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Experienced engineers are struggling to get hired
- whiterknight 3y agoThis is a topic thats hard to discuss without macro level data. We don’t know this person’s preferences, location, background, etc.
- cageface 3y agoThe trend here is unmistakeable: https://hnhiring.com/trends https://hnhiring.com/trends Only one source of course, but I think it's indicative of the state of the overall market.
- jvanderbot 3y agoIt's quite a bit slower than the peak in 2022-ish, just from my anecdata
- mc32 3y agoI agree and it's not only tech, but other areas as well. It's not easy. Whereas before in many cases hiring mgrs would settle for the top of middling candidates, right now because they have so many good quality candidates to choose from, they are being choosey. I know experienced people who previously would be getting recruited now have to search much longer and also settle for lesser jobs.
- whiterknight 3y agoThanks, that’s much more helpful than the article.
- patresh 3y agoHow can one explain the graph you linked given the recent bull market in stocks? Wouldn't this mean that capital is flowing in which should lead to more hiring? Is the job market response delayed or are there other factors?
- lazide 3y agoStock market pricing also tends to follow inflation expectations. Every time inflation is expected to increase, stock market tends to go up. Not necessarily because ‘more inflation adjusted dollars’ but because ‘same thing will be worth more dollars, after inflation’.
- anotherhue 3y agoThe old addage is that the stock market is not the economy.
- perfectspiral 3y ago"Wouldn't this mean that capital is flowing in..." Not really. If the price of shares in your company goes up it doesn't mean you have more cash in your pocket. You would need to sell shares or issue additional shares to have more cash to pay people with. There's other ways an increased price could be beneficial of course.
- cageface 3y agoGood question. My theory is that companies overhired during the pandemic and are now correcting. AI is another wildcard. It remains to be seen exactly how much it will reduce the demand for developers but it seems very likely to at a minimum cut into the entry level job market.
- egman_ekki 3y agoNot necessarily. Layoffs mean higher profit margins and that often leads to an increase in stock price as it means higher potential payout for shareholders.
- jvanderbot 3y agoI will admit that a few positions I've applied for have suddenly changed parameters to exclude me, but most of my recent job search difficulty is because all my network is also looking, so getting an anchor in a good place is much more challenging. But the number of new businesses gobbling up these laid off folks is really crazy. There's been a huge diaspora and in a couple years I'm hoping everyone I know will have really good positions.
- Solvency 3y ago"elwebmaster" posted a completely contradictory assessment of the market 11 minutes after you. WHO DO I BELIEVE?
- deathanatos 3y agoThe data? layoffs.fyi shows that the market has had massive layoffs recently. I can just look at the rate of recruitment emails arriving in my inbox, too. It's all but dried up.
- jvanderbot 3y agoI don't believe I'm being contradictory with data or with those statements (which I did look up). It's been hard for me, pay is lower when offered, and "diaspora" is essentially a huge amount of people leaving wherever they are, even if I painted a rosy picture of startups (lower pay, lower stability, worse work-life balance, required moving) gobbling up most of them. In a few years, I think it'll be better and we'll be in a better non-FAANG place, that's all. And some of us will be working at the next ~B$ company.
- twojobsoneboss 3y agoEasier if you’re a South American
- waskip 3y agoHow come?
- luzojeda 3y agoI think just because we are cheaper.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- twojobsoneboss 3y agoSo many more companies prefer hiring you all remote now, at the cost of local US remote workers Happy for you all but again it’s come at the cost of local US remote workers… the chickens have come home to roost of the WFH movement
- luzojeda 3y agoMany good things for you guys have come at the cost of us third worlders for many decades, what do you expect me to say?
- twojobsoneboss 3y agoThat’s fair. Was just pointing out the viewpoint. We’re all just along for the ride to the ebbs and flows of history at the end of the day. Good times and hard times come and go for different groups at different times. I think it should be fine to say “good for you, but sucks for me”, and have empathy towards groups that have the rug pulled from under them
- richrichie 3y agoI see hundreds of new job adverts on Linkedin everyday. How much of it is genuine?
- YZF 3y agoI was looking for a change 6 months ago (had a job, did find a new one) and applied for a few positions. One of them in a large/known company that engaged with me and then rejected me without interviewing me. That posting is still up on LinkedIn and it's hard to believe they couldn't find someone to fill it for like 7 months. So one can only conclude it's not genuine.
- logtempo 3y agoThere's also a strategy, having an open position might attract some people you'll be happy to put in your database, and duplicate where X companies (contractor?head hunter company? consulting? Idk how to name it) post a job that is for only one client in reality.
- Spastche 3y agoit seems like it's super common and my own company seems to do this. why?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- coffeebeqn 3y agoI was applying a few months ago and most seem to not be real postings. Many of them I’d get a generic rejection months after the fact.
- xboxnolifes 3y agoWith how many never respond to me, as well as how much phone call and email spam increases whenever I apply to jobs, I assume a lot of it is fake.
- elwebmaster 3y agoMarket is the worst it has ever been, at least in the last 10 years but even before because now supply significantly outnumbers demand. Most people on LinkedIn have a green badge. The economy is doomed. Keep rising interest rates to the sky.
- k99x55 3y agoEverything is collapsing except bitcoin.
- bb88 3y agoThe economy cycles between greed and fear, without any room in the middle for stability. All of economics is group psychology. 2000/2001, 2008, 2020 and others were bad years and growth eventually happened. But even The Great Depression lifted eventually. If I had a choice, I would choose gentle growth rather than boom years and bust years.
- coffeebeqn 3y agoHow long have you been in the software market? 2008 was terrible and dot com for a while was also a death knell. If anything the last 15 years have been absolutely amazing for working in software
- mech422 3y agoyeah - its hard to remember how many people out there haven't seen a 'down' market before. 2008 was literally 16 years ago... Anyway, I'll take today's economy over the dot com bust, the early 2000 off-shoring craze, and 2008 recession..
- ecoquant 3y agoNasdaq returns by year 2002 -37.58 2001 -32.65 2000 -36.84 The people that think this is bad, can't imagine what 2002 was like when the all time high in the Nasdaq was a few days ago. Hate to break it to everyone but the good times are right now. The next decade we should see a massive deflationary force from software being so much cheaper to create.
- robofanatic 3y agowell just last week I heard on NPR, may be Marketplace. They were saying there are these huge tech layoffs happening but unemployment claims haven't gone up that much because people are getting new jobs quickly. So basically I don't know what/who to believe.
- swatcoder 3y agoUnemployment is capped very low compared to tech salaries, involves a bunch of paperwork, and requires you to attest that you're actively pursuing opportunties for work in your field. Lots of highly paid people don't bother with it, even when they might have qualified -- whether because they're lazy to lazy to do the paperwork for a small offset against their expenses, or because they intentionally took time away from the labor market after being fired and aren't into lying about it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- xboxnolifes 3y ago> Unemployment is capped very low compared to tech salaries, involves a bunch of paperwork, and requires you to attest that you're actively pursuing opportunties for work in your field. This wasn't my experience in my state. While the first point may potentially be true for those making $250k+, getting unemployment took me less than 30 minutes going through an online portal. That's a trivial amount of work to make >$2k a month. The "attesting" was me submitting names of 3 companies I applied to while unemployed, and this was only asked of me 2 months into receiving unemployment benefits.
- BadCookie 3y agoIn some states, severance pay can delay or reduce eligibility for unemployment benefits. The generous multi-month severance packages that many tech workers receive could have an effect on the unemployment numbers as a consequence—but I’m speculating.
- 3y ago
- mathattack 3y agoMy observation is that companies are getting much more precise on their needs. The days of “you’re smart and have a technical background” have given way to “there’s a dozen people in the market who have the exact experience we need, so we will limit our pool to them.” This is especially painful for college grads, who don’t have specific experience to fall back on.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 3y agoI think there's also a growing realization that, along with what you've said, putting large emphasis on leetcode skills, or using leetcode at all, is not leading to the best hiring results. That doesn't mean leetcode shouldn't be used in interviews --- I'm sure, for better or worse, leetcode style questions are here to stay in tech interviews; but, that there's a growing sense that people who are simply good at binging and purging leetcode might not be the best fits for experienced roles that require experienced skillsets. It's partly the result of software dev as a field maturing (quite literally, most are now older) after the ZIRP bonanza of the last couple years.
- twojobsoneboss 3y agoIs this really true? Been hearing the opposite, that everyone and anyone is using LC for interviewing now
- HarryHirsch 3y agoThis is especially painful for college grads, who don’t have specific experience to fall back on. There is no training or university pipeline any longer?
- h02 3y agoAnd we're having a hard time finding experienced and skilled engineers... trying to hire for a senior nodejs role, over a thousand applicants (most people just hit apply without reading the description, over half are disqualified for not meeting the basic requirements), dozens interviewed, and we've only managed to hire 1 person that seemed close to being qualified, and he quit after 2 months of barely working. We're around a ~600 person company.
- Waterluvian 3y agoWhat does the job pay? Fully remote?
- h02 3y agoFully remote. Salary range is 100 - 170k.
- cvhashim04 3y agoAre you hiring freelancers?
- ebcode 3y agoHere ya go: https://ebcode.com https://ebcode.com
- cpursley 3y ago[flagged]
- laCostly 3y agoIm going to guess pay isn’t commensurate with the ‘basic requirements’ and or something else is wrong with your interviewing process if they bolted after two months.
- geuis 3y agoShoot me an email. I ran and scaled a nodejs api supporting about 1.5 billion requests per month up until December when I sold it. I have many, many years of experience in the node ecosystem and am currently looking for a new role.
- ozten 3y agoDo we have any empirical study of tax section 174's effect on how software companies are operating and if they have changed staffing plans because of it? January S174 discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38957651 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38957651
- elwebmaster 3y agowe don't know how much each factor contributed to the sh*tstorm but it all came at once: Covid over-hiring, high hopes for LLM efficiency gains, S174, interest rate hikes, mass layoffs (do you really want to go against the crowd and hire when everyone is laying off?).
- aaomidi 3y agoIirc this got reversed last minute.
- gamblor956 3y agoThe legislation that would have restored current-expensing of 174 expenses has not yet passed in the Senate, so capitalizing is still the law. (https://rhodeislandcurrent.com/2024/03/12/business-owners-union-leader-urge-u-s-senate-to-move-ahead-soon-on-stalled-tax-package/ https://rhodeislandcurrent.com/2024/03/12/business-owners-un...)
- melon_taeppe 3y ago11 years experience. took me 4 months to get a new job, the longest its ever taken since I became a dev.
- Cloudef 3y ago12 years, still looking though this month looks promising, its been a shit show after shit show since covid tbh
- blindriver 3y agoCovid was the easiest time ever to find a software job
- avmich 3y agoNot for all I guess.
- rhelz 3y ago4 months is actually really good, relatively speaking. Just wait until you have 20 years experience, and you are trying to explain to your interviewer (who has 5 years experience) something which took you 15 years of hard experience to learn.... 35 years experience here, been looking for 2.5 years.
- aryehof 3y agoThe problem is that “experience” has no value in our industry, unless it is recent experience with some technology, framework, language, and the memorization of those algorithms and data-structures.
- rhelz 3y agoYou hit the nail right on the thumb. About 10 years ago, I was looking for jobs, and wasn't getting any bites. My wife said "Cut your resume in half. Only show the last 7 years of your employment history." It worked--when it wasn't so obvious that I was a graybeard, I got a lot more interviews. But it was epochally, cosmically sad for me to cut out 15 years of my experience--describing achievement I was really proud of. And just throw them in the trash.
- matt3210 3y agoThis hasn't been my experience in embedded.
- cccybernetic 3y agoThere's something to this. I’m a senior dev in NYC with ~7 years experience working across the stack (NextJS/ReactJS, Node, Python, Postgres, SQL Server, etc). I’m also not half bad at design. I haven’t been able to get a response much less an interview.
- smogcutter 3y agoIn no other professional field is someone with 7 years of experience considered “senior” anything. Edit to clarify my meaning: I’m not trying to come at you, just pointing out that this seems to be symptomatic of the problem as a whole.
- skeeter2020 3y agoit's definitely a more modern thing, even in Software Development. Probably part on the employee's demands jumping between roles with much shorter tenure, and partly on the employer to justify the higher salaries over the past few years.
- preommr 3y agoThe term 'senior' is completely meaningless. I've seen people get a senior role ~1.5 years after graduating bootcamp.
- smaudet 3y agoMany "seniors" I've seen are just handed the role. They are rarely any good...which makes me treasure the seniors who actually know their stuff so much more, and also feel a fair amount of contempt for the folk handing out paper titles.
- samplatt 3y agoI'll disagree. The last 20 years I've been a DBA/DA/dev at a slew of medium/large/ultragiant mining/construction/engineering companies. In almost every single one, there's a young gun quietly operating somewhere there, the equivalent of a 10x developer, a "Senior Engineer" in their mid-20's. Sure, they're the exception, but with enough numbers you'll always find exceptions.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- alphazard 3y agoNot all experience is equal, but people expect to be compensated for the "experience" (time since entering the workforce) they bring to the table regardless. That's the issue here. There is plenty of software that needs engineering, but we can't make a market. This specific person has 17 years of experience. Are they a staff level engineer, critical to their group? 17 years is more than enough time to become more competent than >99% of software engineers, if they have the aptitude for it. It seems unlikely that a company would layoff someone keeping all the juniors unblocked, unless management is totally incompetent. Or are they a senior with a decade of negotiated raises, who hasn't learned anything meaningfully new in that same time? They have something like 7 years of real learning, and the company is paying for 17. This is an obvious choice for a layoff. I haven't seen any signs that smart people who can write software are valued any less. They are just as hard to find, and are getting paid just as much as ever.
- coffeebeqn 3y agoAnyone who was job hopping in the last 4-6 years is also used to top of the zero interest bubble with COVID stimulus pay levels
- halfcat 3y ago> we can't make a market Bingo. It takes a buyer and a seller to close a deal. Supply going the wrong way with layoffs, demand going the wrong way with interest rates. Like a traffic jam, takes time to unwind the backlog.
- rhelz 3y ago> unless management is totally incompetent Sooo...how do you measure how good a programmer is? You've got to cut $200,000 from your budget. You can lay off 2 junior programmers, or 1 senior programmer. How, exactly should management determine whether or not the senior programmer is worth twice what a junior programmer is? This is not a rhetorical question, and generalities like "keeps the juniors unblocked" are not an answer, unless you can give some objective metric which really tracks that. And even if he "keeps the juniors unblocked"--how can a manager tell whether keeping the juniors unblocked is worth $200,000 a year? Management doesn't agonize for months of who stays and who goes. The directive comes down from Olympus and they have to be executed quickly so that P.R. can move on to another narrative.
- facesofdang 3y ago[flagged]
- sakex 3y agoIt feels like having niche skills like Rust or Transformers makes it much easier. I found a new job very quickly after being laid off.
- mattgreenrocks 3y agoYep. You need to have things that make you stand out. Even with experience there's still a lot of people out there.
- avmich 3y agoTry niche skills like MFC, APL, Flash or even Haskell.
- olivierduval 3y agoActually I think that one of the specific problem of IT is that experience is not really "usefull" because - from outside of IT (management, HR) - there's always new tools/technology/buzzwords that SEEM to replace old technologies... So why pay more to hire an experienced IT man that will not know the latest techno-fad when all you need is a junior that knows them a little bit and is waaaayy cheaper. Moreover - from a management & HR point of view - there's always IT problems. You know: nobody notice when everything run smoothly (and it's a signal to let go some people) but everybody notice when there's an IT problem! So let's take the cheapest... BTW I'm 52 in France and notice this too here. And I don't know how to explain why experience matters... :-(
- d0gsg0w00f 3y agoWith experience comes pattern recognition. You can see traps 10 steps ahead of your junior peers. Yes, they can experience personally those steps faster but you can spot 5 of them reading emails with your morning coffee. My problem now is stopping myself from thinking 20 steps ahead and thinking of all work being pointless. It's a mental trick you play on yourself if "maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'll learn something, chop wood, carry water" and I always learn something.
- rhelz 3y ago> With experience comes pattern recognition. How do you put a dollar value on that though? If I can hire either 2 junior programmers for $100k, or 1 senior programmer for $200k.....how the heck am I supposed to know that this guy can pattern-recognize an extra $100k of value??
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- d0gsg0w00f 3y agoIt's on the hiring manager to decide what if they need a senior or a junior. High functioning teams need a mixture of both skill sets. Your job in the interview is to show that you are a senior. Not to make business decisions for them.
- bossyTeacher 3y agoUnsurprising. Experienced engineers in this market are like Oracle or IBM post-peak, overly complacent and not used to fight for a job. The kind of people posting on Youtube or making courses about How Everyone Should Code because everyone can get a job coding and no matter how many people join the workforce jobs will always abound. The kind of engineer talking to non-tech people about how they should always negotiate and never settle for a low salary. To jump early and often. The kind of engineer that badmouths recruiters, has no LinkedIn or hasn't maintained one in ages because they can't be bothered with it. Yes, it's stereotypical. But we all know someone who has one or more of these traits. Just like companies struggling to hire were simply not optimising for it (higher salaries, regular salary reviews and raises, smooth and quick recruitment processes, employee-centric work culture, etc), the same happens now to employees. They are unwilling to consider a slight decrease in their salary, lack of remote options, slightly worse work culture, boring companies (no Big N, FAANG or even tech sector companies), legacy codebases, boring tech stacks, less than ideal development processes, etc. You have seen those engineers in reddit. You seen them in LinkedIn. In Tech Conferences. In Youtube. And even here, in HN. The reality is that most of these devs are trying to get a role with perks similar to their previous one and that's not gonna happen for quite a while. The struggle in getting hired is basically the devs going through multi-stage reality check. If you have a job and haven't been served a notice, you can be picky and play the waiting game. If you are about to lose your job or you have already, all that matters is getting ANY job that covers your expenses.
- ptero 3y agoWhile there is a basis for many of your points, the overall take is a quite a bit too doomsday-ish. Many senior software engineers have financial cushion. This market will probably get worse before it gets better, but like after dotcom boom and 2008 crisis it will recover. And having assets that you can live on for a few years means one doesn't need to dash around panicked to every job posting. My 2c.
- bossyTeacher 3y agoYes, indeed many senior folks are cushioned hence all the moaning. Less financially stable folks are actually applying and prepping not stop because moaning online won't give you a job nor put food on the table. For the financially secure, the options are mostly the same. They just have the additional option of waiting. Their chances of getting a job similar to their previous one is still very low. While they have the option of remaining unemployed but financially secure, and they have the option to literally wait for a few years, this will not look good on their CV. You have two candidates, similar experience, one has a job, the other one hasn't had a job in 2 years. Interviewers from a job market that has been employer driven for the last x years will likely choose the employed one. No employer cares about how financially secure you are. If they have the choice of someone like you but with no recent job gaps or no gaps at all, they will choose the other candidate every single time. Just like an employee will always choose the slightly better company even if both companies are similar.
- rossdavidh 3y agoSo, as a 56yo who's been programming professionally since 2004, currently having trouble finding enough contract work, a bit of perspective: When there are more openings than qualified people, even when you reduce qualifications to what is actually necessary, it seems like there's "nobody" available. Now, when the shoe is on the other foot, it seems like "nobody" is hiring. It's harsh, but it also doesn't take that much of a shift in the supply and/or demand to go from >1 to <1, even though the effect you feel is large. There is no kind way to put this: a lot of stupid stuff got done with a lot of smart programmers in the last ten years. Meanwhile, boring old stuff like manufacturing was starved for programmers, and eventually gave up trying to get them. Now that it is possible, it takes some time for all the companies who couldn't get (or couldn't keep) programmers before, to realize that it is once again possible. However, anecdotally, I see it happening, albeit slowly. Programming that actually accomplishes something useful in the world, is still a productive thing, and positions will get created. However, large sectors of the economy take time to pivot, and so it is best to find a way to make ends meet in the meantime, and also do something useful (even if unpaid) with your programming skills, to keep your mind in practice.
- facesofdang 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago"There is no kind way to put this: a lot of stupid stuff got done with a lot of smart programmers in the last ten years." Any reasonable person would agree, but would the people in Silicon Valley agree.
- rossdavidh 3y agoProbably not, because if you're looking for a Facebook sized opportunity, well, there just aren't many in real life. So, perhaps a good time to look outside of that community for jobs? It's not easy, and it will take time, but it will happen.
- porcoda 3y agoHaving been on the hiring end over the last few years, it’s not surprising. Other than there being a glut of applicants, there is also a HUGE variation in what people consider to be “experienced”. The signal to noise ratio is pretty bad when sifting through applicants, so I can certainly see how it’s hard for qualified people to make it through. Especially since there are a lot of people who oversell their capabilities and experience, so it’s even harder to distinguish an actually-experienced, actually-qualified applicant from a skilled bullshitter. It doesn’t help that the industry has totally destroyed the meaning of terms like “senior”, so it’s hard to even use someone’s past history to make an educated guess at their actual experience level. As a result, experienced and qualified people get lost in the sea of suboptimal applicants. At this point the best hires I’ve made over that last few years are ones that came via networking / trusted references.
- light_hue_1 3y agoFor the past year the most common topic whenever I go to any conference or meetup has always been that the economy sucks and that economists have no idea what they're talking about. I hardly know anyone under 65 who is particularly well; certainly not in comparison to even 2 years ago. Many people who used to be financially secure are in much more precarious situations now. It's not just anecdotal. I see it at a large scale too. I'm at a top-ranked university and I see it in our students. 2 years ago, they were choosing between multiple job offers and hardly had to apply anywhere. Now, students with CS undergrads or Master's degrees from a university whose name everyone knows where virtually everyone used to get FAANG offers are now having trouble getting reasonable jobs. As a scientist I find the attitude of my colleagues in the economics department totally insane. They claim that we're all wrong and that the economy is amazing. They say that to me and to students who literally apply for dozens of jobs; they say it to our faces. In my neck of the scientific woods we would be publishing papers about how our metrics are totally wrong and we need to reform our science because we're disconnected from reality. In economics it seems like they publish papers about how stupid the public are. It's just crazy. All of this doesn't bode well for the election. I can't describe the lack of enthusiasm students have for Biden when they're literally hurting financially and he's doing a victory lap on how great the economy is.
- freitzkriesler2 3y ago[flagged]
- dang 3y agoCould you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
- ryanwaggoner 3y agoMaybe it’s your circle. Things are particularly bad for entry level devs right now, but I know a lot of people outside of tech, and the vast majority are employed and doing OK.
- hayst4ck 3y agoI remember being a naive college student and hearing about a "software engineer shortage." I was too young and dumb to understand that meant that the owners of companies that needed software engineers wanted cheaper labor and that I was to play a part in the devaluation of engineering labor by helping supply exceed demand, thereby allowing company owners to commodify software labor to ultimately pay wages proportional to hours worked rather than offering a share in company ownership, which allows for compensation proportional to company success. If H1B's were legitimately about labor shortages, it would be required that all companies fire/layoff their H1B's first. I am pretty liberal, but market dynamics are market dynamics, and I am surprised I haven't seen more anti H1B sentiment to bring scarcity (and therefore leverage) back into the labor market. A lot of the history of racial atrocity has been a direct result of desperate (and therefore exploitable) foreign labor de-valuing incumbent labor and the following retribution to the weaker vulnerable foreign laborers, rather than the harder work of solidarity and demanding a fair share via things like trade unions/guilds.
- sinatra 3y agoUsually it’s much easier to be liberal when doing so doesn’t cost you meaningfully. I’d encourage you to evaluate for yourself if your stances are truly fair and if you’re truly liberal considering how painful it is for an H1B to lose their job vs you. It’s also easy to say “but H1Bs get exploited!” Considering how many H1Bs come here, maybe they’d rather face this exploitation vs staying in their own country?
- rhelz 3y agoIn a free market, there's no such thing as a shortage. This isn't a 1980's soviet grocery store. The market for programmers is not centrally planned. Its one of the least-regulated markets extant today. So anybody complaining about a "shortage of programmers" is just a cheapskate. In a free market, what signals to us that more of something should be produced? Buehler? Buehler?
- feedforward 3y ago
- memset 3y agoI am actively looking to hire - either freelance or full-time - an engineer to write open source golang code for my YC startup. However, I literally cannot afford FAANG salaries at my stage. It would literally bring my runway from n to n/5 years. And many candidates are asking for 400k+ salaries. I’d love to hire someone who knows what they’re doing but I’m just not able to find people who are both qualified and interested in the work. (If this is you then message me!) I had one person today - with lots of FAANG experience who’d recently gone freelance - tell me that they weren’t willing to work with me to write code but they were willing to do advising for $450/hr. We just weren’t on the same page. I don’t know what’s going on, and I hurt for people who are looking for work. I’m launching more slowly than I’d like because I am not able to find a partner to build things with who is willing to work for less than what they made after 10 years at Google.
- ohthatsnotright 3y agoHere I was thinking $95/hr was pretty good for app development.
- SauciestGNU 3y agoYears ago when i was much more junior my rate was $85, and if I couldn't get paid more than that today I would be totally ok, but a little disappointed.
- throwaway4220 3y agoWow this is about how much the average radiologist makes after 10 years of postgraduate studies
- cvhashim04 3y agoBrb going to radiology school, given how finished tech is
- jujube3 3y agoAI is coming for radiology
- jobmeplease 3y agoOne year ago I was looking. I applied to a 3 places, they rushed me through interviews and I got offers from every one. One was over 500k with 9 years of experience. I chose to stay at my old job then left a few months ago. Took 3 months to get an interview and I've seen such shitty behavior. Company hiring for nonexistent positions. Ghosting after bad interviews. Heel dragging and super long interview turnaround times. I strongly suspect I'm going to take a pay cut when I do get an offer. My feeling is just that employers can be picky now, so they are. I hope things turn around soon
- tennisflyi 3y agoThe application process is insane amongst other things/task
- gregjor 3y agoMultiple causes have led to this. - A glut of people entering the field with no experience. - A more recent glut of people laid off who now expect or need inflated salaries to maintain their lifestyle and status. - Excessive focus by employers on very specific "skills" that don't necessarily translate to productivity or contributing to a team and project. - Employers not willing to train or mentor new hires, and expecting to hire only the "best" or the top X% of candidates. - Investors and shareholders demanding revenue or at least market share growth rather than quality, consistency, cultivating employees, or even producing anything of real value. - Meaningless titles, people with very little actual experience or talent called (or calling themselves) "senior." - Employers conflating university degrees with talent and ability, and then requiring experience the candidates can't acquire in school. - Programming education degraded to "boot camps" and other superficial and shallow "skills" training. Comp Sci has little to do with the vast majority of programming work. - Mistaking unnecessary complexity for technical excellence, at both the management and programmer level. - New programmers ignorant or dismissive of actual opportunities because they focus on the latest fads and fashion they read about, and only look at the FAANG companies and hip startups. - Managers who can't manage software development projects or programmers, don't know how to evaluate candidates, don't use metrics, and jump from one nonsense pop psychology or social media inspired craze to another. - No useful way to measure ability to perform in the job, and relying on poor proxies such as resume keywords and leetcode and whiteboard performance. - A paralyzing fear of making a mistake, or choosing the wrong job or candidate, that afflicts programmers, hiring managers, HR departments. - Fake it until you make it ethos, and the flip side we call imposter syndrome. - The idea that a job must provide self-fulfillment, "follow your passion," etc. And the parallel inflated requirements employers dream up pretending they will have problems of scale or will work on novel and difficult technical problems. - Actual talent and aptitude for programming in the sense of solving real business problems remains rare. I have worked over 40 years as a professional programmer so I've seen all of these things happen over time. Employers and candidates both have unrealistic expectations and terrible processes for matching with each other. And I can't think of a nice way to put this, but the programming field (or "software engineering" as some like to fancy themselves) looks like a long-term clinical study of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Programmers delude themselves about their abilities and value in the job market, and employers delude themselves about their needs and requirements.
- dave333 3y agoI got laid off around age 50 in the 2000/2001 dot com bust and wrote up my experience on medium: https://medium.com/@davenixon_44904/how-to-find-a-job-when-you-are-laid-off-over-50-c40b426be3b4 https://medium.com/@davenixon_44904/how-to-find-a-job-when-y... TLDR: Work on personal/OS project to learn in demand skills and maybe to create some value or residual income. Startups are often the least picky in hiring and provide a stepping stone to a large more stable company that may be a better fit for an older engineer.
- iancmceachern 3y agoThere are lots of engineers that aren't programmers. I feel like the community on this site forgets that sometimes. I know it's a "hacker" focused site, but thought I'd bring a bit of perspective I guess.
- maldev 3y agoI have ~11 yoe and have near 100% callback rate(50% for remote). All positions from 200-450. Friends have similar rates. And ~70% offer rates. Always confused reading these. But I'm also a low level developer, and only ask for ~250-3 salary/bonus. It feels like the people complaining are either really bad, have poor resume's, or have visa requirements. I tweaked my resume after not getting many callbacks and now have the near 100% callback rate.
- randomopining 3y agoWhat tweaks gave you the most success?
- maldev 3y agoI changed alot of it to action/result oriented. What did I achieve. I also added a section at the bottom of my paragraph with EVER buzzword I could find from about 10-20 relevant job postings to get past the filter. Usually has recruiters making a joke.
- randomopining 3y agoSo literally a few sentences that string together all the buzz words so that it gets picked up in automated systems? smart.
- pdimitar 3y agoInstead of calling people you never met bad, maybe you can share your techniques of tweaking the resume? I've never in my life worked for more than $110K annually and I have 22 years of experience. Can do practically anything on the backend and quite a lot in terms of system administration. This is also VERY sensitive to location, even if I'm working remote ever since 2011.
- reaperman 3y agoI’d be very curious about which schools you both went to. That seems to make a large difference in career trajectory. Probably the #1 differentiator for first 5-8 years of career path. Edit: Other than country of residence.
- silent_cal 3y agoI think experienced engineers are probably "spoiled" by super-high salaries. Nothing lasts forever. Maybe try asking for less than 200k?
- hunterhod 3y agoThe quoted tweet mentions medical leave for burnout. I've noticed quite a lot of these stories begin with the laid-off employee taking extended time off for one reason or another.