "Director" on my resume, mostly because I'm trying to upskill things I didn't get to learn, in an environment where I'm not managing the whole department. It's disheartening to see LinkedIn say "Yeah, want to see how you stack up against the 100+ other applicants?"
moneywoes 4y ago
Poor luck as a 2 yoe backend based in Canada Would love to know any good job boards if people know
moosedev 4y ago
I took ~1.5 years off after 12+ years of FAANG. 1 month ago, I decided I was ready to work again and started talking to recruiters for real. It's been very slow. Most positions I've applied to, I've heard nothing back, even when referred by a current employee. I've had some flat rejections without even a recruiter chat. One recruiter called me to say they were on a temporary hiring freeze, and then she got laid off. I've had a handful of tech screen interviews, but only one* has progressed all the way to a full interview loop so far, and I got a generic rejection a few days later. I have been waiting 2.5 weeks and counting for a phone screen result from another (larger, public) tech company. Nothing close to an offer yet. I'm considering just taking more time off until things speed up again - I can afford it, but I worry about how hard it will be to get hired again with a "long" gap of 2+ years. * for "Senior Software Engineer" at a medium-sized pre-IPO tech company
- ldjkfkdsjnv 4y ago
  In 2017 I had taken two years off and went back into the job market after very solid employment history. Only one major company would interview me, and I passed. I got ghosted by regular companies I was "too good for" previously. Before taking time off I was a premium candidate. So yeah it can be hard, you do need some sort of explanation, even in a good market.
- jedberg 4y ago
  Fill the gap with something technical. Start a company, work on a tech related side project, etc.
- plants 4y ago
  I have also been out of work for ~8mo for various reasons, and while I’m sorry for your situation, it’s heartening to hear I’m not the only one. I’ve only actually gotten one tech screen in which I was asked a LC “hard” question, which I didn’t pass (I’m pretty good with “easy” and “medium”, but come on, hard?). So far, I have one other interview from an internal referral, but haven’t heard anything back from the ~10-15 other applications I’ve sent out. I’m getting a bit discouraged and feel similarly as you - it would be nice to take more time off (maybe I don’t actually love working in tech?), but I have the same worried as you. Feels good to vent in this thread, though :)
tschellenbach 4y ago
We're hiring, but very slowly/carefully atm (https://getstream.io/team/ https://getstream.io/team/). It's insane, similar companies to us used to raise $100-$200M with our metrics, at the moment i'm not even trying to raise additional capital. On the other hands it's nice that there is less hype and you can just focus on building and real progress.
- hawk_ 4y ago
  Nice. What's the compensation range for this role in Remote (EMEA) or AMS? https://getstream.io/careers/job/4617451003/ https://getstream.io/careers/job/4617451003/
piercebot 4y ago
I transitioned from full-time employment to contracting in April 2022. I am currently over-employed and working two gigs simultaneously. All leads have come from my personal network or my reputation as a known entity in a relatively niche field. Only trouble I've had is invoice approval and waiting for money to be moved, but it has always eventually come through. Cashflow remains equivalent to when I was an FTE, but I'm working fewer hours per day and working on more interesting things. A lot of that has to do with transitioning out of management, I think. I don't miss it :)
- nowherebeen 4y ago
  Nice to read something positive for once. Happy for you.
- maxnevermind 4y ago
  Can you elaborate. So you are working two supposedly full-time jobs but in reality working less than 8 hours in total, is that right?
  - piercebot 4y ago
    Sure! For the first job, I bill hourly for the time I spend working. Here, I develop web applications to validate machine learning models for a company; I help organize results in a way that allows ML engineers to easily "spot check" the results of ML runs on data through a web interface. The second job I have is in the "web3" space developing applications that run on a specific blockchain in which I've specialized. Compensation here is based on milestones and paid out in cryptocurrency. In both cases, I am transparent about the progress I'm making and compensated accordingly. The hourly rate I charge as a contractor brings in an equivalent salary to what I had as a full-time employee in about 900 hours per year, which works out to be about 18/hours per week if you assume 2 weeks off.
6ak74rfy 4y ago
I am not laid off yet but the org I am part of, in one of the FAANGs, is rumored to have layoffs in December or Q1 next year. I have been with this company for almost a decade, am one of the top performers and think I am close to a promotion to the staff level - despite all of that, I am cognizant of the fact that none of this matters when it comes to layoffs and I am as likely to be laid of as any other person in my org. It's a bit scary. So, I am spending some time on the side sharpening my technical skills. For e.g., Crafting Interpreters and Designing Data Intensive Applications.
holografix 4y ago
tl;dr some people hiring but December is going to slow you right down. Wait for Jan. Applied for a small pre-ipo biz lately, I’m over qualified for the position and respectfully let them know that I’d expect a very clear and direct path to a more senior position in max 12 months. Interview process is slow but ongoing. I was told that it prob won’t happen before Jan.
DeathArrow 4y ago
Why does OP ask about people layd off? Are there some big waves of people being fired? I don't live in the US and I didn't read much news recently, so that's why I ask. In my country there aren't many people people in It (if any) layd off.
- yumbrand 4y ago
  Yeah, Meta cut 11k people, Amazon has a hiring freeze right now, things are slower at Google hiring, not sure about Microsoft or any of the other big tech companies. Partially driven by interest rates disproportionately affecting tech, partially these companies are just missing earnings a lot and needing to cut headcount. Not sure how private companies are faring, but probably similarly getting pressure to cut headcount -- would imagine that this would start happening in other countries too (e.g., Canada sees lagging interest rates vs. U.S.)
  - DeathArrow 4y ago
    I just got hired in Europe by a private owned US based company. So, at least some companies are doing OK.
- cableshaft 4y ago
  September: Patreon 150, Twilio 850, Ericsson 400, DocuSign 650 October: Peloton 500, Intel "thousands", Oracle 200, Microsoft 1k, Zillow 300 November: Opendoor 550, Twitter 3700+ (probably 5000+ after the 'sign the hardcore decree or be terminated'), Zendesk 350, Salesforce '100s', Meta 11000, Amazon 10000, Cisco 4000, HP 4000-6000, Stripe 1000+, Lyft 683 Hasn't happened yet but reported to do so soon: Google 10000[1] Notice it's accelerating, both in size of layoffs and and how many tech companies are laying people off. Granted part of it may be trying to squeeze it in before the end of the year for financial purposes. Source: https://tech.co/news/tech-companies-layoffs https://tech.co/news/tech-companies-layoffs EDIT: Crunchbase is saying 73,000 workers in the tech sector have been laid off in 2022, so far. Also has more companies on their list. https://news.crunchbase.com/startups/tech-layoffs-2022/ https://news.crunchbase.com/startups/tech-layoffs-2022/ [1] https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/another-massive-tech-company-plans-to-cut-10k-jobs-reports/ https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/another-massive-tech-com...
valdiorn 4y ago
I've just started a new job, a startup hedge fund with friends and former colleagues, so not really that applicable to the question (but also, my god how nice it is to just get a call from someone you know and respect, get offered a job and not even have to interview for it :) However, I've noticed that the LinkedIn spam is getting increasingly outrageous in their offers (I'm in quant finance in London). This surprised me given the market is supposedly cooling off with lots of free agent talent, but I'm getting multiple offers a day promising 300-500k (GBP) compensation, sometimes even fixed base comp! It sounds a bit too good to be true but the frequency of messages and the numbers in those messages have both been blowing up over the last 3-4 months. Not sure what's driving this but it's definitely unusual given the market and location. I'd say it's about double the top range I've seen in previous years.
gigatexal 4y ago
A friend of mine was doing an almost week long (thankfully paid) interview with Automatic for a senior data engineering position. These are the folks being Wordpress and Hey — the DHH company — anyway. Long story short while he was working on tasks in this weird ass way to interview about half way into the week he gets a message saying the role had been closed. Suddenly. There was no inkling or hint that the role was tenantive. Shortly before he he process to interview and maybe hire my friend there was some message or rumor that they were trying to scoop up laid off Twitter employees. I dunno. It seems shady. Avoid Auromatic not for the politics but because it’s not well run at all.
zerr 4y ago
Are only the people with FANG-like compensations (200K base/300K+ stock) being laid off or are the "regularly" compensated (60K-150K) devs affected as well?
- the_only_law 4y ago
  I was a “regular” dev that was laid off. Company saw massive headcount growth prior to and during Covid only for the effort to fizzle out and they probably laid it 30-50% of the small company.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
matsemann 4y ago
> but likely this next week I'll start studying and getting ready. Studying?? For a job interview? Do you seriously need to do whiteboard algorithm reverse a linked list kinda coding as a senior in the US? Or what is it that you need to study before an interview?
- restalis 4y ago
  Not the OP, but my experience when I had interviews and worked on improvement wasn't that much on technical side as it was on "soft skills" that had a bigger impact on the interview outcome than I was previously willing to admit. But even if the study is technical, that's OK. There are a lot of pieces that rarely occur outside academia and hiring interviews, and after years you'd want to fresh things up, even if it's just to improve recall and answer times during the interview, if nothing else.
- bunnyhop 4y ago
  Oddly enough going through about 6 interviews as a senior... things get more technical instead of interviews as a junior where things were more methodical. Junior interviews were more, 'How would you go about solving problem x?'. Senior interviews have been more, 'What exact function parameters of this obscure library would you use to implement x design pattern in this made-up system for this interview?' Which is absurd unless you're a very narrowly focused SME on one specific tool/language.
SpectralTheory 4y ago
Sounds like it's broadly terrible... Good news is the who's hiring thread is coming up again in a couple days.
SCUSKU 4y ago
Thanks for asking so that we can all vent! I have 2 YOE as a SWE, got laid off in August from a startup that was Series A and generating no revenue. I was able to get interviews in September/October, and got far at 2 companies but got rejected by one and ghosted by another. I have found it's much harder to get an interview this month as layoffs increase. I'm pretty much hoping that once the holidays are over, things will pick up again, but I am pretty worried that I may be forced to just join the military or something because I can't get a job in tech.
- skeeter2020 4y ago
  As someone who's been ghosted as well I think you should name the company or (in my experience it was) the person who ghosted you. This is totally unacceptable and I think we should make them pay when the labour market gets tight again. And if you don't believe in karma, I saw a linkedin post by the guy who ghosted me about how he got screwed over by the company and let go. It's not super healthy, but it still feels good sometimes...
  - SCUSKU 4y ago
    The company is called Recurve. I really enjoyed the interview and the process there (no leetcode), but I was just disappointed that after all of that, they ended up ghosting. I'm not holding it against them too much, but still, doesn't feel good.
- ghaff 4y ago
  As others have said, unemployment in the US is still pretty low. But that may not mean for the near future that plum tech jobs are growing on trees. Lots of openings at many companies/govt orgs (including military) for roles with tech skills but probably not at comp many have come to expect. See also 2000/2001+ era.
  - SCUSKU 4y ago
    Do you think $120k is a reasonable expectation for a SWE with 2 YOE in this market? That's what I am shooting for, and still think is reasonable to expect, but on the otherhand if layoffs continue, I guess I may be forced to reconsider...
koinedad 4y ago
I wasn’t laid off but was at a startup that went through 4 rounds of layoffs. It took me 8 months to get an offer in this economy. Literally mid interview loop a few of the companies froze hiring. It was pretty crazy.
brocha 4y ago
I just got blindsided two weeks back from the best job I've ever had. Not looking forward to the search (taking December off to get married) as I have extreme anxiety when it comes to live coding, and I cannot figure out why. Even basic SQL queries escape me when somebody is watching. I've always been fantastic at test taking so take home assignments or leetcode type tests I can do, and hell, even putting together a presentation of a project I've done and presenting is fine. Just that live coding portion that always sucks. Senior Data Engineer with 15+ years of Python experience and a background in Physics and Math. Can't wait for the new "Who's Hiring"
- ryanferg 4y ago
  I feel you on the live coding. As for the physics/math data engineer, hit me up at rferguson at astros.com if you'd like, we're always looking for solid cross discipline folks
throwawaydad12 4y ago
I've been at this for almost 40 years, and it's shocking to me how little urgency there is to hiring over the last 5-10 years. I have a sinecure but still interview from time to time. Compared to (say) 1990, it's intensely time-consuming and unproductive. In principle, I'm likely someone that hiring managers are looking for, and really a pretty good deal. In practice, I'll probably just retire rather than throw my hat into the ring again. Or--since I have a vindictive sense of humor--maybe I'll spend my retirement doing "fake" interviews with prospective employers.
- pyb 4y ago
  This. It's been a buyers market in the last decade. If employers were really struggling to hire great engineers, they wouldn't be "playing with their food" so much.
- dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
  >it's intensely time-consuming and unproductive. I think it's this one of the parts that really ticks someone like me off. Most interviewers know almost upfront 10 minutes into into the interview if they are going to reject you, yet they can often drag on for an hour, under the guise of knowing, your 'approach' a problem.
  - hnfong 4y ago
    Hiring decisions are generally not made by only one person. The interviewee might be performing poorly on one interview, but the interviewer doesn't know how it went on the others. Shutting off the interviewee 10 minutes into a one-hour interview session would backfire pretty badly unless the interviewer is sure that those 10 minutes was enough to determine the candidate definitely isn't hire-worthy (which is different from voting to pass on the candidate). The (Bayesian) priors of that happening should be pretty low if the screening process was working as intended. Making the wrong call would entail the interviewee potentially feeling offended, which could be an issue if the ultimate decision was to make an offer to them -- they might reject the offer due to this experience alone. Not to mention it would be pretty awkward to work with a new colleague where you walked out on him as an interviewer. (In general you really don't want colleagues to know that you voted to pass on them) In general if a candidate thinks they're getting nowhere they can suggest to stop the interview. Nobody can stop you from cutting it short and leave if those 50 minutes are important to you. (Also, FWIW I don't think saving a hypothetical 50 minutes of interview time is what the GP was specifically referring to...)
nowherebeen 4y ago
I am not laid off but I am looking. There is a lot less jobs available. The ones on LinkedIn are all old job posts being refreshed and don’t exist anymore. I was finally able to get 1 interview with Google because I reached out to the same recruiter I rejected a few months prior for another role.
djohnston 4y ago
Pretty tough, altho I'm not sure if it's because of macroeconomic conditions or because I'm applying to a lot of hedge funds and I'm not amazing at leetcode.
laurex 4y ago
Are people in this boat thinking of working on fun or side projects as they look? Especially non-commercial or for-good work. Curious if we’ll see interesting creative work come out of this period it if people are growing disillusioned enough with the current system to start experimenting with other approaches.
cranberryturkey 4y ago
landosaari 4y ago
Actively looking. Jobless and homeless since completing my technical degree from a Nordic country. Subsisting on ~3€/day. The responses have been: not a cultural fit, wasn’t the perfect match (German speaking responses), overqualified (mostly from western countries), under qualified (from countries like Czechia, Poland, Romania,etc.) for junior positions. Getting interviews has been difficult and sparse. Contributed to FOSS, and keep learning programming/higher maths. Hope is low.
bunnyhop 4y ago
CIOGuy 4y ago
I have an opposite problem, I am trying desperately to hire developers but we don't do full remote. We require some in-office time and that just turns people off. Upper management won't listen to me, they want people in the office at least three days a week so basically I'll never be able to hire anyone. We offer big salaries, benefits, you name it. Commuting sucks and people know it.
- saNFTos 4y ago
  If you were able to get one or two candidates by the end of this week to interview that were willing to do hybrid, would that work for you?
okar1n 4y ago
I am a final year student persuing computer science (July'23 expected graduation), applying constantly but not getting responses.

290 points by thunkle 4y ago

For those laid off, how is the job hunt going? I haven't been able to start yet, but likely this next week I'll start studying and getting ready.

jayde2767 4y ago

I have been laid off since August, the options I have in front of me are not positive (things have slowed to a trickle where I am in the US), and I hope the New Year will be better, but... Otherwise I will look into non-tech related work to meet expenses.

zeroonetwothree 4y ago

I am not laid off but interviewing since I don’t like my current job. Seems to be tons of jobs still if you are L6+. Below that it gets harder.

AlotOfReading 4y ago
It's the same reason many employers don't have meaningful programs for continuing education or conferences. The goal is to hire people who are perfectly suited for the role already (or the nearest approximation), not to train people into the job.
- adamius 4y ago
  Which is why the same employers will later complain about the lack of suitable candidates.

revskill 4y ago

No longer hunt for work. Instead will spend 1 year to build product for my own customers. Again, software engineering is such a great career, when you can create valuable things for others in case of crisis.

greenpeas 4y ago
This is intriguing. Can you provide more details? Did you have customers prior to deciding to "no longer hunt for work"? Or do you plan to find customers/build a new product?
- revskill 4y ago
  I actually have enough credits from "potential customers", who always ask me to build products for them. One of main reason is, i told them, cloud products are shit (due to pricing, customization, and quality of codebase they made), but got no time to actually focus on building the product. So this is the time i want to settle down and make the progress for them. One example, they have no idea on how to build fast, secure and cheap websites!
moneywoes 4y ago
How did you find customers? This is a long term goal of mine. Trying to fit in ideation between leetcode prep and applying for jobs
- revskill 4y ago
  Hi, thanks for asking. I know this is a hard one. Firstly, build your connection based on quality software. Find the first customer is the most difficult task! One way, is through friend connection. If a friend's friend is a boss at a company, then it's first good step. The most important thing, is you need to deliver usable software!
- AviationAtom 4y ago
  People actually run businesses selling businesses. They develop a turnkey solution to a problem, launch, then immediately start seeking out a buyer.

arthurcolle 4y ago

Not great. I have been to last rounds with several large companies and then just get ghosted. Honestly have been interviewing for like 9 months (7 months before getting laid off)

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

JoelMcCracken 4y ago

I’d ask in a month. It’s still early since the layoffs. I’d guess that even for people who were laid off first, started looking immediately, and found plenty of hits, few have accepted jobs. I’m much more curious in 4-5 months. I assume VC funding is harder to get now, for example, but I don’t think that’ll make a massive impact for a little while.

bhaney 4y ago
"I've found plenty of hits but haven't accepted an offer yet" seems like a perfectly reasonable response to the question of "how's the job hunt going?"
- JoelMcCracken 4y ago
  Sure, but I think the implicit question-behind-the-question-being-asked is "we're hearing about a recession and that the job market is a lot harder than it was, how are you finding it?"
  - bhaney 4y ago
    Right, and that seems like a question that can be usefully answered right now by the victims of the early layoffs who might have had time to get a few offers by now. If the responses are all "it's been a month and 90% of the feedback I get is 'sorry we aren't hiring anymore'" then that paints a much more dire picture than "it's been a month and I have 4 viable offers that I need to pick between," both of which are potential responses we could be seeing by now.
nixgeek 4y ago
I got connected to someone impacted at Twitter on Saturday, within 24 hours of them being notified they were impacted by the layoff. I talked with them for an hour that next Monday AM about the opportunities my teams have open, one of which was highly relevant to their skills, and by the time we chatted, they had 3-4 interviews with other companies scheduled. Joined the dots to the hiring manager and recruiters. They introduced us to lots of other Twitter engineers too which was amazing and very helpful to me. Our interviews happened with them 10 days later and we moved forward to make an offer; we are still working through offer details with them (and they have multiple companies making offers). We’ve also got several strong applicants for this role. I’m glad to see many of the impacted folks are quickly finding places to land because the cruelty of Twitter’s next chapter under Elon is a stain on the industry and the world.

marumari 4y ago

this is a terrible time of year for interviewing, most places won’t be adding headcount until january.

blamazon 4y ago
I recall the 'pandemic hiring spree' on my team did not start until Jan-Feb 2021. After that it took basically the whole year to complete. That company was famous for its speed and scale of pandemic hiring sprees. To anyone who is job hunting now and finding a slow market: things will change, we will get through this.

abadger9 4y ago

I'm not laid off but actively looking to change after spending a couple of years at my current employer. Despite being a staff engineer, managing 12 engineers, and having a solid revenue stream tied to my current team - I've mostly gotten rejections without interviews, 1-2 low ball offers, or radio silence. I cannot imagine how hard this must be for those laid-off, hopefully this storm passes soon. EDIT: you cannot make this up, it's a saturday and we got an email 1/3 of our team got laid off (I didn't yet, but I have a feeling it might happen soon).

that_guy_iain 4y ago
I've not been laid off either. I'm currently taking a break from jobs. I'm starting to think that it's time to go back to full-time employment. But I'm looking at the job market and think it might be better to give it 4-6 months. Let all the companies that are going to do layoffs have their layoffs and then join a company still looking for new devs in a few months.
- 300bps 4y ago
  >But I'm looking at the job market and think it might be better to give it 4-6 months. I'm fascinated by this. How does one do this? Two options I can think of are being independently wealthy and being dependent on another. Are there other ways to accomplish being so comfortable with, "eh, gonna be unemployed another 4-6 months and see what happens"?
  - rjh29 4y ago
    I don't earn a huge US salary, but my rent and bills are less than a third of my salary. I don't have a family. If you do that for 5 years, you have 10 years of savings where you could potentially not work!
  - ummonk 4y ago
    If you're not saving money on a software engineer salary, you're being very frivolous with your spending.

addaon 4y ago

Disclaimer: This is 100% a plug (for a friend, no financial interest on my part). A good friend have mine who has been focusing on career coaching has started to put together a few articles [1, 2] targeted more at folks impacted by recent layoffs. Like so many of these articles, the intent isn't to have deep, novel ideas -- instead, it's to pull together things that you probably already know, think about them clearly, and get some comfort in the next steps of job search. If a small number of readers have just one thing "click", it has some value, in my mind. This is one of the rougher markets we've seen for engineers in a while, but in my opinion it's still a worker's market -- in almost every niche I interact with, hiring has slowed but we are still having a hard time filling the open positions we do have, and we're always looking! [1] https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7001201153686269952/ https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7001201... [2] https://alignedclarity.substack.com/p/streamline-your-resume-and-increase https://alignedclarity.substack.com/p/streamline-your-resume...

spike021 4y ago

I wasn't laid off but spent Jan-Aug taking time off and then interviewing for a while. Even before the layoffs started things were getting tricky. I was mid-process with multiple companies between June and August that pulled out because they were having freezes, or no longer hiring for the west coast due to budget constraints, etc. I was still getting a fair amount of interviews though. Fortunately I landed an offer in August, because without it I may still be jobless. But the layoffs, freezes, and continued whiteboarding style interviews and things are definitely a trifecta.

kevinconroy 4y ago

If you are job searching and reading the comments on this post, there’s a >90% chance that "An Engineering Leader's Job Search Algorithm" may help you: https://docs.google.com/document/d/19fr_36WOzKlq_zyGP2RdxMEsdNQMZdUqn1Vahncr2pY/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/19fr_36WOzKlq_zyGP2RdxMEs... Good luck!

techterrier 4y ago

any tweeps who've engineering experience with algo feeds, if you fancy a short stint in #techforgood i'd love to hear from you... dom@birda.org

xfactor973 4y ago

Pretty badly. I’m getting way more rejections than usual and positions are closing before I can get through the funnel

chihuahua 4y ago

I keep getting the same amount of emails from recruiters as before, mostly startups. Found a new job (non-startup) by responding to one of those. Signed the offer and was going to quit FB on a certain date, then got the FB layoff severance package a week before that date as a nice bonus. I also interviewed at Google and got the thumbs up to proceed to team matching, but no team matches after a month. This makes me believe that they have at least a partial hiring freeze, although their recruiters are pretending that this is not the case - they're just saying that team matching takes a bit longer. Google interviews were useful as practice for the other jobs, but not for actually getting an offer.

VirusNewbie 4y ago
Took me three months for team match. I had five team match interviews and three selected me, two lost headcount.
- drdrey 4y ago
  What did you do during these 3 months?
  - VirusNewbie 4y ago
    What do you mean? I had a job the entire time, and I interviewed at MSFT and NFLX in the meantime. Otherwise i would just periodically check in with my G recruiter trying to balance some urgency with politeness. I didn’t get an offer from NFLX but they came across extremely well, i’m very bullish on the company solely based on the culture and talent I met. The MSFT experience was the exact opposite!
    - KennyBlanken 4y ago
      I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but referring to companies by their stock tickers in casual conversation does not impress anyone.
      - 4y ago

kache_ 4y ago

Not laid off, but company was recently affected by one. I got recruiter interest, but that died down pretty quickly (My theory is that I got marked as "not laid off"). It was reminiscent of recruiter spam during start of covid. Looks like startups without talent now have the ability to get some engineers.

throw1234651234 4y ago

For those who did get laid off from F(/M)AANG, are you considering "lower" end positions or looking for comparable total comp at comparably sized, tech-focused companies? Just curious, as a flyover midwesterner, it seems like no one here is affected, nor are we getting any interviewees from FAANG into the pipeline suddenly.

oceanplexian 4y ago
There are a lot of FAANG-adjacent companies that offer competitive comp, Stripe, AirBNB, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. I left Amazon a year ago to work for one, most of my peers are AWS or Google engineers and the quality of life is much better. I interviewed at smaller companies but the main problem was they were out of touch with TC and unwilling to offer equity, and at least one place was kind of rude about it when I asked. Unless you’re desperate, no one from FAANG is going to work below market for a place that doesn’t give employees a stake in the business. Unless you’re Netflix and you offer dump-trucks worth of cash, equity is where the upside is.
- throw1234651234 4y ago
  Definitely interesting to see the perspective from the other side - thank you. It really is a different world. I am a (by all accounts decent) architect and a 23 year old junior (admittedly exceptionally talented) got higher TC at Amazon when he jumped ship after 3 months with us (his first job out of college). He did ask if he could come back within a week, stating that the work env was horrible, and we told him he is welcome to if he wants, but at the end he decided to stay at Amazon. It's also not like we have a chill team - I just try to make sure people don't work OT unless it's strictly necessary (about once or twice a year). Other than that though, we do expect people to put in their 8 hours on a semi-flexible schedule.
- granshaw 4y ago
  We will see, but I think there’s a real chance the former FAANG “market rate” due to their high flying RSUs might be gone for good for Engineering ICs, unless you’re well known in your area
- 4y ago

pubby 4y ago

I wasn't laid off, but am unemployed. I've found it very difficult to land any interviews, or even get a response from companies. Even what I thought were safe bets (like a job at a bank, writing CRUD apps) do not respond. I've only had one interview this year. It was with a FAANG. I easily passed and got an offer, but then layoffs were announced and they had to revoke.

elwell 4y ago
You easily passed a FAANG interview?
- pubby 4y ago
  By easy I mean I didn't prep or study, and at the end they said I passed with flying colors. I reckon my answers could have been a lot better though. I've only had two software interviews in my life, so I don't have much to compare it to.
- hnfong 4y ago
  Looking at GP's profile, lots of NES programming and general gaming work. I can totally see how HR in banks would prefer somebody with 10 years of Java or C# experience, familiar with {Vendor}SQL and an employment history in a related banking/finance sector (and screen out everyone else). At least FAANG don't really care about those things. On the other hand if you know your way around assembly on esoteric hardware, the stereotypical FAANG whiteboarding questions like "reverse a linked list" shouldn't be a problem.

ericmcer 4y ago

Quit voluntarily in April, have been working on my own project since then, if it doesn't work I will start interviewing in Jan/Feb/Mar based on how the job market is looking. I find it hard to believe there wont be some recovery and would rather apply during a time where job seekers have a bit more leverage.

jedberg 4y ago

For those of you feeling down about being ignored, keep in mind this is the slowest hiring time of the year, with holidays and vacations, and end of year budgets. Even in down markets, hiring tends to pick up in January as managers get their hiring budgets for the new year and are back in the office. Hang in there!

cmckn 4y ago
You’re totally right; but I’m nervous for my laid-off friends that will burn through 80% of their severance over the holiday season. :(
- czbond 4y ago
  After that there is unemployment insurance for a while. They'll be fine.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Depending on the state, unemployment can be a few hundred dollars per week.
arandomJohn 4y ago
For companies that do on-campus recruiting it is the busiest hiring time of year. But for experienced devs it might be a weird time to look.
- jedberg 4y ago
  This is true but sort of different. Most of them are hiring out of next year's budgets with start dates in May/June. The last time we had a pull-back in tech, a lot of those offers ended up getting rescinded, so if you're in that boat, don't start spending the money until you actually start...
  - arandomJohn 4y ago
    We’ve got people starting every week and open headcount for seniors.

echelon 4y ago

I know this may not be the correct thread for this, and hope it doesn't come across as not being empathetic: I'm paying $100/hr (negotiable) for skills in { Rust/Actix webdev, Unreal Engine plugin development, computer vision, audio processing, signal processing, ML }. These roles will convert to salary/equity later on, once the project outgrows my ability to self-fund. We're building a cloud-based AI film and music production suite. https://storyteller.io https://storyteller.io In any case, I'm sorry to anyone impacted by this down tech cycle. The world will get back to its senses, and tech will continue to eat everything else not-tech. Edit: I broke the contact form. Email me directly. echelon@gmail.com

vogt 4y ago
Pretty cool product. I don't have any of the skills you listed or anything, just wanted to say this looks neat. Also looks like something built by people very familiar with the space they're in, which is always a huge plus in my book when evaluating startups.
lukaesch 4y ago
May I ask why you use rust/actix for web dev?
- echelon 4y ago
  We do real time signal processing, 3D graphics, and other systems-y stuff, so we just decided to use Rust up and down the stack. It works well for us. Actix/sqlx isn't Rails, but it's 90% of the way there. The rich type system is liberating, and form validation is far easier with Actix/serde than rspec.
erixM 4y ago
Hi, your product looks great! I currently have 2 years of experience as a fullstack developer, mainly using React on the frontend side. I am not ready for your Rust/Actix webdev position at the moment, but, if I wanted to prepare for it in the next months, what advice would you give me? What would be the requirements to pass the interview?

the_only_law 4y ago

I was laid off from an over leveraged startup-type company you haven’t heard of. The search so far has been pretty bad. Probably in part because of the timing (a week before thanksgiving, but it’s the same story every time. Any job I want I won’t get and any job I don’t want I can get. I expect things to maybe pick up a little in early December, but I’m honestly kinda defeated. My last job was far from perfect, but I was planning on using to save up the industry afterwards which ofc won’t happen now, at least not in the timeframe I envisioned. Worst case I have to accept a pay cut that will nip those plans very quickly.

killingtime74 4y ago
Hang in there, it's only been one week?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

kristopolous 4y ago

Let me show you the backdoor: Find a company whose open source projects you are interested in. Dive in and and start fixing things. Then if you really like it after a couple weeks start nudging around for a job. If you do good work they'll just give it to you, no bullshit funnel required. I like this method because you aren't just doing l33t coding exercises to work on some sight unseen codebase that makes you suicidal and throw you into existential crisis. In this modality you are test driving each other.

turdprincess 4y ago
Curious if you have done this yourself
- giomasce 4y ago
  Not GP, but I have and it worked. Pretty happy of the job I have, working of free software in a great environment.
- kristopolous 4y ago
  Yep. More than once. I got frustrated by interviews where I told them I've been doing this for over 25 years and they're like "ok how do you show the list of files in this directory at the bash prompt" I've had the "what the hell job are you hiring for?" response in my head many times I've got no interest groveling my way up some kind of hierarchy to eventually get to a position I thought I was coming in to do in the first place. This has turned out to be a perfectly acceptable shortcut. You could say it's more like petitioning for a job as opposed to applying for one
sva_ 4y ago
This sounds like you're suggesting people work for free for the hope of potentially being hired by an employer. I think that is pretty pathetic.
- briga 4y ago
  I mean, even if they don’t get hired they’re still contributing to open-source. Seems like a good outcome either way

cmrdporcupine 4y ago

TLDR: the job market (for senior talent) is much better than you'd think, from my observation. But if coming from FAANG expect compensation cut (and that's probably ok!) I didn't get laid off, but. Quit Google at the height of the frenzy last December. Coasted for a while doing my own thing and entertaining a job offer that fell through. After that through the spring and summer it was actually slow and difficult finding work. I signed a contract that was initially very exciting and promising but then found there was a crypto/eth association I was not comfortable with, so started looking immediately and was very worried because of the layoffs that were starting to blow up. But in the end I actually found it not bad and I had the choice of basically two excellent and exciting jobs. I'm still not 100% certain I picked the right one, but here goes! And holy crap am I tired of interviews. Similarly I have a friend who got laid off from Meta in the latest round, and she's already interviewing in boatloads of places. I think the key thing is that compensation that's out there won't match what is made at a FAANG, esp with the latest round of layoffs. But I'm personally fine with that. In exchange for getting my soul back.

IntFee588 4y ago

Just got hired doing firmware stuff. Core technologies seem to still be doing okay.

hw 4y ago

Curious on how many are taking this opportunity to start their own company. Would love to see a list

HNanony 4y ago

I'm gonna let the H1B folks take first crack at things...I'll start looking in a week or two.

throwaway20382 4y ago

I have 15 years experience, run large production sites, our company sold for near a billion dollars to a foreign company recently, and they are doing layoffs based on "order by salary desc" . My days are numbered. I do SRE mainly, but I code all day and run teams. Company 1: Terrible over-engineered music firm (no users). Full 7 rounds, exams (which were easy shit), but "VP" ghosted me, he was a former twitter guy, seems like he wants to hire a twitter guy. Company 2: Credit card company. Full 5 rounds. Four hours of exams. The recruiter feedback from team was "too much of a people manager", then ghosted. Someone lied and said I was non technical - yet i passed the technical exams. I used the term "we" too much explaining projects. Company 3 (automatic): Finished the exam in LUA for a openresty opensource project (didn't even know lua). Everything worked nicely. I was told he didn't like how i laid out the lua. Company 4: "Not enough of a people manager." Company 5,6,7,...: Recuriters make me do calls and exams then ghosted. I don't think they have jobs - just recruiting cause that is what they do. Exams: 1) using openrusty to create a application load balancer in lua 2) using python to create a url shortener 3) using php, complex input file, then output file (sorting, hasing, parsing) 4) using ruby, connect to an oracle db then do complex queries (outer joins etc). Just for hazing sake, they named the tables keywords eg: "join". I will say the take home tests at these companies are fun. I have a family and I am very nervous.

kyleyeats 4y ago
On a positive note, you seem to have greatly narrowed the range for how much of a people manager to be.
nimchimpsky 4y ago
bm3719 4y ago
> Finished the exam in LUA for a openresty opensource project (didn't even know lua). Everything worked nicely. I was told he didn't like how i laid out the lua. I like take-home tests too, but am reluctant to do them in languages I don't have a lot of recent experience in. Not that I can't ramp up enough to get them working, but when someone who writes that language every day looks at the code of a guy who just read a few tutorials, he's going to be irked by lots of little things. Not the impression you want to give going forward. Only exception is if I can solve the problem in a more academic language, e.g. Scheme, or something else they don't use there. That's probably a deal-breaker at places that want to hire a developer with X years of experience in some specific language. So if I found that was the case, I'd probably just pass on it, as it's obviously not me they're looking for. Whether they realize/intend it or not, they're filtering for someone who has said language and tooling pre-loaded into their brain.

hizxy 4y ago

Looking to quit w/o anything lined up. Rejected a few offers before the shit hit the fan. Starting to hate the field and need some time to think.

mancerayder 4y ago
Wait til right before the summer, not only will the picture economically be more clear, but there's a summer to enjoy. Right now is a slower holiday season where you'd expect a more relaxed work experience, and a bad time to travel or enjoy life. That assumes you're in the northern hemisphere!
- hizxy 4y ago
  Thanks for the tip! I’m in CA.
- veidr 4y ago
  but i hate summer and love winter (but NorHemi FTW whooooo000000!!!)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

fatnoah 4y ago

I was laid off as part of a layoff large enough to trigger the WARN act, so I was put on garden leave for 60 days.. I was fortunate to find a new job and start it exactly as the garden leave expired. It was my first job search in the post-COVID era, aka the era of remote work, and wow was it different. Traditionally, I'd see a handful of jobs that looked interesting each week, and would be one of a handful of applicants. Now that geography isn't really a barrier, there were far more options, but far more applicants. I'd see 20+ roles per week that were a good fit, but each would have 40-200+ applicants, even for the senior (Director/VP) level roles I was looking for. I've got over 20 years experience from startup to massive tech companies, and applied to 58 jobs. 12 of those led to an initial discussiopn with a recruiter, and 3 of those led to a full interview loop and 1 job offer. Since accepting the job offer, I've heard from 4 more of the companies I applied to and they were interested in going forward with the process. For each, it was at least 5 weeks since my initial application.

moneywoes 4y ago
May I ask what job boards you are frequenting? Happy to hear you got back on your feat so quickly
- fatnoah 4y ago
  It was pretty much 99% LinkedIn, but with the huge caveat that the job I accepted was one I found on Indeed. That said, I gave up on Indeed pretty quickly because it mostly showed irrelevant jobs (not software engineering, far too junior, etc). Sifting through the noise was tough. I resorted to a daily alert for each job title, since that kept the number to process each day down to a manageable level, and I made strong use of the "hide this job" function of LinkedIn to keep ones that didn't feel like a good fit from popping up again.
relaxing 4y ago
5 weeks! As a hiring manager, I cannot fathom expecting a candidate to wait around that long and still be available.

manish_gill 4y ago

Since this thread is the most relevant - my partner has been struggling for a long time to get going into the field as a Data Analyst/BI analyst doing SQL, Tableau, Excel and (beginner) Python/Pandas. She has been hunting for junior positions or even internships with no luck so far. Here in the EU, either her career gap (due to covid + country change + taking time to upskill herself) gets in the way, or C-level German language does, and if nothing else, they're hiring Seniors. If anyone is willing to hire a bright and hard-working beginner with an MBA in Finance, drop me an email at me [at] manishgill [dot] com

holografix 4y ago
It might very well be her basic German holding her back. Any chance of upskilling her quickly through some intensive German lessons over the Christmas break? From memory the German market can be surprisingly insular in its use of German. Not as tough as the French, but close. Also, maybe she can work remotely for a Dutch company? If she speaks good English the Dutch don’t care at all.
- manish_gill 4y ago
  Thanks. Her German is A2 already. The problem is that companies here expect professional C1-C2 level, which will take some time. And yeah, great idea re: jobs for Dutch companies. Will definitely check that out!

MattDemers 4y ago

Garbage. I'm looking for marketing/communications/social media work. Those industries aren't really hiring right now, and despite changing/improving my resume/cover letter three times now (with help from a hiring manager friend, and a career coach), I'm still not getting any kind of non-automated response. Been searching for 6 months now. Strangely, I had one place basically self-flagellate at how bad they were at their response time (again, in an automated response), and never followed up again. I feel like part of my problem is that I worked in an industry previously that inflated my titles. I'm applying to entry-level/associated positions with "Director" on my resume, mostly because I'm trying to upskill things I didn't get to learn, in an environment where I'm not managing the whole department. It's disheartening to see LinkedIn say "Yeah, want to see how you stack up against the 100+ other applicants?"

moneywoes 4y ago

Poor luck as a 2 yoe backend based in Canada Would love to know any good job boards if people know

moosedev 4y ago

I took ~1.5 years off after 12+ years of FAANG. 1 month ago, I decided I was ready to work again and started talking to recruiters for real. It's been very slow. Most positions I've applied to, I've heard nothing back, even when referred by a current employee. I've had some flat rejections without even a recruiter chat. One recruiter called me to say they were on a temporary hiring freeze, and then she got laid off. I've had a handful of tech screen interviews, but only one* has progressed all the way to a full interview loop so far, and I got a generic rejection a few days later. I have been waiting 2.5 weeks and counting for a phone screen result from another (larger, public) tech company. Nothing close to an offer yet. I'm considering just taking more time off until things speed up again - I can afford it, but I worry about how hard it will be to get hired again with a "long" gap of 2+ years. * for "Senior Software Engineer" at a medium-sized pre-IPO tech company

ldjkfkdsjnv 4y ago
In 2017 I had taken two years off and went back into the job market after very solid employment history. Only one major company would interview me, and I passed. I got ghosted by regular companies I was "too good for" previously. Before taking time off I was a premium candidate. So yeah it can be hard, you do need some sort of explanation, even in a good market.
jedberg 4y ago
Fill the gap with something technical. Start a company, work on a tech related side project, etc.
plants 4y ago
I have also been out of work for ~8mo for various reasons, and while I’m sorry for your situation, it’s heartening to hear I’m not the only one. I’ve only actually gotten one tech screen in which I was asked a LC “hard” question, which I didn’t pass (I’m pretty good with “easy” and “medium”, but come on, hard?). So far, I have one other interview from an internal referral, but haven’t heard anything back from the ~10-15 other applications I’ve sent out. I’m getting a bit discouraged and feel similarly as you - it would be nice to take more time off (maybe I don’t actually love working in tech?), but I have the same worried as you. Feels good to vent in this thread, though :)

tschellenbach 4y ago

We're hiring, but very slowly/carefully atm (https://getstream.io/team/ https://getstream.io/team/). It's insane, similar companies to us used to raise $100-$200M with our metrics, at the moment i'm not even trying to raise additional capital. On the other hands it's nice that there is less hype and you can just focus on building and real progress.

hawk_ 4y ago
Nice. What's the compensation range for this role in Remote (EMEA) or AMS? https://getstream.io/careers/job/4617451003/ https://getstream.io/careers/job/4617451003/

piercebot 4y ago

I transitioned from full-time employment to contracting in April 2022. I am currently over-employed and working two gigs simultaneously. All leads have come from my personal network or my reputation as a known entity in a relatively niche field. Only trouble I've had is invoice approval and waiting for money to be moved, but it has always eventually come through. Cashflow remains equivalent to when I was an FTE, but I'm working fewer hours per day and working on more interesting things. A lot of that has to do with transitioning out of management, I think. I don't miss it :)

nowherebeen 4y ago
Nice to read something positive for once. Happy for you.
maxnevermind 4y ago
Can you elaborate. So you are working two supposedly full-time jobs but in reality working less than 8 hours in total, is that right?
- piercebot 4y ago
  Sure! For the first job, I bill hourly for the time I spend working. Here, I develop web applications to validate machine learning models for a company; I help organize results in a way that allows ML engineers to easily "spot check" the results of ML runs on data through a web interface. The second job I have is in the "web3" space developing applications that run on a specific blockchain in which I've specialized. Compensation here is based on milestones and paid out in cryptocurrency. In both cases, I am transparent about the progress I'm making and compensated accordingly. The hourly rate I charge as a contractor brings in an equivalent salary to what I had as a full-time employee in about 900 hours per year, which works out to be about 18/hours per week if you assume 2 weeks off.

6ak74rfy 4y ago

I am not laid off yet but the org I am part of, in one of the FAANGs, is rumored to have layoffs in December or Q1 next year. I have been with this company for almost a decade, am one of the top performers and think I am close to a promotion to the staff level - despite all of that, I am cognizant of the fact that none of this matters when it comes to layoffs and I am as likely to be laid of as any other person in my org. It's a bit scary. So, I am spending some time on the side sharpening my technical skills. For e.g., Crafting Interpreters and Designing Data Intensive Applications.

holografix 4y ago

tl;dr some people hiring but December is going to slow you right down. Wait for Jan. Applied for a small pre-ipo biz lately, I’m over qualified for the position and respectfully let them know that I’d expect a very clear and direct path to a more senior position in max 12 months. Interview process is slow but ongoing. I was told that it prob won’t happen before Jan.

DeathArrow 4y ago

Why does OP ask about people layd off? Are there some big waves of people being fired? I don't live in the US and I didn't read much news recently, so that's why I ask. In my country there aren't many people people in It (if any) layd off.

yumbrand 4y ago
Yeah, Meta cut 11k people, Amazon has a hiring freeze right now, things are slower at Google hiring, not sure about Microsoft or any of the other big tech companies. Partially driven by interest rates disproportionately affecting tech, partially these companies are just missing earnings a lot and needing to cut headcount. Not sure how private companies are faring, but probably similarly getting pressure to cut headcount -- would imagine that this would start happening in other countries too (e.g., Canada sees lagging interest rates vs. U.S.)
- DeathArrow 4y ago
  I just got hired in Europe by a private owned US based company. So, at least some companies are doing OK.
cableshaft 4y ago
September: Patreon 150, Twilio 850, Ericsson 400, DocuSign 650 October: Peloton 500, Intel "thousands", Oracle 200, Microsoft 1k, Zillow 300 November: Opendoor 550, Twitter 3700+ (probably 5000+ after the 'sign the hardcore decree or be terminated'), Zendesk 350, Salesforce '100s', Meta 11000, Amazon 10000, Cisco 4000, HP 4000-6000, Stripe 1000+, Lyft 683 Hasn't happened yet but reported to do so soon: Google 10000[1] Notice it's accelerating, both in size of layoffs and and how many tech companies are laying people off. Granted part of it may be trying to squeeze it in before the end of the year for financial purposes. Source: https://tech.co/news/tech-companies-layoffs https://tech.co/news/tech-companies-layoffs EDIT: Crunchbase is saying 73,000 workers in the tech sector have been laid off in 2022, so far. Also has more companies on their list. https://news.crunchbase.com/startups/tech-layoffs-2022/ https://news.crunchbase.com/startups/tech-layoffs-2022/ [1] https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/another-massive-tech-company-plans-to-cut-10k-jobs-reports/ https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/another-massive-tech-com...

valdiorn 4y ago

I've just started a new job, a startup hedge fund with friends and former colleagues, so not really that applicable to the question (but also, my god how nice it is to just get a call from someone you know and respect, get offered a job and not even have to interview for it :) However, I've noticed that the LinkedIn spam is getting increasingly outrageous in their offers (I'm in quant finance in London). This surprised me given the market is supposedly cooling off with lots of free agent talent, but I'm getting multiple offers a day promising 300-500k (GBP) compensation, sometimes even fixed base comp! It sounds a bit too good to be true but the frequency of messages and the numbers in those messages have both been blowing up over the last 3-4 months. Not sure what's driving this but it's definitely unusual given the market and location. I'd say it's about double the top range I've seen in previous years.

gigatexal 4y ago

A friend of mine was doing an almost week long (thankfully paid) interview with Automatic for a senior data engineering position. These are the folks being Wordpress and Hey — the DHH company — anyway. Long story short while he was working on tasks in this weird ass way to interview about half way into the week he gets a message saying the role had been closed. Suddenly. There was no inkling or hint that the role was tenantive. Shortly before he he process to interview and maybe hire my friend there was some message or rumor that they were trying to scoop up laid off Twitter employees. I dunno. It seems shady. Avoid Auromatic not for the politics but because it’s not well run at all.

zerr 4y ago

Are only the people with FANG-like compensations (200K base/300K+ stock) being laid off or are the "regularly" compensated (60K-150K) devs affected as well?

the_only_law 4y ago
I was a “regular” dev that was laid off. Company saw massive headcount growth prior to and during Covid only for the effort to fizzle out and they probably laid it 30-50% of the small company.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

matsemann 4y ago

> but likely this next week I'll start studying and getting ready. Studying?? For a job interview? Do you seriously need to do whiteboard algorithm reverse a linked list kinda coding as a senior in the US? Or what is it that you need to study before an interview?

restalis 4y ago
Not the OP, but my experience when I had interviews and worked on improvement wasn't that much on technical side as it was on "soft skills" that had a bigger impact on the interview outcome than I was previously willing to admit. But even if the study is technical, that's OK. There are a lot of pieces that rarely occur outside academia and hiring interviews, and after years you'd want to fresh things up, even if it's just to improve recall and answer times during the interview, if nothing else.
bunnyhop 4y ago
Oddly enough going through about 6 interviews as a senior... things get more technical instead of interviews as a junior where things were more methodical. Junior interviews were more, 'How would you go about solving problem x?'. Senior interviews have been more, 'What exact function parameters of this obscure library would you use to implement x design pattern in this made-up system for this interview?' Which is absurd unless you're a very narrowly focused SME on one specific tool/language.

SpectralTheory 4y ago

Sounds like it's broadly terrible... Good news is the who's hiring thread is coming up again in a couple days.

SCUSKU 4y ago

Thanks for asking so that we can all vent! I have 2 YOE as a SWE, got laid off in August from a startup that was Series A and generating no revenue. I was able to get interviews in September/October, and got far at 2 companies but got rejected by one and ghosted by another. I have found it's much harder to get an interview this month as layoffs increase. I'm pretty much hoping that once the holidays are over, things will pick up again, but I am pretty worried that I may be forced to just join the military or something because I can't get a job in tech.

skeeter2020 4y ago
As someone who's been ghosted as well I think you should name the company or (in my experience it was) the person who ghosted you. This is totally unacceptable and I think we should make them pay when the labour market gets tight again. And if you don't believe in karma, I saw a linkedin post by the guy who ghosted me about how he got screwed over by the company and let go. It's not super healthy, but it still feels good sometimes...
- SCUSKU 4y ago
  The company is called Recurve. I really enjoyed the interview and the process there (no leetcode), but I was just disappointed that after all of that, they ended up ghosting. I'm not holding it against them too much, but still, doesn't feel good.
ghaff 4y ago
As others have said, unemployment in the US is still pretty low. But that may not mean for the near future that plum tech jobs are growing on trees. Lots of openings at many companies/govt orgs (including military) for roles with tech skills but probably not at comp many have come to expect. See also 2000/2001+ era.
- SCUSKU 4y ago
  Do you think $120k is a reasonable expectation for a SWE with 2 YOE in this market? That's what I am shooting for, and still think is reasonable to expect, but on the otherhand if layoffs continue, I guess I may be forced to reconsider...

koinedad 4y ago

I wasn’t laid off but was at a startup that went through 4 rounds of layoffs. It took me 8 months to get an offer in this economy. Literally mid interview loop a few of the companies froze hiring. It was pretty crazy.

brocha 4y ago

I just got blindsided two weeks back from the best job I've ever had. Not looking forward to the search (taking December off to get married) as I have extreme anxiety when it comes to live coding, and I cannot figure out why. Even basic SQL queries escape me when somebody is watching. I've always been fantastic at test taking so take home assignments or leetcode type tests I can do, and hell, even putting together a presentation of a project I've done and presenting is fine. Just that live coding portion that always sucks. Senior Data Engineer with 15+ years of Python experience and a background in Physics and Math. Can't wait for the new "Who's Hiring"

ryanferg 4y ago
I feel you on the live coding. As for the physics/math data engineer, hit me up at rferguson at astros.com if you'd like, we're always looking for solid cross discipline folks

throwawaydad12 4y ago

I've been at this for almost 40 years, and it's shocking to me how little urgency there is to hiring over the last 5-10 years. I have a sinecure but still interview from time to time. Compared to (say) 1990, it's intensely time-consuming and unproductive. In principle, I'm likely someone that hiring managers are looking for, and really a pretty good deal. In practice, I'll probably just retire rather than throw my hat into the ring again. Or--since I have a vindictive sense of humor--maybe I'll spend my retirement doing "fake" interviews with prospective employers.

pyb 4y ago
This. It's been a buyers market in the last decade. If employers were really struggling to hire great engineers, they wouldn't be "playing with their food" so much.
dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
>it's intensely time-consuming and unproductive. I think it's this one of the parts that really ticks someone like me off. Most interviewers know almost upfront 10 minutes into into the interview if they are going to reject you, yet they can often drag on for an hour, under the guise of knowing, your 'approach' a problem.
- hnfong 4y ago
  Hiring decisions are generally not made by only one person. The interviewee might be performing poorly on one interview, but the interviewer doesn't know how it went on the others. Shutting off the interviewee 10 minutes into a one-hour interview session would backfire pretty badly unless the interviewer is sure that those 10 minutes was enough to determine the candidate definitely isn't hire-worthy (which is different from voting to pass on the candidate). The (Bayesian) priors of that happening should be pretty low if the screening process was working as intended. Making the wrong call would entail the interviewee potentially feeling offended, which could be an issue if the ultimate decision was to make an offer to them -- they might reject the offer due to this experience alone. Not to mention it would be pretty awkward to work with a new colleague where you walked out on him as an interviewer. (In general you really don't want colleagues to know that you voted to pass on them) In general if a candidate thinks they're getting nowhere they can suggest to stop the interview. Nobody can stop you from cutting it short and leave if those 50 minutes are important to you. (Also, FWIW I don't think saving a hypothetical 50 minutes of interview time is what the GP was specifically referring to...)

nowherebeen 4y ago

I am not laid off but I am looking. There is a lot less jobs available. The ones on LinkedIn are all old job posts being refreshed and don’t exist anymore. I was finally able to get 1 interview with Google because I reached out to the same recruiter I rejected a few months prior for another role.

djohnston 4y ago

Pretty tough, altho I'm not sure if it's because of macroeconomic conditions or because I'm applying to a lot of hedge funds and I'm not amazing at leetcode.

laurex 4y ago

Are people in this boat thinking of working on fun or side projects as they look? Especially non-commercial or for-good work. Curious if we’ll see interesting creative work come out of this period it if people are growing disillusioned enough with the current system to start experimenting with other approaches.

cranberryturkey 4y ago

landosaari 4y ago

Actively looking. Jobless and homeless since completing my technical degree from a Nordic country. Subsisting on ~3€/day. The responses have been: not a cultural fit, wasn’t the perfect match (German speaking responses), overqualified (mostly from western countries), under qualified (from countries like Czechia, Poland, Romania,etc.) for junior positions. Getting interviews has been difficult and sparse. Contributed to FOSS, and keep learning programming/higher maths. Hope is low.

bunnyhop 4y ago

CIOGuy 4y ago

I have an opposite problem, I am trying desperately to hire developers but we don't do full remote. We require some in-office time and that just turns people off. Upper management won't listen to me, they want people in the office at least three days a week so basically I'll never be able to hire anyone. We offer big salaries, benefits, you name it. Commuting sucks and people know it.

saNFTos 4y ago
If you were able to get one or two candidates by the end of this week to interview that were willing to do hybrid, would that work for you?

okar1n 4y ago

I am a final year student persuing computer science (July'23 expected graduation), applying constantly but not getting responses.