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Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?

• klaus_s 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • hindsightbias 3y ago
    People still hire biologics?
    • iExploder 3y ago
      lower your keyboards and surrender your coffee mugs. your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our training data sets. resistance is futile.
• Ilasky 3y ago
  I've had similar issues - so much so that I've created Resgen[0] just because it was tough getting call backs. It turns out I really needed to tailor my resume to each job and it resulted in a lot more call backs. [0] https://resgen.app https://resgen.app
  • ccvannorman 3y ago
    i've bookmarked ResGen in case i ever become desperate / crazy enough to rejoin the working class. But may I just say sir, I LOVE your lightweight pixel inspired web page -- so clean! We need more sites like this, well organized and thoughtful without the clutter
    • Ilasky 3y ago
      Hey thanks!
    • ant6n 3y ago
      Pixel inspired? I think it looks like a Lichtenstein painting. Neat.
  • ukyrgf 3y ago
    Wow, that design is modern but brings me back to the days of application skin sites and early digital art communities back in the early 00s. Great job. I'm going to sign up.
    • shishy 3y ago
      It's like gumroad.com (the design I mean)
      • Ilasky 3y ago
        I definitely had a lot of inspiration from gumroad - love their design too.
    • Ilasky 3y ago
      Thanks! Let me know what you think when you try it out.
    • 65 3y ago
      To be fair this Mondrian style is a web design trend right now.
  • imafish 3y ago
    I like the idea of ResGen. But I think you should consider changing your pricing. 10 free resumes per month seems too generous. Also, $7 is very low for a paid plan, when your users are likely to churn as soon as they find a job. If this tool is really as valuable for job hunters as it aims to be, they should gladly pay three times that amount.
    • Ilasky 3y ago
      Thanks for the feedback! I'll experiment with it - currently still early stages and feeling out what people are comfortable with.
  • ricardobayes 3y ago
    This site is amazing. Finally something with a clean design, no fluff and it's fast.
    • Ilasky 3y ago
      Gotta love Sveltekit SSR for snappy response
  • jacob_rezi 3y ago
    Similar to what we're building at rezi. https://www.rezi.ai/ https://www.rezi.ai/
    • Ilasky 3y ago
      Nice! I've used Rezi a couple of times.
  • fhaldridge7 3y ago
    Great project but I don't have LinkedIn. I've previously used ChatGPT to do something similar. Wrote a text about myself, copy-pasted the job description and then asked it to generate resume bullet points. It worked well. Maybe your site can do something similar? Instead of requiring a LinkedIn job posting, users can copy/paste a job description.
    • Ilasky 3y ago
      I plan to have support for other job boards (greenhouse, ashby, indeed, etc.) soon.
• zeestar 3y ago
  It's really tough for remote jobs. In-person jobs, on the other hand: people are literally reaching out to me (a first in my career) about on-site jobs but it's just not tenable for my lifestyle atm. So yeah I've been unemployed for nearly a year now.
  • jacquesm 3y ago
    How are you making ends meet then? Or are you freelancing or something?
    • zeestar 3y ago
      Occasionally but mostly I'm burning savings. I got pretty used to a low standard of living in the couple of years before I entered software development, so when I started making money, I saved a lot of it. If being confined to one place for work doesn't currently suit me, then neither do many of the material trappings of rooting: accumulation of consumer goods, a nice home, etc.
• austin-cheney 3y ago
  I am right there with you. And so are several other super senior (10+ years) developers that I know. A couple years back employers were begging to hire seniors in a heartbeat, now its nearly impossible to get an interview. I am wondering if I should retake the CISSP and just abandon software for corporate security.
• bluedemon 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • DoesntMatter22 3y ago
    Really doesn't benefit companies that much because once the market turns around those people won't stay
    • happymellon 3y ago
      I have not known many companies that have been that far forward thinking.
      • DoesntMatter22 3y ago
        I agree with that.
  • quickthrower2 3y ago
    Most companies can barely stay solvent let alone engineer a conspiracy. I admit there was wage collusion in the past but I reckon that is as coordinated as it gets. We need a new boom of startups figuring how to do useful stuff with computers without resorting to overhiring on success.
    • hyperparameter 3y ago
      [flagged]
    • MauroIksem 3y ago
      The era of cheap money is over and without it we wont see another startup boom.
      • gumballindie 3y ago
        Somehow i doubt the world’s startup engine, the us, will never get back to sprouting startups again. This situation as many before it will turn around.
• kypro 3y ago
  It's bad, but it's not that bad. The fact you have only had one interview this year is very odd in my opinion. I've been on the market twice this year and it's been harder for sure (especially earlier this year), but it's far from impossible to find something. I don't know if you're looking for advice or just anecdotes here, but I'll share some thoughts for what might be happening... Frontend development has changed a lot over the last 5 years. Obviously I don't know what skills you have, but a few years ago it was common for companies to be looking for a "frontend developer" with just HTML5, CSS & jQuery experience. These roles basically don't exist anymore. Typically a frontend developer today would be someone who's got experience with a modern JS framework like React (or similar), knows TypeScript, has experience writing tests, possibly has some experience with dev tools like Storybook or docker, etc... At least this the kind of thing I typically see companies recruiting for these days. The last 5 years also haven't been very representative. The tech job market from around 2016 on has been very strong and there was a huge under supply of labour (especially during the pandemic). Today tech companies are cutting jobs, or slowing their hiring, meanwhile your average 12 year old has done some basic HTML and JavaScript coding. Just knowing your way around HTML and CSS isn't going to land you a job anymore – companies can afford to be much more selective. If you're not even getting interviews you can assume your resume is the problem. Again, I don't know what skills you have but you either don't have skills that are being sought after or you are not showing your experience in a way that highlights those skills well on your resume. It may also be that you're applying for roles that are beyond your experience level. In my experience if you've been a developer for 5 years that would typically mean you're a bit better than a junior developer, but unlikely to be a senior. A couple of years ago you may have been able to land a senior developer role, but today the market is far more competitive and you'll have people with well over a decade of experience applying for these roles in most cases. I know it sucks but you may want to look for roles which require a little less experience even if you believe you're worth more. It's far better to be employed and in a role where you're growing your experience than being unemployed. You can always look for something else when you have the experience you need or when the market picks up a bit. The fact you've been out of work for about 6 months now would be sending huge warning flags to me if I were a recruiter. Recruiters want to place candidates that are in demand and as harsh as this may sound a 6 month gap in your employment will suggest you are not an ideal candidate. I would seriously consider coming up with a back story to explain why you've been out of work for this long. Some will disagree with this, but you should think of your resume like an Instagram profile – only show the things others want to see, and don't be afraid to represent yourself in a slightly exaggerated way. Obviously you need to be able to do what you say you can do, but you need your resume to give a good impression of you and your experience if you want any chance of getting an interview. So for example, if I was the primary dev on some project I'll typically say that I "led" the project on my resume. I'll also always include things like "senior" & "lead" in job roles because, "Lead software engineer" looks way better than "Frontend developer" imo. Minor things like this can make a big difference and help your profile stand out from the rest. I guess to concluded though, the market isn't that bad that you should be getting at least some interviews. It sounds like your resume is being dismissed for some reason and you should try to understand why that is. If you want to anonymise and share your resume I'd be happy to take a look.
• dudul 3y ago
  The market is probably not super great, but one interview in 7 months. There's something with your resume or your search.
  • onetokeoverthe 3y ago
    [dead]
• TechBro8615 3y ago
  You need to do some personal hustling and find hiring managers or founders of recently funded companies that someone in your network can introduce you to. Otherwise you're just another resume in a sea of thousands. Do something to make yourself stand out.
• saluki 3y ago
  Reach out to your personal network to try to get some connections to get your resume to the top of the stack. Reach out to former co-workers and see if their current companies have any openings. It's tough to stand out in a stack of 200 applicants without a connection. Is your front-end stack or experience too narrow? What are you using for frontend. Are there more front-end languages you have experience with that you could broaden your search/resume? Have you done any backend? Is now a good time to learn Rails or Laravel? Can you seek out any alternative job boards that are more specific for your niche? Linked and Indeed are the most saturated with applicants. Freelance and Contract work might be an option to stay active and show on your resume. Show Consulting as your current gig from when you left your last job. Lastly you could reach out to your old company if it's a place you'd like to go back to, not sure how things left off. A lot can change in a year.
• pjbeam 3y ago
  We are getting literally thousands of more or less qualified applicants for most of the roles we're hiring for at Dropbox right now. Can't speak for other places but I imagine it's similar for some. I don't know anything about your resume or qualifications but it very well may not be _you_ that's the problem, per se. As others have suggested I would see who you know places who can pull you out of the pile.
  • Paul-Craft 3y ago
    Thousands, eh? I'd assume you're not actually hiring "thousands" of people, which means that a very large percentage of those "more or less qualified" applicants are not passing the interview rounds. Since it's logical to assume that you'd actually want to hire someone for those open roles, it's not too hard to see where the disconnect is. Of course, I don't mean "you" in the sense of you, personally, and I don't intend this to be a personal attack of any sort, but it really does say something about how utterly insane people on the hiring side have gotten in the past few months.
    • esquivalience 3y ago
      I couldn't understand this comment and wondered whether you had misread the parent. The point is that they are posting job openings and getting thousands of applicants per role i.e. They are oversubscribed.
      • Paul-Craft 3y ago
        That literally cannot be true unless the supposed "more or less qualified" applicants actually aren't qualified. Now, I suppose it's possible that thousands of people are lying on their resumes just to get a chance to work at Dropbox, but given this year's layoffs, I find it far, far more likely that people on the hiring side have gone off the deep end. You can disagree with me on that, and that's fine, but stay with me for a second here... if there's an open role, presumably they'd be better off with someone filling it than having it stay open for months on end, right? And, given that the candidate pool has been recently enriched with people who were recently employed and would not normally be out on the job market (remember, these are "more or less qualified" candidates, at least according to their resumes), I have a hard time believing the disconnect isn't that companies either think it's a good time to go unicorn hunting, or they don't actually want to hire at all for some reason. But, again, unicorn hunting only works out in a tiny percentage of cases, because the supply of unicorns is low, and the real unicorns probably are not the ones out there pounding the pavement. I can't even begin to explain why any sane company would post a job listing in good faith and then never hire anyone for it, given that they're supposedly inundated with reasonable-looking candidates. So, what's the deal here? If you have the explanation, I'd love to hear it, because I've been on the hiring side, and you can damn well bet I wouldn't devote my time to resume screening and interviewing if I didn't think we were actually going to hire anyone.
• LargeTomato 3y ago
  Yes, it's awful. I applied to 60 companies and got 3 responses. I have a background in big tech and applied to mostly large and medium sized tech companies.
  • sosodev 3y ago
    That ratio isn’t bad tho
    • Paul-Craft 3y ago
      That's half the response rate I was getting years ago when I was trying for my first job with no internships and a non-CS STEM degree from BFE Midwest Liberal Arts College.
      • macintosh-hd 3y ago
        I truly graduated just 6 months too late, apparently.
    • LargeTomato 3y ago
      I'm used to >80% callbacks. Before the pandemic that was standard.
• rahimnathwani 3y ago
  I'm curious: when you say you've 'been applying constantly', how many jobs have you applied for? Assuming the number of available roles isn't a limiting factor, you probably applied for ~1000+ jobs in that time. (1 job per hour * 40 hours/week * 4.3 weeks per month * 7 months) Is that right? If so, where have you had drop off in your funnel? Are you getting dropped before or after the recruiter screening call? If after, then the problem may not be your CV.
  • imadkhan 3y ago
    I'm not even getting an initial screening call. I know this points to it being the resume but I already paid for 3 separate resume reviews, so I'm hoping its just the market right now
    • rahimnathwani 3y ago
      If you've applied to 1000 jobs and gotten only one screening call, I suggest you take seriously what's in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36901965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36901965
  • jacknews 3y ago
    That seems unrealistic unless you're just scattering applicaitons. By the time you've filtered out suitable jobs, researched the company a little, written a cover letter, customized your CV, gone through their application process/questions, sometimes even a test, you're looking at 3-4 a day quality applications at most.
• 1letterunixname 3y ago
  I'm a Sr. SRE (IC5) with corporate, startup, and consulting experience also looking.
• zer8k 3y ago
  My linkedin views are basically rock bottom and the twice-daily recruiter spam has stopped entirely. From my assessment of my network anyone who lost their job is looking, or has been looking for a long time. The market is effectively dead. Even if you set your sights extremely low. Even corporate suit-and-tie programmer jobs are drying up. I don't know what I'll do if I lose my job. Construction, maybe. I can't be without health insurance so I am always terrified of markets where it might take months to get a new position.
  • quickthrower2 3y ago
    Feels like the market is good in Sydney but alas you get lower wages and the high and rising cost of living. Stagflation is rampant!
    • pokepim 3y ago
      I think the market is shit only in certain HCoL places like US or west europe, everywhere else seem to be normal maybe slightly wordless than last year (but last year was crazy good)
      • quickthrower2 3y ago
        Feels like the US is on AC and everywhere else is on DC
  • rsynnott 3y ago
    It might be dependent on what's in your area. I still get a fair bit of recruiter spam, but the character of it has changed a lot. Amazon seem to have put their ambitions to briefly employ everyone in the world on hold, and I haven't heard from them in a year, say. On the other hand, I'm seeing a lot of mail/LinkedIn messages from (a) medium-sized post-startups (~1k employees, probably not a unicorn) and (b) financial firms (HFT and all that). I suspect that these types of companies were starved of applicants over the last few years; they simply couldn't afford to compete with stock-heavy offers from Big Tech(TM).
• quickthrower2 3y ago
  Are you only applying for front end? You might consider trying backend and devops too if not. Anything where code is written. Then if you get interviews, invest in learning the stuff that gets you past their tests and interviews.
  • John23832 3y ago
    There are, again, many qualified candidates in backend and devops as well. Changing specialties probably puts you at the bottom of the pile because you don’t have experience that speaks directly to the job.
    • Leherenn 3y ago
      Sure but unless your limiting factor is that you can't apply fast enough to every jobs, it's just a long shot with about no downside for you.
• scelerat 3y ago
  Same here. 22 years experience full stack; leadership roles. Can't get an interview. Taking an ML class. I think telling some recruiters I had a baby on the way was a mistake.
  • pokepim 3y ago
    [dead]
  • sosodev 3y ago
    You’re struggling with 22 YOE? That’s unfathomable to me
    • agumonkey 3y ago
      this industry seems to be more and more senseless. or maybe it was a bubble and we're falling back to the norm where enterprises are your enemies..
    • lrem 3y ago
      Possibly the ageism in our profession is not only a myth?
      • ItsBob 3y ago
        I've heard about that many many times yet I don't believe I've ever experienced it (I'm in the UK and in my late 40s). I am a contractor and for the most part it's still, thankfully, a meritocracy. So experience is, in my opinion, the biggest factor. I have no doubt that sometimes, perhaps for the entry-level roles, they will discriminate against age but for senior roles, due to the cost of the candidate and the potential damage they can do, a younger candidate without the experience, could affect them badly.
  • throwaway2037 3y ago
    I definitely hide everything about my private life when speaking with recruiters or potential employers. On the first day that you walk in the door of your new employer, dump all your personal problems (that you choose) on your new boss. It is the only chance you have to do it. All other times are "inconvenient" or an excuse to say no-to-hire or give you a lousy rating or layoff. Women have been facing this ... forever in the office. The smartest ones learn to play these games.
• oto9 3y ago
  There’s a few motives in play; office leases, are part of it. But senior workers were getting too full of themselves a social agents for good and political status quo is coddle the government agents and their lobbyist/think tank leaders. Now it’s templated to some dependency imports, leetcode, some well known TF; they can backfill with lower paid newbs. I’m working on a Linux distro where the install sets up an LLM and boots to GPU accelerated 3D viewport where a little entity acts as my chatbot. Goal is to show the world we don’t need corporate controlled software.
• tayo42 3y ago
  Its rough and people seem picky. I've been out of work for around a year now, partially by choice. I still get interviews here and there. Post your resume in a comment here maybe? And as much as it sucks shoot a little lower? Are you you only applying to house hold tech companies?
• RomanPushkin 3y ago
  It's bad if you're in the U.S. Companies hire folks in the US to fire them later if they want to. That's how it works, and everyone understands that we can hire today, we can fire tomorrow, because of "employment at will". Those high salaries don't mean anything anymore. If your salary was $200K and you spent 1 year to find a job, your salary is now $100K. Compare it to other countries - Germany, for example. Salaries are lower, but if you work, you can't be fired. You're getting your paycheck, you're protected by laws, and it's your American fella who is going under the bridge with his family, not you. We really need to make "employment at will" illegal. Personal anecdote from Russia (I hold expired Russian passport and have many friends from there). Auto-translated from chats (reach out if you're curious getting the origin link): === 8< === Another moment. When I was completely desperate to find a job here in our region, I published a CV on the Russian HH.ru. And there is a lot of activity there. In one day, they wrote to me vk, sber, yandex and several other fairly well-known offices. And all as one are looking for remote employees, but for some fucking reason that is not clear to me, I have to be on the territory of the Russian Federation. That's just an exception with Yandex. They can arrange in Serbia. But you also have to go there. === >8 === I don't know what they did to the US economy, so now it's even worse here than it is in Russia.
  • KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
    You sure they are not trying to draft you? Don't be a fool, smart engineers let other idiots do the actual fighting.
    • RomanPushkin 3y ago
      I can't leave the US for other reasons, so even if I really want to, I can't go there.
    • Vibgyor5 3y ago
      Sidenote: but no, drafting is not so quick and there are multiple ways to refuse to do that. (I'm in RF at the moment)
  • Vibgyor5 3y ago
    There're no EORs (Employer of Record) like Deel etc. operating out of Russia so they'd need you to be legally/officially registered at the very least in Russia. I know someone who did the same and then spend ~6-7 months outside Russia. Within RU, they work remotely and have never visited the office even. As a sidenote, not only did they get the job, but their income progression has been 1.5x since they joined as a newbie within 1 year.
• SxC97 3y ago
  I posted something similar just a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36876485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36876485 I worked as a cybersecurity engineer for 2 years and I've applied for over 300 _entry level_ developer jobs over the last few months and still haven't heard back from most places. It's definitely not just you! I've heard from family and friends that are still in the tech field that most companies still have a hiring freeze in place and that this will probably stay in place for the remainder of the year, maybe even into Q1 or Q2 of next year. The best idea right now might be to get _any_ job (even entry level positions) and just hunker down while we wait for the market to recover before we can apply for jobs that are more commiserate with our experience levels. I decided to go back to school and get my Masters in CS while I wait and I'm also planning on doing some web or app development on the side just to pad my resume a little. I'm sorry I can't help any more, other than to say that you're not alone in this :)
• ulfw 3y ago
  The market is bad. I've been unemployed for 9 months, almost no interview invites and the ones I did have led to nothing (also to no alternative hire of someone else for the allegedly position). And I've got almost 20 years of Product Leadership experience, Stanford, Google, myspace, Booking and Trip.com Groups, that stuff. The market (in my case APAC: HK/SG/AU) is shit and frankly not really worth engaging in right now. I'd love to be employed, but a low IC position (haven't done that in 13-14 years) for 60-70% less pay (the last one who contacted me) is a bit of a tough pill to swallow in a market with (last year) 10% inflation.
  • MrDresden 3y ago
    My humble advice would be to take any job that gets offered (as long as it isn't sweatshop conditions or unrealistically low wages) and then simply continue the job search. Once in a job, you are more employable. And employers are for sure not entitled to their worker's unquestioning loyalty. So I see nothing wrong with moving positions if a better one presents itself.
    • iExploder 3y ago
      exactly, stealing someone who is already employed feels much better because from the company's point of view you have already been pre-selected. it also gives you a leverage when asking for more $$. don't hate the player, hate the game...
  • moneywoes 3y ago
    Have you considered your own venture with that experience? Would love to connect
    • ulfw 3y ago
      I am still considering, but assembling the right team and the right locale (to get talent and funding) is a bit difficult as I am based out of Hong Kong and Australia right now. But I am open to ideas.
• frontman1988 3y ago
  Try applying with a different name, maybe there's some discrimination factor at play as well
  • readthenotes1 3y ago
    I recall reading many years ago about a woman who had to change her name to be male to get calls. That is in contrast with a few years ago where a man changed his resume to be of a black lesbian and started getting calls.
    • pavlov 3y ago
      What kind of résumé highlights that the applicant is a black lesbian? This sounds more like a porn movie script. “Hardcore All-Girl Positive Discrimination XVII”
      • iExploder 3y ago
        lol you really are not afraid someone's going to press a cancel button on you? based.
        • pavlov 3y ago
          Hah. I’m saying the idea that a man could pose on their résumé as a black lesbian sounds more like a male fantasy scenario, because that’s not how professional résumés work at all. Where do you even put the lesbian part? College extracurriculars?
          • iExploder 3y ago
            easy, you put it right under your photo with your pronouns and twitter handle. exhibitionist don't have any qualms about such sort of behavior
            • pavlov 3y ago
• diavelguru 3y ago
  Remember the FAANG layoffs were huge. You are competing against those folks (you may also be one of those). https://fi.money/blog/posts/faang-company-layoffs-what-caused-it-how-did-it-affect-their-stocks https://fi.money/blog/posts/faang-company-layoffs-what-cause...
  • RomanPushkin 3y ago
    Being in a major corporation sometimes can play against you: - I see a couple of corporations on your resume, do you have experience working in a startup environment? - ... If you have Blind app access, try to search for "I really thought after Google, I should be employable" post
    • 5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
      blind is the most obnoxiously insufferable community. i'm glad they're not employable! TC 0. how's that.
      • bogota 3y ago
        I don’t wish TC 0 on anyone but Blind has to be one of the most toxic communities. I spent a few months on it when working at a FANG adjacent company and after seeing people personally calling out managers and just generally any visible person I stopped using it.
        • ben_w 3y ago
          What does "TC 0" mean? I only found (three types of) complexity classification, which clearly doesn't match the context…
          • seeekr 3y ago
            In this context "TC" probably means "Total Compensation", and "TC 0" meaning "currently not earning anything at all".
          • 3y ago
• qwertynowz 3y ago
  It seems to be bad. I have applied to 600 software dev jobs in 2/3 months and have had around 8 interviews but still no dice.
• 5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
  FED is finished . i would suggest moving into something with higher barrier to entry. last 4 FED my company hired are ex-sales/ex-whatever bootcampers (yes my company is cheap). remote working is the final nail. still few good FED jobs but you have 10,000s expert leetcoders fired by faang to compete.
  • pkaye 3y ago
    What do you mean by FED?
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • AlbinoDrought 3y ago
      Front End Development
    • jml78 3y ago
      I assume front end developer.
  • tap-snap-or-nap 3y ago
    I am amazed people are still getting jobs as FED
    • Tade0 3y ago
      The corporate world is still in large part using Angular - it's a niche nowadays, but a safe one considering that bootcampers usually pick React.
    • bambataa 3y ago
      Why are you amazed? There are many complex front ends out there.
    • 3y ago
• jameshush 3y ago
  Reach out to people you've worked with in the past. After having five years of experience, you should have worked with at least a handful of people who need someone to fix another broken website. These could be managers, people on your team, people on OTHER teams, vendors, salespeople you've spoken to, anyone. Ideally, you should ALWAYS keep in contact with people you've worked with, even if it's just emailing them "Happy Birthday!" every year for the rest of your life, but the best time to plant a tree was ten years ago, the second best time to do it is now. A warm referral is the best way to get a job. It's tough doing cold outreach. Good luck!!!
  • a_t48 3y ago
    So much this - nearly every job I’ve gotten in tech has been due to knowing someone working there, or knowing someone who knows someone.
    • mattigames 3y ago
      I have around 13 years in the business but I suck at socializing and I'm thankful this hasn't been the case for me, I would be broke if I depended on acquaintances to find work, instead I just have landed positions by applying to offers found at LinkedIn and elsewhere.
      • JackFr 3y ago
        You don’t need to socialize - a recruiter reached out to me and I let him know that I wasn’t in the market, but the guy who had sat next to me for 3 years (open plan offices FTW!) at my last job would be perfect. We weren’t terribly friendly but certainly got on professionally.
    • tomp 3y ago
      Interesting. Literally every job I’ve gotten was either through a recruiter or cold outreach.
      • JackFr 3y ago
• yieldcrv 3y ago
  Same here. No problems with call backs but many rejections after technical assessments as each company only had 1 position. Except the very first in person interview I did resulted in a job offer, just like in the beforetimes. But it is hybrid, but I also wasnt opposed to that in the whole job search.
• ochronus 3y ago
  The market is definitely bad! Headcount is tight at companies, so they are trying to make each hire count hard, plus the market is saturated with talent (compared to how it used to be) because of layoffs.
• jacknews 3y ago
  Rejection email? You were lucky to get a rejection! Or an email. We used have to lick the bosses boots clean, applying for a job paying penny a year, an' if we were lucky we might get a thrashing to within an inch of our lives, and a rejection screamed in our ear. Luxury.... . Yes sure, I'm in the same boat, but probably with worse prospects (took a 'career break' to work on side projects, etc), and it feels like I'm boxing in a cloud - 90%+ of applications are just ignored, not even a rejection.
  • EddieJLSH 3y ago
    A rejection screamed in your ear? Luxury! When I was a junior developer we used to stand in job line 25 hours a day for tuppence and if they didn't hire us we'd be shot.
  • rewmie 3y ago
    > - 90%+ of applications are just ignored, not even a rejection. I recall being at that position. I firmly believe those 90% of applications are actually fake job ads to trawl for personal data. The most suspicious cases come from recruiters who post the most generic job ad over and over and over again.
    • mattigames 3y ago
      Yep, I also noticed those fake positions usually promise a very high wage, higher than similar positions.
  • JasserInicide 3y ago
    You were lucky to get a rejection! You could say that again. In the early 2010s, I always got rejection emails. 10 years later with milliennials now in hiring manager spots, ghosting is now the norm.
  • arp242 3y ago
    33 applications since 1st of June: - 2 rejected after interview. - 2 ghosted after interview. - 3 declined on my part after interview for various reasons (1 paid essentially below minimum wage, and 2 required relocating to a different country which is fine by me for the right job, but I didn't really have a good feeling about either). - 8 rejected by email. - 18 no reply (but some might still reply, since it can take a few weeks). So that's about a 50% reply rate, give or take (assuming I'll get a reply from a few of the application from the last few days).
• ryanhupfer 3y ago
  Applyall.com is a good option for you, too. I feel like the longer you're out of the interview game, the more you need to get back into the flow of interviewing / talking to new options.
• firefoxd 3y ago
  I hate to say this, stop applying. Find a recruiter on LinkedIn. This is what it has come to. There are thousands of resumes being sent at my company, yet the recruiter can't find anyone. Why? Because no one is applying through her link. The regular resume channel is reserved for bots at this point. Contact a person and you have more chances.
  • rewmie 3y ago
    > This is what it has come to. There are thousands of resumes being sent at my company, yet the recruiter can't find anyone. Why? Because no one is applying through her link. It sounds like your recruiter is purposely ignoring any resume that is not explicitly sent to her personally. It sounds like a job security move at the expense of both the company and candidate's best interests.
    • firefoxd 3y ago
      A lot of resumes are not even for the job she posts. Bots and other 3rd party recruiters are also trying to game the system so they drown real candidates. When a resumes is from her link, there are high chances it's a real person who took the time to read the job description.
      • davidthewatson 3y ago
        The post-modern labor dichotomy between robots and human robots is mirrored on the hiring side in ATS and HR, respectively. Sadly, this is not new: https://medium.com/@jannaq/the-robot-takeover-is-already-here-5aa55e1d136a#:~:text=more%20robot%2Dlike.-,Algorithms%20are%20taking%20over%20much%20of%20the%20human%20work%20of%20hiring,the%20robots%20are%20most%20likely%20to%20hire%20the%20most%20robotic%20humans.,-The%20tests%20for https://medium.com/@jannaq/the-robot-takeover-is-already-her...
      • rewmie 3y ago
        > A lot of resumes are not even for the job she posts. I don't see how this can be a problem. People do look for jobs by contacting companies. Isn't the goal of a recruiter to check potential candidates? > Bots and other 3rd party recruiters are also trying to game the system so they drown real candidates. I fail to see how this problem is avoided by ignoring the company's inbox. > When a resumes is from her link, there are high chances it's a real person who took the time to read the job description. I don't but it. This does not pass the smell test, as screening does not depend on which input you use. It sounds like someone is failing to meet their job requirements.
• hnaccountme 3y ago
  My sense of the Tech industry is almost all the companies just jump to the new flashy hyped up buzz word "Thing". There is no real expertise any more. So its more sensible for companies to hire inexperienced people at a lower salary or offshore. If you have to learn the "new tech" every few years there is no point of your experience.
• randomuser23423 3y ago
  For what it's worth, I'm in a 'hot' area and my application response rate is something like 3%. I've also had this bad luck where a lot of the larger companies I've been interviewing with have rejected me without giving a reason, and then a month or two later (or one time, the day after the onsite!), I'd see that they were having layoffs. edit: and just as an aside, I'm a minority in tech, and I feel a bit like I'm more likely to get an interview (some recruiters have told me as much... wanting to increase diversity on their teams) while also more likely to get a "technical rounds were great, but not a culture fit" final decision.
  • lokhura 3y ago
    I'm a minority in tech too and I never respond to the race, ethnicity and gender questions. There are many red flags to find out which companies are likely to be racist. If the company's diversity statement is larger than the job description, I do not apply. So far this has worked pretty well for me. I applied to 25 jobs in the last month and I got 3 interviews so far. I think ethical companies that do not partake in racist statistics appreciate you not answering those questions.
• yosito 3y ago
  When you say "applying constantly", what do you mean? A few years ago, when tried cold-applying to jobs, I had to send several hundred applications to get a few good interviews, and I have a very strong resume (15 years of experience and worked at NASA). During the pandemic, I was hiring for an engineering role at a fairly unknown startup and we had to filter through over 500 applicants and interviewed only 15-20. Now, with LLMs, I imagine those numbers are an order of magnitude worse and applications are looking more and more personalized. A few bits of advice: - Don't focus your efforts on cold applications, the numbers are against you - If you must do cold applications, use LLMs to customize applications and aim to send out >50 per day - Focus on your personal and extended network, reach out personally to people you know and ask them if they have any opportunities they can connect you with. Personal connections are always going to trump sitting in a stack of 1000 cold applications
  • basisword 3y ago
    In addition to your network I would say contact recruiters who may have “spammed” you in the past. At least they are almost certain get you interviews as opposed to just sending your resume places. Speak with a few recruiters and you’re almost certainly going to get doing one or two interviews a week for jobs you’re actually interested in.
• nelsonfigueroa 3y ago
  Are you on LinkedIn? I am not currently looking for a job but I still get a lot of recruiters on LinkedIn reaching out to me. I get the impression that there are still a lot of opportunities out there. But then again this may not be the case in your location.
  • throwaway2037 3y ago
    Yes, definitely update your LinkedIn profile. Put something catchy in there. And post something once a week to generate some activity. It is totally influencer bullshit, but this war -- getting a job. You can also flag your profile in LinkedIn as looking for opportunities.
    • Paul-Craft 3y ago
      What do you mean "put something catchy in there?"
      • ChainOfFools 3y ago
        I wish I knew, currently rolling the dice on going back to school for computational neuroscience, and if tech doesn't bite on that then there's always a masters in psychology as a backup. Or just bite the bullet and remortgage the house for a nice safe MD.
        • throwaway2037 3y ago
          What kind of work can you do with a masters in psych?
      • Oras 3y ago
        1. Skills, add as many skills as you have. 2. You have 2500 words limit in the About section. Write about all the projects you were involved in. Instead of just writing: "Experience in Mongo", it could be "Improved the system's performance by 30% by optimizing Mongo." 3. Again, add skills to each of your working history. 4. you can add the training courses or what you're learning for hot skills in the market. 5. Professional quality photo. You don't need to spend on getting a professional photographer. You can use AI tools to improve a selfie from your phone to look professional. These will not get you the job, but will increase your appearance in search results.
• Traubenfuchs 3y ago
  Have you considered moving to Europe? Germany, Switzerland, Austria? With my senior salary and depending on frugality I can save between 1000 and 2000 € a month in Austria and have a very pleasant life. If you ask if there is gonna be leetcode bullshit in the interviews, most people laugh in your face because the idea is so alien to us. People want to hear about your authentic experiences and see you solve real world problems / take home tasks. Small no name companies are as desperate for talent as ever, while the banks, insurance providers, retailers, government related entities and consulting companies feeding on them have open positions all year round. I don't think anyone experienced with fighting on the US software engineering market would have any struggle to get something here. Though it does depend on your expectations: You generally will not get 300k, 200k or maybe not even 100k starting and won't get any name worthy stock options unless you are doing very special things for very special companies. Second consideration: Have you considered not applying for those FAGMAN level companies and their inflated salaries or overpaying startups, but something boring instead? Government, insurance, banking? In other words, have you considered lowering your expectations and standards?
  • frant-hartm 3y ago
    > I can save between 1000 and 2000 € a year in Austria You mean a month, right? Or you forgot one zero, or something is wrong.
    • Traubenfuchs 3y ago
      Hahaha, yes. Oops.
    • expertentipp 3y ago
      Considering housing situation and extortive taxation and various contributions in these countries, the OP might be joking. Salaries there have been stagnant in numbers for at least 5 years.
      • amon22 3y ago
        Lol what the hell youre talking about?
• beebeepka 3y ago
  It's not you. The market is really bad. I thought the massive layoffs in the US wouldn't have an effect on me here in Bulgaria but it just took a while to propagate. My LinkedIn spam is just the site looking for engagement, not recruiters. I was s contacted by Microsoft representatives offering 5000 USD as a B2B. It's that bad. Feels like my FE days are over.
• isykt 3y ago
  Have you considered contracting work?
• Madmallard 3y ago
  software engineering is incredibly saturated at this point you have to be marketable in another way
  • rvz 3y ago
    More like a over-saturated field and now 'less engineers' are needed thanks to AI. > "you have to be marketable in another way" Correct. I would look at personal GitHub projects over Leetcode BS if I was finding a candidate at this point.
    • hardware2win 3y ago
      >less engineers' are needed thanks to AI. I dont believe
• ItsBob 3y ago
  I thought I'd add a data point to this discussion. I'm in the UK and the traditional dev/tech job route was via something like JobServe, Indeed etc., where you see a role advertised via an employment agency and you send your CV hoping for a callback. I'm in a stable contract so I'm not looking but two weeks ago, I was contacted by two agents, one day apart, both unrelated to one another, completely out of the blue. The first agent was more like a headhunter-type in that he arranged to "interview" me the following day via Teams to drill into my background and skillset. It lasted about 40 mins. Now, I can say, hand on heart, that in all my 20+ years of work that has never happened. Ever. He didn't have a role in mind, just that he wanted a few good candidates to pimp around to his contacts (CTO's and such). My experience in the UK has been that you apply for a role you find on JobServe, you phone and chase the agent, and you hope to get through the cattle market, not this US-style agent-works-for-me stuff. The other agent had a role in mind but he also grilled me extensively. Again, never happened before... they usually ask you about the keywords they're looking for and that's it: call done in 2 mins. This call took over 30 mins. I asked the first guy what was going on as his style was more like the US system where a recruitment agent will work for YOU, and try to get you a role somewhere, whereas the UK model (unless headhunted!) was very much that the agents worked for the companies in question and acted like a CV-buffer to filter out the crap. One of the agents hinted that there are a lot of average candidates out there at the moment looking for a smaller number of roles so they are aggressively filtering them before handing over to the clients. I suspect that there have been a bunch of rejected CV's sent to the clients and they're now wanting better candidates... either that or agencies are indeed swamped in average candidates (not pissing on them, but if you have avg candidates and good candidates, the avg ones will lose out). Anyway, things are a bit weird in the UK at the moment so I thought I'd chime in.
  • iExploder 3y ago
    as a rule of thumb I ignore all UK agents, they have the attention span of a coked up butterfly. from my experience they try extract as much information out of you (your salary, last company, are they hiring, give me phone number to their manager or hr) and never call even if they scheduled a call. they never update you if the role you applied for have been filled in meantime, you simply get ghosted and your email gets spammed with offers. I would suggest to email directly to a company hr or apply directly through company's job portal. Apply to companies that don't advertise on linkedin or similar portals. This is how I got essentially all of my jobs and this is how I get leads even now.
• koopuluri 3y ago
  Could you elaborate on how you're applying to these companies? The highest probability approach to getting an interview is via an internal referral: i.e. someone at the company you want to work at refers you. After you've exhausted your network, cold emails with a strong pitch to engineers & engineering managers at companies that are aggressively hiring is the best approach to gain referrals. A couple of friends and I wrote a playbook to help folks land interviews: https://koopuluri.com/get-interviews https://koopuluri.com/get-interviews. We go into detail about what a strong pitch is, how to craft one, and how to effectively cold email. Happy to help in any way, feel free to reply here / email me (in bio).
• physicsguy 3y ago
  Things that disqualify CVs straight away for us: * Unclear if have right to work in country. This needs to be stated up front! Our company can't sponsor visas, so if based in another country unless it says something about the visa status, we basically have to throw it away. * Poor grammar, spelling, attention to detail on CV. I get some CVs through that are almost unreadable. I'm not saying if there's a single typo then we'd disqualify, but if it's littered with them it shows poor attention to detail and that's quite important professionally! Things that would make me think twice about interviewing: * Too much emphasis on stuff that's not relevant. * Big gaps in employment * Working for weird companies that show poor judgement in itself. For e.g. - Crypto exchanges, predatory companies, etc.
  • Tao3300 3y ago
    > Big gaps in employment Really curious what you suggest as a remedy for this one. It seems to boil down to "sorry, you're screwed now" or "lie but don't get caught"
    • physicsguy 3y ago
      If you've got 300 CVs to review, much of them with similar experience, do you interview the people who've had 2 years off, or the people that haven't?
      • Tao3300 3y ago
        I'd probably take a mix. Those people were probably doing some interesting stuff in those 2 years. Generally among our hires, those applicants have been much more eager to get down to business than the ones that are burned out from working the same job as the one they're applying for at a place they hate that isn't paying them enough. And before you think you dodged it, I'm still wondering what you're suggestions are.
      • robga 3y ago
        At least in my field, it would be an absolute complete irrelevance. You’ve said 2 years here. What sort of gap wouldn’t be a factor to you? 3mo? 9mo?
• tossoff49463628 3y ago
  If you admit that you have a slight bent towards entrepreneurship or similar you are out of the door instantly. If it’s somewhere like a YC startup and they realize you’re not young and willing to sacrifice your life, same thing. Edit: to make that less bitter sounding. To be more helpful: A resume gap that you’ll casually admit to or honesty in monetary requirements also are instant disqualified status these days. No more low interest rate free for all.
  • fullstackchris 3y ago
    Can't help but feel this is often the case. A bit of "oh they are not desperate enough yet to join us"
  • moneywoes 3y ago
    How do avoid mentioning that, what is the ICP for an interviewer?
• devoutsalsa 3y ago
  One resource you can look into is specific channels for your skills. For example, if I'm looking for Elixir work, I'll look at the jobs in the weekly Elixir Radar newsletter => https://elixir-radar.com/ https://elixir-radar.com/. And there is also an #jobs channel on the Elixir Slack account => https://elixir-lang.slack.com/ https://elixir-lang.slack.com/ Good luck OP!
• SCUSKU 3y ago
  I was laid off in August 2022, and it took me 6 months to find a new job. I was able to land a decent number of interviews but I interviewed poorly and didn't get any offers. Doing interview prep actually helped a lot -- now having been on the other side it is very apparent when someone hasn't prepared and practiced interviewing. It really is a skill in and of itself. I found my current job through the January HN Who's Hiring post. This company doesn't post anywhere except HN. Would definitely recommend that since the August post is coming out soon! This experience inspired me to build a tool that uses AI to match your resume to the best matching jobs: https://hnresumetojobs.com/ https://hnresumetojobs.com/ Give it a try, maybe it'll help you! Best of luck, it truly is a grind and is emotionally taxing -- but you WILL find something soon.
  • InvOfSmallC 3y ago
    Hey, I tried your website, it selected 314 jobs. Doesn't look like is matching correctly. Or I am a jack of all trades.
    • ulfw 3y ago
      No the website doesn't work at all. It shows me the same 314 jobs. Not a single one relevant.
      • SCUSKU 3y ago
        Hey, sorry to hear it's not working for you -- would be happy to look more into the problem! Could you shoot me an email with your resume attached? My email is in my HN profile.
    • SCUSKU 3y ago
      Hey would be happy to look more into it -- my email is in my HN profile, would appreciate if you sent me your resume there.
  • Dylan16807 3y ago
    > now having been on the other side it is very apparent when someone hasn't prepared and practiced interviewing. It really is a skill in and of itself. And now that you can recognize that skill in isolation, do you use it as a major factor when choosing candidates? If you do, why? Do you think the people interviewing you could recognize that you were specifically bad at interviewing, and not at everything?
• expertentipp 3y ago
  Bots and scams. Housing, dating, job search - these three have become hopeless "marketplaces", hopefully we are at the tipping point and they will collapse. I compile Latex CV for every job application and make an extra effort to apply directly to the company. Every time they have direct one to one communication with an experienced professional with relevant education, and they... insist on digging into inconsistencies and gaps in the CV, search for fraud on my side, ask for salary upfront (ie. "we want cheap" or they simply probe the market for salaries). The market is bad, you have bad luck, the shit's fucked.
  • iExploder 3y ago
    the ideal candidate has 3-4 years of experience in exactly everything you need so you dont need to train. has no idea what they are worth so you can underpay. and doesn't have a family so they can sit in the office 24/7. this is what the job world has become and it's not going in the right direction.
    • aa1234556 3y ago
      [dead]
    • ragnot 3y ago
      Bingo
• aryehof 3y ago
  Supply simply far exceeds demand. Unless your highly specialized, connected, lucky or perceived as a “James Bond”, the employment market is dire. This is the inevitable consequence of too many entrants into the market, past over-hiring, and a profession where experience doesn’t count and your competing against ever more newcomers with a high IQ, less expectations, and a better ability to “leetcode” and memorize those algorithms and data structures. Your prospective employers probably get 200 resumes or more for every general position, but of course “we’re hiring” (sic).
• system2 3y ago
  What state? Also do you apply only 6 figure jobs? What is the minimum are you asking for frontend jobs? IMHO these affect the job hunt the most.
  • haspok 3y ago
    What country? What continent even?
• iExploder 3y ago
  how its suppose to be done and how it worked for me in past in order of the most effective to least: 1. social circle 2. attend conferences, exchange business cards, contact info 3. apply to companies through their own job portal or direct hr email 4. don't go for shiny companies (either location or business must suck, less competition this way) anything else such as random recruiter agencies, linkedin, job portals is not going to yield any effect in this day and age. there is just too much saturation and bots + we are in a layoff cycle and AI uncertainty.
  • kioleanu 3y ago
    Good advice about attending conferences. At the last Java conference I went to, most large and good employers had booths trying to catch people. It’s a perfect “demand meets supply” situation
• ivolimmen 3y ago
  I know this is completely off-topic but I am Dutch and never MET anyone that was laid off. Non of my friends, family and even colleague's (and I work in IT-consultancy so I see loads of people). How common is this in America? Is it normal that in your career your are fired at least once?
  • zdragnar 3y ago
    There have been some industry wide collapses- the dot com bust in 2000-2002 most notably, a few more industry specific slumps such as during the housing market crash in 08, and most recently FAANG-esque companies went on an absolutely wild hiring spree during COVID lockdowns and remote-work period. Many big tech companies went through a round or two of layoffs in the last year. I interviewed I think two or three junior devs a few months back who had been hired at Facebook or Twitter or some other company and let go within a few months of being hired. Note that "fired" and "laid off" are very different things, with different causes, worker protections, and expectations around i.e. severance. I don't know that it is uncommon to get laid off at some point, but it also isn't something that you really go into a job expecting will happen either. Personally, the only people I know of who were laid off were in non-tech fields.
  • meeuwer 3y ago
    They prefer stealth layoffs here in the Netherlands. The end result is the same: you’re out, but with no severance and gaslit AF. Thanks Rutte, I guess?
    • ivolimmen 3y ago
      Yeah but that is only in large corporations right? I have one friend that works at KPN and survived 3 rounds of lay-offs. I personally could not cope with that kind of stress. I only work at and for smaller companies. Currently I am the only employee at my company. It's only me and my employer.
      • meeuwer 3y ago
        Indeed, it seems to be a large corporations thing.
• Archipelagia 3y ago
  At my last job, I had a little bit of experience on the other side of the hiring table – our founder walked me through our hiring process, and it was really eye opening. Any posting we had immediately got a lot of responses. We heavily tailored our postings to appeal only to people we actually wanted (e.g. were super clear about requirements, or talked extensively about company culture), and we still got dozens of applicants almost right away. And IIRC that was just through Linkedin, I hadn't even seen how many applied through other channels. Granted, most of them were mass-sent resumes, but that still crowded any good-fit applicants and made it a pain to look through. For positions at bigger companies, you could easily be competing with hundreds or thousands of mass-sent applications. Even if a human being ever looks at your resume, she'll most likely make a decision on whether to throw it away in a few seconds before moving to the next one. At this point I think applying to postings is pretty much dead. Instead, I'd focus on contacting your past colleagues asking if they know of any openings at their companies. Instead, I'd suggest: - Contact your past colleagues if you hadn't done so yet. - If there are relevant conferences or meetups in your area, consider attending. - Also, look into meetups for groups that might look for someone like you. E.g. if you go to a front-end meetups, you're just another guy in the crowd, but at a marketing or local chamber of commerce meetup there might be only a few people with the same skillset. Granted, this one often works better for freelancing, but still. - A friend of mine found his previous job by contacting people in the field and asking for advice. He moved to a different city right after university, so had no local contacts – I told him to look up people in the companies he wanted to work for, and just message them asking for a short advice call. I think the third person he spoke to recommended him to someone that was hiring. Though the key here was that my friend was only asking for advice on how to get into the industry – but once he spoke with people, it was easy to make a good impression and they kept him in mind next time they heard of an opening.
  • Varriount 3y ago
    What do mass-sent resumes look like?
• rookwood102 3y ago
  Reading the other comments, it's wild how different people's experiences with this can be even in the same country. In my experience, in the UK, the availability of types of jobs is dependant on the city and seniority level. London seems to have the most front end jobs for example. As to how to get hired, although I have succeeded with direct application, recruiters are a very popular way here to get a job, especially in web development. Finding a recruiter you trust to be working close to your interests is important, but not critical. The best recruitment firms I have found through talking to colleagues and managers. Managers often have a strong opinion on which firms refer the best candidates. I expect another angle is the type of company you're expecting to get a job at and the compensation level. I've never applied to a FAANG, but I expect all of this advice goes out the window. Perhaps though if it is applying to too-senior jobs that is your problem then talking to a trusted recruiter could be helpful. I don't know anything about resume scoring services, but perhaps they are flawed in some way? Your CV could be great for applying to certain types of jobs, but not for the ones you are applying for. I can suggest forwarding it on to someone who you look up to, who is able to give candid, honest thoughts on it. For example the company you were working at may not be a prestigious company or the technology you were using may not contain the keywords that hiring managers often are looking for. You haven't given much information so there are many possibilities as to what is going wrong, including ones outside of what I have mentioned. Good luck.
• rwky 3y ago
  I can't say about the current market but I got my last job over a year ago by posting on HN who wants to be hired (this month's post is here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36573869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36573869) try posting there on the 1st.
• aftoprokrustes 3y ago
  Something that worked for me is that I have a profile where I am a domain expert who is reasonnably good at data science and software development. I am no rock star in any of the three fields, but this particular combination is pretty rare. I got my last 2 jobs this way: most applications just got lost, or ended in a meh screening interview, but there was this one job posting in the year that required this mix of skills, and I was just the obvious choice and got hired pretty much without competition. I am not suggesting that you start a PhD in some obscure domain, but any additional skill can help stand appart from all other generalist front end developers. For instance in my last company we did quite a lot with geographical data, and if a front end dev showed even just the slightest knowledge of geodata (like knowing what a map projection is, or a knowledge of the technologies used to display maps efficiently on the web), he would quickly go on top of the pile. So if the is any domain where you know just a bit more than the average guy, even just as a hobby, I would say that it makes sense to display it on your CV and search for postings that might be related.
  • vasili111 3y ago
    >reasonnably good at data science and software development. Could you please specify how good? What exactly are your strengths in those fields? Do you have PhD?
• throwaway14142 3y ago
  I tried advertising as a consultancy, after an exceptional career in tech. * Client emails me asking if I can help with his site. I respond. He asks for more details. I respond. He provides a website with an MLM video on how to "be your own boss and sell a product that sells itself". I was talking to a bot. * Try upwork. Spend all day to send 15 proposals, get 3 views, no replies. Upwork wants me to pay money monthly for more "connect" points. Looks like you need to do work for nearly free to get ratings, and you're heavily competing with offshore. close tab ... Try fiverr. Get no messages. * Startup with revenue contacts me, shows me their business, discusses their problems, seems very interested in hiring. Offers $20 - $30 an hour for Cloud security work; software engineering, seems price sensitive to the extreme, doesn't seem to want want to pay for any time spent reviewing docs/analysis, only wants to pay for the execution time. Say no. Guy keeps calling. Guy agrees to higher rate for a tiny amount of hours to be done next-day. Guy doesn't give access, asks to review more stuff. Wasted many hours for no money. Lesson learned, try to find a fast growing company and stay away from people that sound like they would negotiate on the price of corn kernels in the back alley of aldi
  • ricardobayes 3y ago
    Thing is with the freelancer sites, they are almost all looking for cheap talent. You can be anyone, with a perfect score on the site, with huge track record, but the moment you raise your hourly above $30, no one is interested.
    • jjahdhnmko 3y ago
      [dead]
  • mpeg 3y ago
    Consulting is absolute shit. The only way to make it work is if you already have the contacts with companies that have the money to spend or if you have a channel that can get you those contacts (eg. a huge following on twitter, or a popular blog) I have a couple companies I do consulting work that are great for but they came to me through my network, I have tried to get more work but either I get stuck in an endless sales cycle (think over 1yr of sales meetings and no money exchanges hands) or their budget is extremely low.
• isaacremuant 3y ago
  If you're not even getting interviews, neither of those things is responsible and there's so something wrong with your strategy. Definitely try linkedin, as they said, and talking to your contacts (outside of LinkedIn, I mean). Basically don't spam the same thing but treat it as scientific experiment and try different things. Also prepare yourself for the different interviews. When you get those, remember not to work for free "for interview projects" and stuff like that.
  • ricardobayes 3y ago
    I'm still sore about the two times I was asked to do free work: Create a custom datepicker following a strict design (that is the best part of a week minimum to make it polished perfect) The other one wanted me to learn a complex product on my own, with no knowledge base and demo their own platform to them. All this while they knew I was working a full-time demanding engineering manager job.
• thelittleone 3y ago
  What is your area of expertise? I have 25 years in cyber security. I left corporate world for a few years which made it very difficult to get back in. So I stated a profile on upwork with with a low rate. Now, after 2 years, I'm flat out, and earning more than I did in corporate world and I can pick and choose the projects I work on.
• mrweasel 3y ago
  I think the market is perhaps a little worse for developers, compared to other positions. It might also be localized to certain areas. I'm in Denmark and there is certainly no shortage of SRE/operations types of jobs. So if you know Windows or networking then finding work is really easy, but overall there's a shortage of pretty much everything. Just the past two months I've gotten four offers (granted two was from the same company), but they are straight up job offers, not asking me to do interviews and I'm an average SRE/operations person. So I think it depends on the area and whether or not you're want to work for small to midsize companies outside the bigger metro areas. Some of the jobs also isn't that exciting, but it beat doing nothing.
• fullstackchris 3y ago
  Applying and interviewing for software jobs has become possibly THE most toxic thing I've ever experienced: - ghosted by companies if you don't EXACTLY match and 'gel' with their stupid full stack takehome projects to the T - multiple cases of simply no response - hours of interview rounds taking my time away, when it's clear they won't take you The list goes on, there is truly nothing I hate more.
• EddieJLSH 3y ago
  The market is pretty horrible right now, in my experience. Speak to a recruiter and it should be a little easier to find something. I used to have roughly 1/2 of applications leading to interviews and around 3/4 of those leading to offers but this year had a 20 application dry streak. I think the market is pretty flooded with good talent from the large tech companies layoffs and the number of people going through bootcamps for junior positions too. Hoping to get an offer in my final interview for a role in 10 minutes!
  • booi 3y ago
    good luck!
    • EddieJLSH 3y ago
      Thanks, got it! :)
      • vasili111 3y ago
        Congratulations!
  • giovannibonetti 3y ago
    > I think the market is pretty flooded with good talent from the large tech companies layoffs and the number of people going through bootcamps for junior positions too. I believe this is the key part. I see many people coming from coding bootcamps with a lot of experience with frontend dev in React, since that is (was?) probably one of the few fastest things you can learn to go to the market get a job fast. Now the market is flooded with people in this situation, since their qualifications are so generic that they become more easily replaceable.
• fergie 3y ago
  As a hiring manager, I would say that the job market is still pretty strong for any engineer who can do fizzbuzz on the spot. However, its now much tougher in the tech-adjacent fields such as graphic design, copywriting, and project management. Not so many openings, many applicants. Even if you get the job, pay and prospects are not great.
  • vasili111 3y ago
    What about data science areas like machine learning, deep learning and AI?
• aleks5678 3y ago
  Do you adjust your resume before applying to each role? If so how? If not, why not? Also do you send a cover letter?
• terjej 3y ago
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• nurettin 3y ago
  Don't use resume websites. Use company links.
• fluential 3y ago
  The key is this: While you browse various job boards if there is no direct contact to a person or the email / phone is obfuscate, just find contact details online. I often pay for various services that can give you contact details based on linkedin profile - give them a call and most often then not you will have interview shortly after. Do the work to reach out to those people, establish rapport and you will be in a good place. If you are great professional they will make sure to keep you on their roster as an ACE candidate.
• mixtieboo 3y ago
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• mixtieboo 3y ago
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  • enilakla 3y ago
    I find it fascinating yet sad that some people have such adverse opinions toward whole generations, essentially. Why such animosity?
    • rsynnott 3y ago
      Media influence; note their concentration on millennials specifically. The media loves to obsess over the misdeeds of the terrible millennials and boomers. My personal theory to explain this is that ~everyone currently in a position of editorial power in media is gen X; note that the media never mentions gen X. However, change is coming, as the gen Xes will start aging out soon. Within about a decade, expect the media to be decrying the villainous gen Xes and Zeds, as the top editorial jobs go millennial. Constant memes about cereal will replace the stuff about avocados, etc (Gen X are the peak breakfast cereal generation, as they were largely around before truth-in-advertising rules severely restricted manufacturers from claiming that the product containing a lot of sugar was good, actually). This isn't new; "everyone significantly younger than or older than me is terrible" has been a meme for, at least, thousands of years. Shows up in ancient Roman and Greek stuff, say. The _degree_ to which people think that Other Generations are weird and bad may be growing, though, as the media writ large becomes more pervasive.
• gloosx 3y ago
  I got laid off at the end of the last year and had some savings which allowed me to live comfortably for another 6 months jobless. I enjoyed this time, worked on some personal projects, and learned a lot. Eventually ran out of savings and started applying in the spring – the recruiter will set up an interview for you very quickly, so there was no problem on that side, although the quality is low, usually, it is a mechanical interview for X/Y/Z 10000-employee conglomerate looking for 10001st with cosmic high expectations (from a 2007 methodical book), so you have to rely on the quantity a lot to find what you want (it's a good practice anyway). In the end, I was lucky to find my gem by leaving a short resume in an HN "Who wants to be hired" thread :) You never know when and where you will find your destiny – but you can always pull more out of the chance – if you advertise vigorously!
• vegancap 3y ago
  I got laid off, started working for an unfunded start-up, they ran out of cash. Had to look for other jobs, it took something like two months to find one. I applied to probably the most jobs I've ever applied for whilst on a job hunt. Previous job hunts have taken like... a couple of weeks and I've had multiple offers to choose from. It really came down to one solid offer this time around. Most of my applications were just rejected immediately, without even speaking to anyone. It's easily the worst I've ever seen it. I suspect a lot of jobs are waiting to see if folks laid off by Google/Meta/Twitter would apply, hence why I was getting rejected immediately, having not worked for one of them. Just a theory though... but either way, it's really really tough at the minute. Hang in there, mate. You will get something, it's just going to take a bit more digging this time around.
• Uptrenda 3y ago
  I believe the market really is just bad right now. When I was job searching it probably took me 3 times as long. I noticed that there were hundreds of applicants per role when normally I'd have noticed less than 20 maybe? Even at my current company they told us that hundreds of people were applying. That's how many you have to beat just to get in the door. I think it's caused by a number of factors: (1) Investors are spooked about the health of the economy and are giving out less funding. Less funding = slower startup growth = less hiring for new roles. (2) Since funding is slowing down startups can't count on future raises as much and are being told to preserving capital. Runway becomes more of a priority = also less hiring. (3) ''"Covid revenue spikes lead to surges in hiring and lay offs when revenues reversed.'" I've been told it was only non-technical roles but I don't buy it. I think what happened was companies needed to trim fat to satisfy scared investors and Covid was used as the perfect excuse to make layoffs seem like they were outside of companies control. But everything was about the mentality of scared investors. Investors were literally angry that more people weren't fired... So yeah, this is quite a toxic time to be in tech. But I do think it will stabilize eventually.
  • varjag 3y ago
    It's the interest rate. Investment money is no longer (near) free.
    • toxik 3y ago
      Meanwhile companies are having record profits. What gives?
      • varjag 3y ago
        Only a small fraction of start-up scene is ever profitable. That gives.
        • edrxty 3y ago
          Most people aren't applying to startups.
• fxtentacle 3y ago
  Be careful when batch applying. My company, for example, requires applicants to repeat a code word in the email subject line. Last time we had an opening, it was clearly stated in the job description, yet 90+% of applicants didn't do it. We then sorted them onto the same pile as those guys from India that booked a CV spamming service, meaning no human ever looked at the CVs of people who didn't follow this simple request.
  • o1y32 3y ago
    Assuming we are talking about software engineer positions, at least in the US I have not seen any company that requires applicants to actually send an email to apply for a long time. Just about every company uses an online applicant tracking system, either a third party, common system or an in-house one.
  • zorrolovsky 3y ago
    Good tip, but to offer a counter-point: I skip a lot of text when reading job descriptions because 99% of the time they are packed with marketing nonsense. It's so dull, meaningless and repetitive that it's sometimes comic. Ie toilet paper company: "Here at XYZ corp we believe we will change the world forever through market-leading technology that inspires generations. We hire innovators, explorers and change-makers. We're non conformists on a mission. blah blah blah" The real job role: "be some sysadmin for an ancient legacy platform".
• rsynnott 3y ago
  It's not a good job market, but it doesn't seem normal to spend six months applying and only get _one_ interview. It might be worth asking friends or former colleagues, ideally people who actually are involved in recruiting (hiring managers etc) to take a look at your resume and LinkedIn profile and see if there's anything glaringly wrong with them. Is your resume in a weird format, or is it structurally weird/overdesigned? For instance, a recent trend in resumes was to show (programming) languages known in a pie chart (do not do this; it is nonsensical). In many companies, the text from your resume is going to end up in a standard format anyway; they'll have tools for this and if their tool can't extract your text they may not bother. Unless you're a graphic designer or something, you probably want a boringly-designed resume. Are you applying jobs for which you are dramatically underqualified? One thing to keep in mind is that some small companies (if you're coming from one) have _wild_ title inflation; a small startup might call someone with 5 and a half years experience their director of frontend engineering, say, whereas everyone else would call that person a junior engineer. Does anything particularly unfortunate come up if people Google your name? For instance, a real-life version of that Seinfeld episode where Elaine's dating a guy who has the same name as a notorious local serial killer.
  • whiddershins 3y ago
    No, no one calls someone with 5.5 years of experience a junior engineer.
    • Aeolun 3y ago
      That depends entirely on their skill. I’ve seen people with 10 years of experience that were still junior.
      • arghwhat 3y ago
        One should definitely have outgrown a junior title after say 3 years of relevant experience, as that is more than sufficient time to be trained into a normal (non-senior) status. It could last longer if your company does not have a normal title (i.e., they consider junior == !senior), but someone with 10 years of relevant experience should have earned a seniority title of some sort.
• mixtieboo 3y ago
  This is a topic, I really dont want to comment on: But here it goes: Job sites are spam. Supply and demand is all that matters. People who suck got laid off. So what. These companies are incredibly dysfunctional at hiring ANYBODY in software. That includes FAANG. Software Engineering is no longer a respectable career regardless of pay. The reason is that the goal of "de-professionalizing" software engineers since the mid-90s has been accomplished within 15 years since 2005. This de-professionalizing effort was the purpose and reason for the H1-B program expansion during the Bush and Obama administrations. The main drivers behind it were Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Neither of whom wanted to pay engineers, (Bill G was more entrenched though as he said in the 90s he wanted to pay software engineers 6-7 dollars an hour) Unfortunately for both Bill G and Steve J they were caught (red-handed by the way) not only trying to fix engineer wages, create blacklists but also trying to "KILL JAVA" which is all on DOJ grand jury testimony video recordings you can access yourself. Fortunately (for them), however, the US govt cares not about what it pretends to care about in public. So the GOOD news is: Tech hiring is corrupt, managers are usually going to be gone after they fail to build their "kingdom" which they ALWAYS do and even in a market "full" of genuises and apprentices, noone will read your resume anyway. Because IT hiring is and has been a scam for almost 2 decades. Does that answer your question? Good luck.
• debarshri 3y ago
  Lot of things depends on where you are located. In EU, market is not very bad as compared to US. It is still easy to find a good opportunity. In US, it is really hard hit. In South east Asia/India, it is calm before the storm as operational costs are low, it is last one to experience the stream of layoffs. It hasn't hit the market yet.
  • eunos 3y ago
    Grab (one of the biggest in SEA) already laid offs and I can tell you local startups from SEA also have been laying offs.
• RGamma 3y ago
  So this is what neoliberal hellscape looks like from across the big pond. Feel sorry for you :/
  • wildrhythms 3y ago
    Rest assured this is coming for the UK and Europe soon too.
    • sentinalien 3y ago
      The job market is already pretty bad in the UK
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
• c16 3y ago
  This advice won't help you right now, but when you do find your next role, try take an active role in tech interviewing. It's something I pushed hard to take part in two jobs ago, and it's shown me what good candidates and bad candidates look like, how to interview and how not to bomb the interview in the first few minutes. It's also helped me massively as a candidate.
  • elAhmo 3y ago
    I was about to write the same. I volunteered in the company to help with hiring and after 20-30 interviews you get a lot of insight, what is looked at when evaluating and just in general being more natural when talking to people you see for the first time. Can’t recommend it enough!
  • wildrhythms 3y ago
    I am registered as an interviewer at my workplace ($big tech company) and in the past 2 years I've been assigned just one interview. In the past year I've been assigned zero. Interviews are randomly assigned. Front-end web developer. Internally I can see they are hiring countless full-time PMs, PgMs, directors... but developers being hired are here on 6 month vendor contracts, and not full time employees, which is a change. Something is happening.
    • solarmist 3y ago
      This is odd to me. At LinkedIn they always needed more interviewers. And I did more than 100 in my 5 years there.
• Roark66 3y ago
  Depends where you are and what you're looking for I guess. Here in Poland the market for remote jobs is great. Of course a big factor is that on average I estimate the rates paid here are half of these in UK/US (comparing my own rates for remote vs on-site). Also the way you look for work matters a lot. Every market has its specifics. In some locations it's better to send dozens of cv's in the others it's better to have alerts for exactly matching jobs and when they appear phone the recruiter within the first 5 minutes after the ad was posted. I used both techniques with great results. And the most important thing. Do not give up! And never trust words, unless they are in a form of a contract.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• zephyrfalcon 3y ago
  In my experience, the market is a lot worse than a year ago.
• fnordpiglet 3y ago
  You left off the most important pieces of into - where are you? Are you looking for remote, hybrid, in office? Do you need visa sponsorship?
• black_13 3y ago
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• catsarebetter 3y ago
  Have you tried niching down on a tech stack, an industry, or even the types of teams you want to work on? It's a good way to stand out from the crowd. You might have to turn away more recruiter screens, but it gives you a much stronger profile against everyone else with the companies you have strong fit in.
• thriller 3y ago
  I was laid off in December, a week after a rallying speech from the CEO declaring all jobs were safe. I was surprised at how difficult it was to get an interview as I have a somewhat unique skillset. But understandable if 50-150 are applying. It took seven months before I found something, by which point I had to bullshit about the gap in employment (left to spin up my consultancy!). Agree with some of the comments here. Find a good recruiter who is a straight shooter, they will be able to get you an interview or tell you what you're missing.
  • inetknght 3y ago
    > a week after a rallying speech from the CEO declaring all jobs were safe I strongly wish such things were recorded (eg, in a 1-party jurisdiction) and would be used to file grievances in court against CEO and leadership.
  • tjrgergw 3y ago
    > I was laid off in December, a week after a rallying speech from the CEO declaring all jobs were safe. Name and shame please.
• openplatypus 3y ago
  Currently at WeAreDevelopers congress in Berlin. It is conference that is heavily skewed towards businesses advertising their hiring efforts. Have no comparison to previous years but it looks like there is tons of jobs offers. And the compensation seemed to increase as well. It is now SV level, but we are talki Europe, where 100-130k puts you in top 5%.
  • djsegal 3y ago
    Hey is there a way to reach out to you? Living in berlin and currently looking for a tech job here
    • expertentipp 3y ago
      OP only want's you to buy a EUR 600 ticket, and probably a EUR 8000 bootcamp as well.
      • openplatypus 3y ago
        Not sure why I deserve this petty attack.
• supertofu 3y ago
  What is your education background? I've noticed that more companies want front-end engineers with STEM education creds than they do front-end devs with non-STEM education. If you have a non-STEM degree and/or a weak portfolio, your resume might be getting filtered out.
• cdavid 3y ago
  If you want, feel free to send me your resume and I can "review" it for you. I've have hired dozens of engineers and EM across ML, BE, etc roles. Info to contact me in my user account (handle + gmail.com)
• softwaredoug 3y ago
  I’ll be honest. Some people are bad at interviewing and selling themselves. Some of the best people I’ve worked with are getting passed over because they’re quiet and undersell themselves. Some of the more incompetent people can bullshit their way through the process and really oversell themselves. They think they’re gods gift to the field, and believing that, they can sell it. It’s 100% Dunning Kruger. I don’t know how to advise someone in this position. You just have to be willing to psych yourself up and believe a story about how great you are. Paradoxically it’s probably a TRUE story, but the great people won’t want to believe it about themselves. You CAN however put energy and practice into putting on a kind of performance of your (actual) competence. The best people can probably say things like “oh I’ve never done X before”. They think of all the ways that can go wrong doing X. Because they visualize all the things that would go wrong they actually perform better at that task (research shows negative outcome visualization is actually better than positive visualization at achieving a goal[1]). Yet it sets you up to undersell yourself. You have to suspend disbelief and remind yourself you can do hard things. And say “oh wow X sounds cool! I’ve done Y related thing, not X directly and I really would love to take a crack at X. I think I’d really love digging into it!” 1 - https://mindowl.org/premeditatio-malorum-negative-visualization/ https://mindowl.org/premeditatio-malorum-negative-visualizat...
  • dmvdoug 3y ago
    > Some people are bad at interviewing and selling themselves. 100% me. Also, hi, Doug.
    • softwaredoug 3y ago
      Whenever I meet another Doug we have to fight Highlander style to try to get the others powers. ;)
      • dmvdoug 3y ago
        There are few enough of us left that if we spread out far enough we will only jostle each other 20ish times per year for, oh, six seasons.
• scarface_74 3y ago
  Just so hopefully this doesn’t come across as insulting and for context, I spent my entire long career as a journeyman enterprise CRUD developer until 2020 working for mostly unknown companies. What do you think you have that sets you apart from all of the other developers who are looking for a job? If you can’t answer that question and you are randomly applying for jobs through job portals, it’s no better than playing the lottery. While I have been working for a long time, I stayed at my second job for nine years and by 2008, I was very much an expert beginner at 34 years old. The only thing I had going for me were soft skills and I was a good “developer”. But I was a horrible “software engineer”. 2008 was the first and last time I randomly submitted my resume to portals. After getting another job and while muddling my way through the recession, I answered every recruiters call, accepted lunch invitations, went to local tech events and built a network.
• sheepscreek 3y ago
  Ask your friends, family and university connections/network for referrals. That will almost certainly get you an interview.
• fefe23 3y ago
  I have been getting a lot of spam from India or Pakistan trying to sell me front-end or app development for several years now. If people are so desperate they resort to spam, maybe that that kind of job is just not in high demand anymore? (I have no idea, it's not my area of expertise; just posing the question) EDIT: I have heard stories that companies keep job offerings open when they are not actually hiring. They want it to look like they are dynamic and on the way up and just can't find good people to hire, when in reality their business is stale, their prospects are grim and the inflation and previous over-hiring has doomed them and what they are really looking for is a Google to buy them out. In fact I have heard of companies hiring people they don't need because they think that makes them more attractive as a buy-out opportunity to companies who actually do need those people.
• matt3210 3y ago
  My strategy is being firmware/10 years… works pretty good, getting an interview per week.
  • the_only_law 3y ago
    How did you get into firmware? From what I’ve seen, most of those companies seem to source exclusively from university pipelines for entry level, and only established domain experts for anything else.
• TootsMagoon 3y ago
  33 years in Software Development and the only job I have ever “applied” for was a seasonal job at Costco. All the other jobs, including IBM, 2 startups and currently Accenture were through my network.
• dbg31415 3y ago
  A lot of times people get put on "cool down" after applying. Apply to a job and even if you don't get a rejection letter, they may still say, "Let's put a pause on this guy for the next 6 months." So if your resume didn't start out strong the first time, they may not even be looking at the revisions. Similarly, if you're applying in the same city, in the same sort of work, don't be surprised if the HR teams have shared notes on prospects. When I worked at an agency, we had one talent scout who was just head and shoulders better than any we had worked with. I asked her what her secret was, "How are you able to find such consistently good developers?" and she said, "I get plugged in to the network, and I listen to my peers -- if they pass, I pass. Saves me time to go after better candidates." Anyway I don't know if something like that is impacting your job search, but I'd try and diversify a bit. If you were a dev, look at Test Engineering, or DevOps, or Project Management work for a bit. Remember you never have to list a job on your resume. It's always OK to say, "I took a sabbatical." And it's OK to shine rainbows on the truth, but it's never OK to outright lie. If you get caught doing that, you're burned -- to everyone in that network. Anyway, if I had time off, I'd spend time on Udemy, and YouTube, and such. Just learning as much shit as I could. I really want to get better at SketchUp so I can do more woodworking projects, but I haven't had time. I have a billion things that need repairs, or modifications in my house, and it's always, "Sigh... I'll get around to it next weekend..." And if you finish your little home project list, hit up your parents for things they need help with. Odds are, if they're elderly, they need a lot of help with tech and cleaning and even simple stuff like getting their oil changed can lead to old people getting ripped off these days. Anyway, if I had more time I'd want to take care of more of that sort of stuff for my mom... I could be laid off tomorrow in this economy... so who knows. Oh, also I feel like most companies are aware that salaries have plummeted in the last year. If you were making $200k in SF, and are asking that for a remote job... yeah, basic stuff like that can sink you. Make sure you are pricing yourself for the role. EDIT: One last thing... I have seen a TON of people lately who are really shiftless. One guy literally said, "I only work remote because I don't ever want to wear pants again." And it's cute I guess, but it's not something you want to bring up in an interview. Make sure you don't come off as someone who got "laid off for cause." Keep your background clean when doing video calls and... put on some pants even if they can't see them! (=
• foysauce 3y ago
  I can't speak for everyone, but in the 6 years and 4 companies I've worked for, we have hired only 2 front-end engineers. Full stack is simply what we want a vast majority of the time. So I'm not saying it's impossible to find something but just from a numbers perspective it's just not in demand (I worked at 2 startups and 2 mid-size companies, big tech probably does hire front end devs, but I can't say for sure).
  • Etheryte 3y ago
    As a frontend developer, with the usual caveats of anecdotal experience etc, I'm somewhat inclined to agree when talking about regular employment. Over the last decade or so I've worked in companies that range from a few employees in total to thousands of people, and most of the time I'm either the frontend guy or one of a very small handful. Most of the time the value you bring to the table from the technical side is unblocking other people, that is, making sure the design system is consistent, everything builds, nasty frontend-specific bugs are fixed, etc. Everything else can be delegated to generalists which gives the company a lot more flexibility around how to hire and arrange work. The one place where this trend does not hold in my experience is contracting. I've done a fair bit of it throughout my career and being a frontend development contractor or similar is like selling hot cakes if you bring a lot of experience to the table. The main customers are generally companies who don't have that one guy who figures out frontend stuff and in the end they have a critical mass of mess that they hire someone from the outside to come in and fix pronto.
• jawerty 3y ago
  I've been mentoring many new engineers and students this past year and there's a lot of people in your position. Overall, the biggest setbacks are network and a lack of focus in the niche. Frontend developer at a professional level requires a top 5% (roughly) resume to be a competitive applicant. I live streamed about some of the harsh truths people are dealing with now (not learning fundamentals being one of them) https://youtube.com/live/yNqWwX4jsI4?feature=share https://youtube.com/live/yNqWwX4jsI4?feature=share Let me know if you (or anyone) want to discuss this further. There's a lot of ways you can set yourself apart but it's good to understand that we're not in the 2015 tech market anymore. Most people have to have an exceptional resume/network/or a calculated niche.
  • the_only_law 3y ago
    How do I get a “niche”. I would have loved to work in some particular field I was interested in, but my whole career I was never qualified for that because well, they wanted someone already established in that niche. So I took what I had, which were generalist jobs. Never had a problem quickly picking up relevant parts of the business domain, but never really became an expert in anything particular. I’m an expert in figuring shit out I guess, and I’ve done some more interesting things on the side, but it never mattered.
• nologic01 3y ago
  Its combination of location, experience, salary expectations and sectoral business conditions. In a good market everybody needs warm bodies, the standards drop, the pay levels rise. In a poor market people focus on the absolutely required positions (e.g. replacing critical vacant roles) and pay levels drop. Location (country / region) is quite important too, there are places with chronic and dire shortages in IT expertise (but salaries might not be great). These are the fundamentals. Then you have the overlay of market making / matching which is clearly totally broken and only gets worse. What is important is to find the discipline and energy to keep developing while job searching. Maybe work on a open source project or learn something new, expanding your expertise by going deeper or broader.
• a_square_peg 3y ago
  I think regardless of the job market situation, the time-to-hire has become unreasonably long and I'm not optimistic that this will change for the better anytime soon. The trouble with job-hunting these days via web is that the signal-to-noise ratio has decreased dramatically over the years. Being able to apply to hundreds of jobs is a double-edged sword where hiring managers also have to filter through thousands of profiles so now everyone pretty much have to play resume-seo of some sort.
  • WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
    > Being able to apply to hundreds of jobs is a double-edged sword where hiring managers also have to filter through thousands of profiles This has been true outside of tech as well and has given cover for harmful hiring bias to thrive. Hiring for common jobs is largely done thru portals and most will diminish/disqualify entire classes of people (first-time, age, inconsequential criminal rec, other hidden criteria) with no regard of the candidates' likely capability. During the worst of employee shortages, there was no sign that portals loosened their ingrained discrimination; qualified and available hires went unconsidered as before.
• swat535 3y ago
  I can only speak to my personal experience of attempting to hire engineers. We started a hiring 2 weeks ago, the top engineers are taken off the market _before_ we even get a chance to interview them! (usually within 3-5 days). We had to accelerate our process and nearly double our offers to have a fighting chance. So at least from where I'm standing, the market is pretty aggressive at the moment.
  • JonChesterfield 3y ago
    Most people are already employed. Some of them will move if your place looks likely to be an improvement. Limiting your search to the currently available will cut the pool drastically. It's really easy to write a job listing that will be ignored. It'll still get lots of noise but not so much signal. It's probably also important where you post it, especially if your website doesn't pull a lot of traffic to the careers page by itself.
  • vasili111 3y ago
    > the top engineers How you would define them? What makes for you someone a "top engineer"?
• shagie 3y ago
  (note: much of this advice is based on the assumption of a permanent resident of the US applying to a position in the US. Things may be different in other countries) From the interviewer side of the house, the purpose of interviewing is to hire the least risky candidate - not the best candidate. As you get closer to senior job titles, a longer duration of employment in the latest position is more desirable. If you have three or more jobs in that 5.5 years, you may be a more risky applicant. It isn't necessarily the case that you do from your post here ("I held a job as a front-end dev"), but switching jobs frequently is not uncommon and may catch up with people in time as they try to move up. For more senior positions, initiative and projects may last longer than the length of a job hopper's tenure and can be seen as a negative as they are less likely to see the project through to completion and the company may need to hire someone in the middle of the project. If you have had multiple positions, companies with a longer onboarding process it may be that you won't even get to being a positive ROI before your feet start itching again for a new position. In companies with faster onboarding (dump into the pool and see who swims) a less risky applicant will have a close match to the skills and responsibilities listed on the job description. This entails making sure that each job application that you send out (my reading of the post is that you only have one) emphasizes familiarity with their technology stack rather than just a list of tech that are tossed into a line on the resume without care for order. If applying on job boards for listings that do not specify a company or are "an exciting opportunity with a client", you are applying to a 3rd party recruiter and not an actual job. If applying on job boards for companies themselves, realize that these jobs may be scraped, unmaintained, or otherwise not representative of the current jobs that company has open. I have seen jobs listed on indeed for positions that were posted in January and closed in February showing up months later. Likewise, job listings on the company's current career page may have openings that are not on Indeed. Make sure that you're applying for jobs that are a fit for your experience. Job boards are notorious for having poor search criteria for experience. Doing a search for entry level jobs will pull up principal engineer positions and searching for senior jobs will find entry level ones. Mass applying to everything that shows up will result in a higher percentage of rejections. If you only have one resume, create one resume for each type of position that you are looking to apply for. Create one resume for React developer, one resume for Angular developer, one resume for Php developer - and then send the relevant one. If you are sending a "5 years of React experience" to a position that is looking for someone to work in their Angular application, there will be a subset of applicants who are less risky than you (based on the resume) that are selected for interviewing. While not applying for jobs, use the job requirements for positions that you've applied to (or interest you) as a guideline for personal projects to work on to keep skills fresh or to learn sufficient information about that technology stack to be able to competently answer questions if you are interviewed. Make sure that you are also looking at public sector employers. State and local government tends not to advertise on career boards but rather on the state's workforce development board. Make sure you are applying to non-remote jobs. Yes, everyone wants a remote job. The applicant pool for such positions is much larger than the local jobs and instead of competing with people who live in the area or are willing to move there you are competing with everyone who can legally work there.
• kasey_junk 3y ago
  This is an unsatisfying answer but if you are depending on your resume going through the hr process cold you are unlikely to have success no matter what it looks like or what experience you have. A better approach is to find someone at the organization you are applying to who can shepherd you through the process. The best way to do that is via your personal network from prior jobs. But you can also do it by going to meetups, doing open source work etc. Even your non-work network can be helpful. Churches and country clubs were powerful professional tools for a very long time.
• Clubber 3y ago
  From the other side of the table, we just went through a few months of interviewing (we're devs) and boy were there a bunch of lemons. We were offering 6 figures for a junior/mid in a low cost of living area too, with 100% remote. Only a few even had the slightest idea what they were talking about when asking questions and they were softballs. One guy was even googling the questions we were asking him. We used multiple recruiters from multiple companies. We ended up having to pick one because, "it's just a junior, they can learn." We suspect the guy was working multiple jobs because he was hard to reach and wouldn't return messages and calls for a day or two, even when we were letting him go. He was hired as full time salary. From my experience, the tech labor market is really messed up right now, there are a lot of people who shouldn't be in it. I'm not sure how long that will take to correct. You're not really competing with good people, you're competing with a huge glut of bad people with well written and probably highly embellished resumes. I'm not really sure how to stand out in that type of market.
• benreesman 3y ago
  In November I was getting ~10 inbound emails a week from top-flight shops, that had been typical for at least 5 years. In December that was zero and has been since. I was an L7 in ML infra at a FAANG a few years ago. I did some marquee loops in Jan/Feb, and my “fuck this” point was when I did a coding screen at $KNOWN_COMPANY highly recommended by a former colleague and ended up with a 24 year old in a hotel room on a MacBook Air looking at his phone for 45 minutes and the back channel was that he had flunked my trivial 50-line Python program less than 10 minutes after the interview was over. After that I was like, I’m consulting for a while, catch you all in 2024 once Powell gets brought to heel for the geberal. :) It’s not just you.
• bpm140 3y ago
  It sounds like you’re working with a number of services right now, so take this with a grain of salt. Joinrelentless.com does resume review and coaching and then gets people first interviews. Not cheap, but it’s nice to literally just have interviews put on your calendar by someone. (Not a customer, just no the CEO)
  • JonChesterfield 3y ago
    Unspecified initial cost then 12% of first year salary (RSU unspecified) on success. Think I'd better off hiring a PA but still nice to see new approaches to hiring.
• WinstonSmith84 3y ago
  Market job is bad, but it also depends on the industry (tech had a lot of layoff) and on the benefits you are looking for. Speaking of benefits, since "everybody" want a remote position, if you're not too picky, it's probably much easier to find an on site position at the moment, without even compromising on the compensation
• myth2018 3y ago
  The market is indeed not the same it was during the past 2 or 3 years. But these last years were abnormally good for IT professionals. Too much cheap money distorted the job market and, if you don't have much experience on how things used to be before that, you may find it difficult to adapt. Suggestions: - Try to expand to back-end and advertise yourself as a full-stack. I'd say that many companies are currently in "maintenance mode", putting their new projects in a wait list and focusing on maintaining their existing systems. A generalist developer, able to work on the entire stack, would be more valuable in such cases -- and that would also explain why UI designers are having such a hard time to find new jobs. - Submit resumes to the "Who is hiring" lists here in HN - I don't know if that's your case, but anyway. If you live outside US and EU, worked for companies from these regions in the past few years, and are trying to find a similar job now: it's gonna be harder than before. Those are precisely the countries where the cheap money caused the most severe distortions. Too many small companies with very little potential were full of cash and hired tons of developers from abroad. These days are over. Such jobs still exist, as they existed before the pandemics, but are harder to get and the competition is tougher. If that applies to you, I suggest you to start focusing on "traditional", on-site jobs in your country, and keep looking for better, remote jobs while you are employed and less preoccupied.
• sarmasamosarma 3y ago
  [dead]
• WinLychee 3y ago
  I've gotten plenty, though I am a decent bit more senior than you. It's very hard to get an offer right now, but for sure you can get interviews. I think I've interviewed with ~10 companies for positions since June, and all passed on me, but it's mostly because I didn't take the time required to prepare. In hindsight nobody asked anything _super_ hard, but you cannot make a single mistake, or a suboptimal solution, or give the wrong response to a question right now. I've started grinding leetcode, reviewing system design, and behavioral questions. You MUST memorize perfect responses to regurgitate as fast as possible on the interview. Again, you cannot afford a single mistake in process right now or they will pass on you. Tech is a really weird place in general these days, maybe we need a hard reboot in the sector, or maybe we should all go do something else with our lives.
  • neon_electro 3y ago
    > I've started grinding leetcode, reviewing system design, and behavioral questions. You MUST memorize perfect responses to regurgitate as fast as possible on the interview. I have been diagnosed with ADHD (and started medication, to be clear) this year. How do I best tell prospective employers I might need some accommodation in this process? I've been at it on and off for 17 months and have had the worst experience with technical assessments, despite being a 10 year career veteran with plenty of Web development experience.
    • edrxty 3y ago
      Never reveal ADHD to employers or fellow employees. It will always be used against you.
      • sethaurus 3y ago
        I've been very disclosive about my diagnosis, and many people I work with have in turn revealed their own diagnoses to me. I'd like to hear more about your experience with this ⸻ how is this info getting used against people?
        • 3y ago
• hospitalJail 3y ago
  >I held a job as a front-end dev for the previous 5 and a half years. That work can be done by pretty low skilled people. Get out of that sector.
• ProjectArcturis 3y ago
  Even when the market was good, I never got jobs by applying for them. It was always either recruiters cold-calling, or through my network. Maybe focus there instead of grinding out hundreds of applications.
• kraig911 3y ago
  What market are you in? Are you only going for remote?
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• marcopicentini 3y ago
  Try to add some experience using LLAMA2, OpenAI and AI models. Then add this fancy tags in the CV.
• epolanski 3y ago
  I went from being contacted once a day to once every two weeks. Market is definitely colder than it used to be. Much colder. Part of me thinks it's gonna stay like that for some time, some of the weakest profiles may even have to change line of job entirely as the entry level got much higher.
  • bdcravens 3y ago
    > some of the weakest profiles may even have to change line of job entirely This is what happened in the early 2000s. (ie, dot-com bust) During the boom, companies were shoving warm bodies in chairs for those who could spell HTML, and paying them great money. People were coming from everywhere to get in on it. Then it crashed, and those who couldn't cut it went back to car sales or whatever they did before. Those with chops mostly hung on and built the next phase of the market. (I was doing ColdFusion at the time, which was an easy language to learn. Those who were one-trick ponies suffered, and I regularly heard from "ColdFusion Developers" who were desperate as the one-trick rodeos went away) I'm sorry to say, but if you're just a "front-end dev" you're probably in the same boat. Left a career to do a bootcamp? You may want to start calling those old colleagues. (not saying this applies to OP necessarily, but I'm just an "old" dev who's seen this before)
• bdcravens 3y ago
  Do you have skills outside of front-end? I've said for years that heavy front-end development is a luxury. In down economies companies are looking to do more with less.
• tcgv 3y ago
  I haven't been on the "applying" side, but in my company we just had four replacement openings in the tech team (after more than 9 months without having a new hire) and to our suprise we received 5x times more applicants to all positions than we used to get one year ago, and salary expectations were at least 15% lower than in 2022. We ended up hiring five devs on the same budget of the four original positions. We are a data analysis and digital/mobile marketing survey startup located in São Paulo, Brazil. So at leat around here the job market is much different than the hiring craze of 2022.
• noodle 3y ago
  As someone on the other side, with open positions we're hiring for: There are probably fewer job openings than there were, but I don't think my company or anyone in my network have changed HOW they're hiring, but we have definitely noticed a huge uptick in volume of applications. Earlier in the year, we were getting almost nothing. Now we're getting hundreds of resumes a week for each open position, and the bulk of each one of those resumes do not come close to even being in conversation range of the posted JD. There's just a lot more to wade through from an HR and hiring perspective now, orders of magnitude more. It takes way more time/resources and is way more draining for the people involved. I think my suggestion is, do what you can to stand out. Don't go overboard or anything, but if you're submitting your resume to an HR software or something, maybe try and find someone in the hiring chain on LinkedIn and email them directly either with your resume or just asking how its like to work there before you submit. Something like this.
  • ransom1538 3y ago
    I remember a report from facebook hiring, when they broke down how each person applied. It was something weird like %0.01 were hired by "walk in". Some person literally walked into FB headquarters and left with a job. I will say, if you walk into an office, you will NOT get ignored.
    • isbvhodnvemrwvn 3y ago
      Of course you won't get ignored, you'll get escorted out by security. The likelihood of a hiring manager being in the office nowadays is also very low.
    • dustincoates 3y ago
      I actually got my first job out of college this way. I was trying to get a job in something completely unrelated to what I studied, so I was doing whatever I could think of to get noticed. I still can't believe it worked, but it set me on a good path, at least.
      • galangalalgol 3y ago
• theasteve 3y ago
  When do you think the market will start picking up?
• orderedtree 3y ago
  I'm a new grad and I didn't have too much trouble getting interviews. Most interviews came from large "startups" based in the US.
• rootusrootus 3y ago
  Everyone wants to work remotely. But that means now you are probably competing with hundreds of other applicants for any halfway interesting job.
  • ActionHank 3y ago
    And many of them for a lot less TC
    • rootusrootus 3y ago
      Yep, exactly. I've known some really great devs who lived in the midwest, and didn't want to move to the coasts. They're totally okay with half the comp someone would look for in one of the big cities.
  • macintosh-hd 3y ago
    I figured me not caring between remote and in office would increase my chances, but it really doesn't feel like it has. I think the market is really bad right now.
• Shinchy 3y ago
  Just from my own perspective and in speaking with recruiters (UK), I've never seen the job market this bad before. I have 20+ years’ experience, Harvard, senior leadership positions, and long tenures at reputable places. Yet I don't hear anything back from applications I put out (and these are senior positions). I think one huge factor at play is the move to remote work, before you would compete with the people in your area who had to physically be able to turn up to a location to interview. What has happened is the opening of the gates to anyone in the world being able to apply to that same job, so you now have 500+ applications for roles that would have previously gotten 20. There’s only so much headspace one can give to that quantity of applicants so I suspect the first 25 get a look in and the others go in the bin.
• rdedev 3y ago
  I am going through the same experience. For now only referrals seems to get me a response from HR. Otherwise it's just radio silence.
• MentallyRetired 3y ago
  I can relate. I have 25 years of experience as a senior and lead frontend developer, with some management experience. I've applied at over 80 roles. I've received 35ish rejections and about 18 interviews. 4 put me through to final interviews and chose someone else despite liking me more, I was told. (one person had a smidge of java experience, one was a female and they needed a diversity hire, etc)
• Balgair 3y ago
  I'm outside of FAANGs and the valley and in biotech and formerly DoD. For us, it's always been 'this bad'. Applying for thousands of jobs isn't too terrible, depending on the economy of course. Covid was a rare bright spot for biotech applications, unfortunately. My advice is to ditch the applications entirely and go straight to networking. Yes, not exactly the most revolutionary advice here. But, if you;re in that kind of competition/environment, you've no choice but to work your network. If you've already done that and found no luck, find people at the companies/departments you want to work for and figure out what hobbies/side-projects they do. Then try to make friends and try to get a job through that connection. Yes, it's a lot longer and more fraught process, but it can lead to results. Church or other community based methods are also possible, though it takes longer to build up the network that way. Outside of that, recruiters/headhunters have been something approaching a way to get a position. Try looking for them online too. Really though, work your network and don't be shy about it. Let your friends know you are looking for work, don't be embarrassed.
  • moneywoes 3y ago
    >My advice is to ditch the applications entirely and go straight to networking. Yes, not exactly the most revolutionary advice here. But, if you;re in that kind of competition/environment, you've no choice but to work your network. Could you elaborate on this please? Is there more to networking than just sending personalized connect messages based on a person profile on Linkedin? I have been doing that without much success
    • solarmist 3y ago
      Yes, meeting someone in person, like at a meetup, even for 5 minutes, will get you 100% better responses than trying to force a connection without even having met the person before. Alternatively asking someone you know in person to introduce you to the person. You're trying to connect with. Doing “networking” cold without any personal connections rarely leads anywhere valuable.
• moneywoes 3y ago
  Nope, in the same boat, unfortunately.
• alanpage 3y ago
  If you must apply via online job applications, definitely change your resume to include as many of the keywords in the job description as you can, while still being truthful. If you don't, the first-level automated filtering will screen you out of the group moving on to the HR department. This is a huge amount of work, but even a little bit of an edge can help. That said, DON'T go through online applications if you can avoid it. Many of the jobs I (and others around me) have gotten are through their personal network. Develop your personal network now. Question: When is the best time to plant a tree if you want to enjoy it? Answer: 20 years ago. When is the second best time to plant a tree? Today. 1. Connect to everyone you know personally or have ever worked with on LinkedIn, and use the "Send a note" function to give them a reason to remember you, and say you'd like to add them to your network. Once you've got a decent number of connections (at least a few hundred?), post a "looking for work" type of message with your skills, experience, and interests. Be sincere and not "network-y". Do it with the intention that they might be able to help you now, but you may be able to help them in the future. 2. Reach out to friends and coworkers that you had a closer relationship with, and let them know that you're looking for work in a particular area or field, and do they know of anything available (or companies that fit your area). Friends and ex-coworkers are the best because they can get you right into the HR department or the hiring manager. 3. Do not discount the many people on LinkedIn who currently or recently worked at a company that you are considering applying to (but that you don't know). Sign up for the paid LinkedIn service for a month, and use the ability of paid users to email anyone, to reach out to people who might be in the department of the company that you are looking at. You'd be amazed what information or help you can get from total strangers, just by sending them a nice note explaining that you're looking at the company/department and would like to speak to them for a few minutes to get an idea of the company culture. This is scary for many people (a younger myself included), but I've done it and it works. Most people will give you a few minutes to talk to you. And you could get valuable information about the team/department/manager, that could help you present the side of you that works best in their culture (laid back, hard-charging, early-risers, dog-friendly, tabs not spaces, etc.). Good luck with the search!
• swamp40 3y ago
  Post a screenshot of your resume, with identification redactions. You have 500 programmers here on this thread ready to give you free advice.
• HEmanZ 3y ago
  I’m sorry this is happening to you. The job market is very bad right now by tech standards, but people are definitely still hiring. A few things I notice from my very-myopic view as a backend engineer at a large-ish tech company: - Hiring has ground to a halt for generic FE developers. The general strategy seems to be that we should have enough FE people to move around to get new features done. No more big UI rewrites that would require an expanding FE dev force. - Hiring for specific roles is still good, but I guess the applicant spam has gotten crazy bad, and now most hiring moves through direct recruiter interaction and other side channels. We’re still hiring a good number of backend distributed-systems devs, specialized mobile devs, and tons of the ever-popular “ML Engineer”. - The finance industry is apparently having a great time right now because their recruiters won’t leave me alone. Multiple people we laid off on my team landed at cushy or high paid jobs in banking or finance. All backend engineers tho. My probably worthless advice would be to start spinning your resume differently and target a new position. I suspect FE rolls are really taking a hit as companies seem saturated. Start reaching out directly to recruiters. If all else fails, consider a career move or even the classic “go back to school to weather out the downturn”. Good luck!
• hunterhod 3y ago
  If you have any entrepreneurial tendencies, starting a simple LLC and selling your services to local businesses can be a solid option right now. Industries outside of VC-backed consumer technology are making money and need technology generalists to amplify their businesses. Just protect yourself with contracts and you’re good to go.
• formulathree 3y ago
  I've been applying too. I've landed tons of interviews about 40 total. Did them all. All failed but one. It's definitely harder than before. Much harder. I got failed for the most trivial reasons. There were interviews where I passed and did all the tasks required and the interviewer gave me positive signals like "good job", "talk to you soon" and boom the recruiter told me I was rejected the next day. There was one where I made it to the final round onsite. Everyone liked me in the onsite. Schooled the technicals with code that worked first run and they canned me because behavioral. One guy (the director who I wouldn't even be reporting too) didn't like my reasoning for wanting to work at the company because I focused on my interest in the technology rather then the mission. Like literally I just didn't talk about the mission... a specific thing and that was it. Besides that 4 out of 5 people during the final interview told me "talk to you soon" and one told me "I hope we see more of you in the future". So yeah it's harder, brutally harder not just on the screening but even up the pipeline. I would say my resume is impressive enough that recruiters still contact me and I can make it to a first technical. I think the people who are getting hired the most right now are people with connections. Who knows who.
• johnwatson11218 3y ago
  Back in 2001 - 2002 I was out of work and it was miserable. I had been doing webdev for 2 years in nyc during the dot com bubble. In addition to looking for work I was also trying to move cross country. I remember days of just spamming my resume out to 40 or 50 new email addresses that I would harvest from monster.com. This got me 2 interviews in 3 months. I was very surprised in terms of how much harder it was to get interviews compared to just 2 years earlier. During the height of the dot com boom I had arrived in nyc on a greyhound bus and found a job writing java servlets against mysql/postgresql in 3 days w/o any contacts. Looking back I would have been better off taking any job and reading as much new tech as I could. The long aimless days were as damaging as the lack of income.
• JofArnold 3y ago
  The volume of applications we are getting for our open roles is huge and the proportion of them applying because they were laid off is higher than I've ever seen. Given that, as you will expect, hiring teams we need to process a lot of applications and make snap decisions. You need to ensure you rise to the top by - Keeping your CV brief and relevant - Making it clear what things you specifically did in previous roles and their benefits - Make it clear (e.g. in a side panel) your abilities and how they match the role you are applying for. But yes, it's hard. The days of applicants getting ten job offers at once are over for now. At least outside AI and outside of senior positions.
  • vasili111 3y ago
    >At least outside AI Does the finding job in AI easier? Any examples?
  • trhr 3y ago
    I've started telling new grads / interns that ask me "how 2 get jerb" to cut their resume to 1/3 of a page. Because we still need interns and juniors, and we already know they don't know a damn thing, and the only thing that would stand out at this point is _not_ making me read half a page about your capstone.
• gdedhitchhiker 3y ago
  If you can I would recommend making sure you can do some backend work to. I started in front-dev and expanded into backend. Backend devs are often seen as more valuable as that manages the biz logic. You can argue if that's right or wrong but it is what it is. As I look for people I appreciate folks who can do one area very well and want them able to do multiple areas, especially in a startup.
• the_only_law 3y ago
  I’ve been out of work for about a year. I was never a top player in the field, most of my experience has been enterprise work and non tech companies, with some tech companies (including the one that laid me off. I have a bit more YoE than you. For the first several months, I screwed myself by operating in a 2010s mindset “I’ll have a job in <= 3mo and I can be at least a little picky”. I was not targeting specific companies and looked at both tech and non tech companies. I was exclusively interested in remote jobs, mostly because I still had a lease and breaking it would be very expensive, as would keeping it and having to pay two rents. Remote roles were also scarce, adding that single filter could significantly cut the amount of jobs I saw. I did interview for a handful of on-site roles, mostly for practice, and those tended to progress better, but again, they all wanted me to move to even more expensive areas when moving at all was going to be expensive. After a while though it got worse and worse, my professional confidence flatlined. There were hardly any recruiters reaching out anymore, cold apps went to the void, and the few interviews I did get never made it past the first round. Never got any feedback. The few recruiters I could get were equally useless, usually showing off some roles that I looked like a good fit for before completely ghosting me. I wondered if my resume was the issue, and had several people, as well as ChatGPT look at it, and got nothing but good feedback with minor nitpicks. A lot of the jobs I saw within my area of experience either wanted high senior people, or people with very niche skill sets, and apparently they can afford to be picky right now. Most recently, I’ve had interviews that seem promising and people (family friends) now claiming they can get me a job, but unfortunately this year has battered me, with large expenses left and right My lease is up now, so I’m looking at on site roles, but the rental market is so bad here I’m afraid it’s too late. One one hand, I was never happy with my career, and now the golden handcuffs are off, on the other hand, I have nowhere else to go, and the shit that matters just keeps getting more and more expensive
• jobappenjoyer 3y ago
  [dead]
• icco 3y ago
  With all of the layoffs, we're seeing about a 50-100x increase in number of applicants for open rolls, so the market is definitely more flooded. Also I'm regularly finding applicants were over-lelveled in past roles, and so usually have about one or two titles higher expectations for level than they actually are capable of having.
• n_ary 3y ago
  Market is same as before, here in EU, but people just got a bit more cautious and economy is not exactly prospering with the war and inflation. Hence, a lot of risk aversion and tightened purses. Also, due to sudden spike in interest rates, raising investment(previously you gave a shiny pie-in-sky presentation and got money, now you need to demonstrate demand and having actual revenue and improvement plans etc..) hiring became much more slow and competitive. Also a lot of people left school due to inflation and higher taxes and scrambled to find some work as savings were abysmal due to follow your dream and get rich quick schemes(crypto/social media shills etc).
• sophe 3y ago
  The market is bad. Since getting laid off in March, I've applied to 185 jobs. I'm a director, 25 years, and I can only work remotely. What's new this time around is: + Nobody at target companies will respond to questions (via email or linkedin) + At least 50% of application forms require desired salary (seriously who does this for a director or VP role?); I've dropped my limit by 50k + Radio silence from companies. most never even send a rejection. Very few applications get to screenings. + For some openings, I write some test code up front top demonstrate my interest, and still no bites. I suspect that TA teams are getting blown up by the traffic, but... for leadership roles, I would expect more careful handling.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• raydev 3y ago
  It's bad! I got laid off late last 2022 when I had just joined in 2021 When I got 2021 New Job, I continued to interact with recruiters and even did a few more interviews into December! My inbox was full of recruiters, as it had been for the 4-5 years prior. The recruiter spam started drying up for me around June/July 2022, what used to flow became a trickle. By November 2022, my inbox was a bunch of tumbleweeds and I had just been laid off. I followed 6 referrals from ex-colleagues and only 2 got me to an actual phone screen. I got my current job a few months ago, but that was after weeks of pinging recruiters directly on LinkedIn and stumbling on a exactly-perfect fit of a job description to my resume which I boasted about. My inbox is still mostly dry.
• NCharby 3y ago
  Perspective from a PM who runs a job board - Yes it's hard right now, but the reason why changes depending on where you look. We saw mass layoffs (https://layoffs.fyi/ https://layoffs.fyi/) at the beginning of the year from what we used to call FAANG companies. Economic fear is a major motivator, but there's also been a shift in investor's mindsets. Growth at all costs isn't sexy anymore - we want to see realized profits. In response, these big names tightened up their expenses. And where you used to be a hot shot for having 2 years at Google or Amazon, you're now just another in the flood of extremely highly paid workers looking for a similar salary. At the same time, the VC market sobered up. 10 years ago you could get a couple million on a powerpoint deck for wifi enabled dog food. It was the end of the great recession, let's get rich baby! Today the startup scene is much tighter and SMB's in any industry are nervous. Then there's inflated title demand and emerging tech. Scroll any job board; 2/3rds of those roles will be at a senior level or be in something new like AI that few have real experience with. Do companies actually need Seniors? Usually no, but they believe 1 Senior can do the work of multiple Mid-levels and the cost per head drops. Do companies actually need an AI team? Usually no, but they believe they can replace departments with it. So who's winning right now? It's not 'Tech Workers at Tech Companies'. It's not smaller SaaS businesses who can't afford all the talent sloshing around. Consultants might see some gains as a 1099 isn't the commitment a W2 is. But the real winners are the "Non-tech Tech" companies. Insurance companies, construction, brick and mortar retail, the IT department at your local hospital; they don't sell software, but they need tools to stay competitive. Those hiring teams have the pick of the litter right now. Last thought: Firing all the recruiters during covid was a stupid move. You're not getting a callback because they canned the person who did the callbacks.
• Kalpeshbhalekar 3y ago
  Have you tried freelancing platforms like Upwork, Fiver and other apps? Sometimes getting started as a contract worker/part time consultant and then transitioning to a full time role would be easier. (This helps in building confidence for the recruiter)
• komali2 3y ago
  How many applications have you sent? Oh average I send 250 applications in a job hunt to get about three offers, two of which are for positions I actually want. It's my opinion that in general people don't have a proper expectation for the volume of applications necessary to find a good fitting job. Or dating to find a good partner, for that matter. Many of my friends often "settle" for the first company that gives them an offer because the job hunt is so tedious and emotionally exhausting. It requires a shifting of a mindset imo: every rejection is not telling you literally that you're not a good fit. First of all, I've met very few people that are good at hiring or evaluating engineering ability, let alone their own engineering needs. So most rejections just come from that lack of skill in that area, they failed to realize or evaluatedthat you would have done a good job for them. Second, it's not a reflection on your ability, it's just that you require 197 rejections to get the three offers. It just takes that. If you settle in for the ride I think it goes better. I've blogged about this in regards to boot camp grads: https://blog.calebjay.com/posts/bootcamp-job-search/#the-resume-send https://blog.calebjay.com/posts/bootcamp-job-search/#the-res... Whenever I mention this people often say that that strategy is too impersonal, that I'm not leveraging warm leads enough, etc. Of course you should also do this. And attend meetups. All the steps, lol. Treat the job search like a full time job. I will say this round of my job hunt my numbers are off. I'm at 80 resume sends to one call back. I should be at about 20 call backs now. It might be because I'm full remote now though.
• tekchip 3y ago
  I've been looking for nearly a year. I've done the same work having services write/rewrite my resume. Having friends, loved ones, colleagues etc review them. Few bites here and there. Made it to the third interview once. Ive only had 5 or 6 actual interviews. Not including initial contact interviews with recruiters (more like 10-12 of those). It's rough out there.
• Alex63 3y ago
  You did not ask for feedback on your resume (found through your profile), so I hope you won't be offended by my observations. Your resume looks good: format is clean and will probably scan well, you've highlighted your technical skills and kept the list to a reasonable length, and you've done a good job of providing an appropriate level of detail about your past experiences. You probably know all that because the services you have used have told you. Here are a couple of things that you may not have heard yet. First, I think for now it would be better not to list your intention to start an undergraduate degree in the fall. I think almost any hiring manager would see that and wonder how you were going to be able to balance being a student and settling into a new job. Remember, the point of your resume is to get you an interview, not to give the hiring manager reasons to reject you. Even if you are committed to being a part-time student in the fall, you don't have to put that in your resume. You may feel that showing you are committed to getting a degree will address concerns about education, but hiring managers are selfish -- first and foremost they want to know that you are going to be focused on doing the job. My second point may not be popular, but I feel I have to bring it up. Your experience and skills, and your stated focus on front-end development, position you in what is essentially a commodity market. There are lots of developers these days with strong Javascript and Python skills. If you want to stand out from the crowd you are going to have to work really hard to differentiate yourself. What particular skills or experience could you highlight that make you a premium resource, and not just a commodity programmer? It might be knowledge of a CMS that is not widely used. It might be practical experience with a very new technology. Maybe it's your familiarity with a particular business function or process. I think you need to figure out what makes you special and highlight it more in your resume. I hope these thoughts are helpful. Good luck with your job search!
• LiamCooper234 3y ago
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• devilsAdv0cate 3y ago
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• MollyRealized 3y ago
  My initial thoughts (gotta help out a fellow Chicagoan): * Let your resume be your landing page, rather than the recent work - save a click. And make your resume viewable on the web, with a PDF version downloadable. Point being, you want to reduce friction. As it stands, if you want someone to look at your resume, they need to (1) visit the site; (2) (i) find and then (ii) click 'Resume'; (3) locate the downloaded PDF; and (4) open it. Compare that to: (1) go to your site. * I do not recognize any of the names on your 'Recent work' landing page. This may be a fault of mine as my field is not particularly IT-heavy . But for those who might be clueless, it may be worthwhile to briefly state who they are, or what type of work they do. * FWIW, have someone look at it for grammar/spelling, and tell them to be picky. "Self-taught", for example. When people are trying to seek reasons to wade through tons of candidates, even the smallest stupid mistakes can be used as sorting criteria, under the umbrella of "showing attention to detial." * I'm not sure if "self-taught" is something to advertise; I see the appeal, but if I'm someone anal, then I may wonder what holes that left. Self-taught means you only had to meet your own standards. * Are you saying - with your education - that with your Bachelor's, you expect to enroll this fall? I would take this completely off your resume; it's not an existing skill, then. It also is going to leave a lot of people thinking that your focus will be split. * Generally, overall, retool/rewrite a LOT of your items by backing up claims and orient it more as a sales pitch. If you are an employer, what version of this tiny little sentence would make you want to hire you? You don't want to just say 'experience in...', you want to say the things you did. "Shepherded six major projects in high-level companies from brainstorming to rolling out the door." You don't want to say what you're seeking, you want to say what you can do for the person looking at your resume. * Some of your verb choices are very passive. "Acted as the developer of" -- no, it's "Developed". "Experienced in implementing a range of" -- "Implemented eight contant management systems" - use active voice and provide specifics. Look into whether you want some items on your resume at all, given the impression they might give. The National Safety Council was a two-month gig; Thrive Creative was an eight-month gig. If you just HAVE to include it but there are things that explain it, incorporate it into your resume. "(Short-Term Assignment)", etc.
• Cypher 3y ago
  I've been looking for 6 months too, I'd say I've had 5 or 6 that got to the interview stage. Lots of screening calls and nothing much afterwards. Came close 2 twice to landing a job but too much competition. It's a bad market. I have another 2 interviews Monday but I'm dreading one that is like a pair programming test which I get anxiety over just thinking about it. I much prefer take homes but IDK we just gotta keep looking and hope things bounce back I guess.
• dawmak 3y ago
  Market got worse definitely. That's also one of the reasons we have created https://careera.io/ https://careera.io/ to address all of the usual problems during job seeking and recruitment, like: applying hundreds limes to different companies manually, digging thru hundreds of applicants' CVs by recruiters, ghosting and all types of bias (race, religion, age, you name it..).
• ggariepy 3y ago
  I was laid off in March, 2023, a victim of the startup shakeout after the SVG banking collapse. A year previous, I had a small bidding war for my services. When I was let go this March, it was in the midst of the Facebook and Amazon layoffs. It was terrible. The market had flipped 180 degrees away from where it was in 2022. I did not, however, have problems getting interviews. I got lots of them. I also got ghosted regularly after third and fourth interviews as the companies interviewed dozens of candidates looking for the very best deal they could find. Now, for some perspective, I am a 30 year veteran of the IT industry, with well over 20 years of programming experience under my belt. You guessed it, that means I'm in my mid-50s. Did I run across ageism in my search? Not overt, but undoubtedly, yes. Were companies overwhelmed by the number of applicants? Unquestionably. I had one recruiter tell me they had over 150 applicants for a single programming job, and they planned to only talk to 10% of them. 10% is still a LOT of interviews to find the right candidate. So yes, the job market is bad, although not for traditional reasons. The economy seems to be chugging along, even though it's rumored to have one foot on a banana peel. Companies are hiring. But there's a lot of competition out there for posts, and companies have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the number of candidates to choose from. They don't know how to act. So if your resume isn't in as-expected format, forget it. If your interviewing skills reveal you're an introvert with poor social skills, forget it. If you don't respond quickly and professionally to every serious inquiry, forget it. If you're not making your job search a 3-5 hour DAILY effort, forget it. In other words, you have to bring your A-game right now, where you might have gotten by in previous years with just having good coding skills and a halfway decent resume. The good news is that everyone can bring their A-game with some practice and effort. I got hired after two months. It was hard-- gut-wrenching, even -- but after dozens of interviews I finally landed a good job that met my requirements. If you are working right now and you aren't saving your money for a rainy day, you're being foolish. Fortunately, I had been saving, and my bank account wasn't destroyed. I feel bad for people in this market who don't have savings. Be prepared to weather a six month outage. And keep upskilling. Complacency will get you laid off.
• goddamnyouryan 3y ago
  We’re trying to solve this exact problem over at https://polyfill.work https://polyfill.work
• JoshDoody 3y ago
  I have a unique perspective on this as my job is coaching Software Engineers (and others) through salary negotiations when they change jobs. I would describe the current SWE market as "stuck". I'll start with what I've observed over the past year, then I'll opine on why I think I'm seeing that. In 2021 and early 2022, there was basically a hiring boom in tech, and particularly Big Tech. This was superficially obvious, but I personally saw it in my business as Jan 2021–August-ish 2022 being the best stretch my business has had _by far_ (and I've been doing this full time since 2016). Then the macro economy saw some significant changes (maybe the most in-your-face data point being interest rates going up in the US). Big Tech slowed the hiring, froze it, then starting laying folks off in pretty big numbers. I saw _this_ in my business via a pretty rapid cratering of applications to work with me. People overuse the term "fell off a cliff", but the inbound web traffic to the pages that drove my coaching business ... fell off a cliff. (For screenshots, you can check out this writeup I did earlier this year: https://www.joshdoody.com/2023/06/focus-on-high-earners/ https://www.joshdoody.com/2023/06/focus-on-high-earners/) Traffic to those pages dropped like 90% in 6–8 weeks. It was a dramatic, sudden shift. Those are pages that one would find if one were searching for, eg, "How to negotiate [big tech company] job offer". So, at least from my business' vantage, interest in negotiating job offers with Big Tech companies cratered around September/October 2021. Why is that relevant? By now, we all know that happened because there were layoffs brewing, etc. But at the time, that was not widely known and, much to my chagrin, inbound interest in my business was a leading indicator of what was happening with hiring at Big Tech companies. Fast forward to today: Traffic to those pages is still more or less down 90% from where it was in mid-2022. I believe if there were to be a spike in hiring in Big Tech, I would see it pretty quickly. So, for now, I don't think there's much of a change there. Why is the overall market for SWEs still "stuck"? My guess is a lot of those layoffs were mid-level and junior engineers—not the experienced Senior Engineers, who were probably spared. So the market was suddenly flooded with mid-level and junior Software Engineers with Big Tech experience and Big Tech-level salary expectations. Since those folks couldn't go to another Big Tech company, they just sort of sat on the sidelines (pay in Big Tech firms is very, very good, and even a little fiscal responsibility would net someone a nice cash cushion to live on while sitting on the workforce sidelines). Meanwhile, the normal attrition in Big Tech SWE jobs that typically happens ground to a halt either because those folks were not working at all (laid off and on the sidelines) _or_ because they were Senior Engineers—who would normally have been looking to hop to their next Big Tech job—deciding to just hunker down and see how things shook out. When there are layoffs happening all around you and you wonder whether you're next, it's easy to just sort of switch to survival mode, lay low, and see how long you can keep your job (I speak from experience here). So, for several months, everyone was frozen: Either sitting at home waiting for hiring to ramp back up _or_ holding on to their Senior Level job. Eventually, the folks on the sidelines realized this might be a longer-term adjustment, and they needed to get back to work, so they started looking and applying for jobs. Unfortunately, Big Tech still wasn't hiring, so they had to look elsewhere. The good news is "elsewhere" needs SWEs, the bad news is the pay they're offering doesn't look nearly as attractive as what Big Tech was paying during the boom. They also aren't "Senior" level in their experience, so they can't just apply for Senior-level roles at other tech companies (where they might be able to get comp approaching their mid-level Big Tech comp from before). Or they _can_ apply to Senior-level roles, but they're under-qualified for what that firm needs. A lot of firms saw lots of inbound applications from mid-level Engineers with Big Tech experience and salary expectations applying for Senior-level roles that they just weren't ready for. So those firms are getting inundated with candidates and just trying to figure out how to find qualified candidates among the deluge of applicants. Meanwhile, you (OP) are applying for jobs at those firms along with all of those folks who are migrating from Big Tech, which means you're not landing interviews. How does this resolve? Unclear. But _eventually_ Big Tech has to start hiring again. Not at the rate they were hiring during the boom, but at a normal rate to support normal levels of business growth. When they do, the Senior Engineers will start moving again, and things will start to unstick. All of those sidelined Engineers from the layoffs will start to mix back in with normal Big Tech hiring, easing the pressure on non-Big Tech firms' recruiters, and opening up more interview slots. I could be totally wrong here. I'm only going off of what I've seen. I can say that when I _do_ coach folks through salary negotiations, the process is the same as it always has been. There are just fewer negotiations happening because fewer people are getting jobs. I have no idea when the market will come back, but it _feels_ like things are slowly unsticking right now. I know this probably isn't much comfort to you, OP, and I'm sorry you're not getting any traction. I hope you find something great soon.