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This is the toughest market I've ever seen. I easily made it to on-sites at FAANG a few years ago and now I'm getting resume rejected by no-name startups (and F

This is the toughest market I've ever seen. I easily made it to on-sites at FAANG a few years ago and now I'm getting resume rejected by no-name startups (and FAANG). The bar has also been raised significantly. I had an interview recently where I solved the algorithm question very quickly, but didn't refactor/clean up my code perfectly and was rejected.

trentnix 2y ago
I’m not sure the bar has been raised. It’s been weirded, but not raised.
- realityfactchex 2y ago
  Weirded how, if you don't mind elaborating slightly? For example, does it mean: the actual skill level (e.g., smartness) people actually look for and hire hasn't changed, but the activities that hiring teams require candidates to have experience with are (seemingly weirdly) not a great thing to need anyway and therefore lots of great candidates end up twiddling their thumbs? In that way, the "height" of the bar is the same, but it's a "weird" bar, in that one could have to accept it for what it is, or even stoop to it, or perhaps shift over to it, in order to pass it? Or more that the overall interview experiences are weird caricatures in and of themselves? Weird is a great word, but it can be a little non-specific, so I'm left curious about the intended usage/meaning.
  - rdfc-xn-uuid 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - MrVandemar 2y ago
      > It hurts when you see posh privileged urban women having much more chance of getting into a good company than a man who worked his way up through sacrifice. It's not a gender issue. I would be looking to hire someone competent who works hard, not someone who makes "sacrifices" and then expects a job/promotion. The latter never works. That's not the work culture in most places. I've seen it many times, people who make "sacrifices", allowing themselves to be exploited, expecting some promotion from it, and are then passed over for someone who actually has demonstrated they are good at the job and ready for more responsibility, and not being a doormat. Then they become resentful. Don't be bitter. Be better.
      - sambapa 2y ago
        But they are better, that's his point lolwut
        MrVandemar 2y ago
        That is not the poster's point. The poster contends women are being prejudicially hired as "diversity" rather men who have "sacrificed" and worked hard. "lolwut" indeed.
        throw111424 2y ago
        [flagged]
        latentcall 2y ago
        Your perceived truth maybe. The truth you’re looking for to fit your world view.
        sambapa 2y ago
        The best track on elseq 4
        InsideOutSanta 2y ago
        Are you asserting that companies in a free market are intentionally hiring people unqualified for their jobs and paying them wages as if they were qualified? To what end?
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        randomdata 2y ago
        Right, but certain careers have figured out that women are, on average, better at the socialization game and thus, broadly speaking, a better fit for the job. Ain't nobody "diversity" hiring on the oil rigs or other jobs where the physical act is more important than interpersonal interaction. However, it is difficult to measure those positive traits for what they are, so employers are selecting based on gender hoping for positive correlation. But that's illegal, so "diversity" hiring was created as a scapegoat to help avoid legal fire.
    - greenie_beans 2y ago
      > * Diversity hiring: Big US/EU companies are trying to hire more females here because cost is low and they can show great diversity numbers. It hurts when you see posh privileged urban women having much more chance of getting into a good company than a man who worked his way up through sacrifice. do you have any examples of this happening? or is this just a boogie man? my experience has been different: so many mediocre men in this industry. all of the women i've worked with have been brilliant.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - kmmlng 2y ago
        I always got the feeling that the distributions were different for men and women. Male professionals seem to be normally distributed, with a lot of mediocrity, some excellence, and some incompetence. In women, the mediocrity part of the population seems to be missing, so the distribution looks more bimodal. If that's actually the case and not just a warped perception on my part, it could easily happen that, depending on your own skill-level and environment, you'll be more likely to work with one of the two groups in the bimodal distribution.
      - memtet 2y ago
        [dead]
      - consteval 2y ago
        I've had the same experience, and I've reasoned it as follows: It's very difficult to be a woman in Computer Science. CompSci is uniquely awful for women. Like other STEM, it's overrun by men, so you get all the subtle discrimination of that. But CompSci men also tend to be, for lack of a better word, asocial weirdos. Civil engineers have to work with people, CompSci people built up their skills in front of a screen. All this means that the large majority of women are filtered out. The ones that remain are the ones most skilled with navigating tough situations, and who have a strong passion for engineering. A passion strong enough to wade through the downsides. I also think they have to constantly prove themselves, which also builds up their skills.
  - trentnix 2y ago
    Many companies are filtering candidates in favor of mercenaries while pretending they are looking for dependable, committed professionals. If you don’t have specific experience with some CTOs favorite esoteric API or don’t have experience in the same, specific corner of some insurance or usury industry, your ability to actually engineer solutions is considered irrelevant. It’s as if the industry has forgotten that building software is about the application of algorithms to data structures to accomplish some user need. Instead, company after company wants to hot glue some service via some API using some framework on some cloud platform. And because the MBA decision-maker can write Excel macros with GPT, we don’t need programmers to build systems anymore. Just wire up foo SaaS to bar SaaS and MVPFailFastLeanAgile our way to success! Sorry for the rant…
    - dartos 2y ago
      Yeah well what do recruiters know about software development? They just know the keywords the EMs and C suite sent them in the headcount request.
      - trentnix 2y ago
        That EMs and the C-suite think solving their engineering needs is to add "headcount" is the bigger problem.
        dartos 2y ago
        That’s what they thought in 2021. Now that money isn’t free, they think the problem is too many engineers.
    - realityfactchex 2y ago
      Thanks, much appreciated
    - scott_w 2y ago
      > It’s as if the industry has forgotten that building software is about... This really isn't new. A look at Slashdot will give you similar complaints as far back as at least the 2000s. I'm sure someone older than me will dig up Usenet posts with exactly the same complaints and tell me to get off their lawn ;-)
- briandear 2y ago
  The bar has been lowered in many respects. 14 years experience, 5 of them at a FAANG. Successful startup exit for a small company I founded, and and endless array of India-based recruiters that, for example, want me to mention “Ruby 3.2” in my resume when the resume says I have 14 years of Ruby experience including using it daily in my present job. I could literally say “I invented Ruby and have worked with it daily for 20 years,” and they’d say, “but you don’t have 3.2 listed.” I play the game then they pass me off to another Indian who is less understandable than the first guy and then they offer $45/hour. I say yeah sure, submit me to the potential client. Then I never hear anything back. The Indian 3rd party recruiting industry is absolutely horrible. Another anecdote was spending 10 minutes explaining how Java and JavaScript aren’t the same thing. I am convinced there is rampant discrimination happening as well against non-Indians, and especially those who aren’t H1Bs. (H1B is a trap that makes it easy to hire people at lower wages and then also makes it harder for them to switch employers.) I’m not well articulating the problem, but anyone who has done this dance knows exactly what I’m talking about. By the way, I used to contract at $95/hour and now I can’t get calls back for $45/hour. The outsourcing offshoring business needs to be significantly reformed. I had a gig at Best Buy ($70/hour) and I got to spend 3 months training some Accenture H1Bs to replace me. I thought H1B was to fill “critical shortages of highly skilled workers?” Best Buy didn’t have a shortage — they fired my entire team and replaced it with Accenture. Best Buy should be heavily taxed for that and Accenture et al should have their offshore labor tariffed into oblivion. (They typically have onshore H1Bs directing offshore teams.) The Best Buy CEO talks all sorts of DEI crap, while firing people to cut costs. Not very inclusive if you ask me.
  - mathverse 2y ago
    Indians,Brazilians,Portuguese,Ukrainians,Russians are possibly the worst clique of discriminative nationalities. You can be 100% assured that you will be driven out of a company/job if more of them take a hold and get into higher up positions. This is not racism. This is a pure fact based on statistical evidence. You will be sold a dream of infinite scalability by hiring "talent" in those countries for cheap and what you will get is usually disfunctional teams riddled with incompetence and nepotism. Even if a job/team is meant to be multicultural,diverse they will find a way how to hire more and more of their countrymen until knowing the language is basically a requirement for the job. I am not even an american and i've seen this happen in Europe as well so I imagine in the US it must be 1000 times worse.
ziaowang 2y ago
Though FAANG offers are usually more attractive than startups (considering pay level and stability), some startups could be more selective since they couldn't afford to hire the wrong candidate.
- hnfong 2y ago
  It's also a numbers thing. Startups generally hire a couple people, while FAANGs hire in the tens of thousands. (Used to, at least.)
- lumost 2y ago
  It’s more about calibration. If you interview 100 people at a FAANG, you get an idea of where the bar is. This idea gets calibrated with a panel of interviewers, along with shadow interviewers. At a startup… who knows? I had an interviewer burn up 25 minutes on a 45 minute coding question trying to “hint me” towards the solution I mentioned in the first 2 minutes.
bberenberg 2y ago
I can’t solve everyone’s problems but I can say that I have 1-2 (depending if an outstanding offer is accepted) open principal engineering roles directly working for me. The process will be talking to the recruiter, then two tech interviews, then an interview with me. This will take you a couple weeks to go through because of our team is tiny and we’re fairly busy. Team is 100% remote and async. All the stuff in the JD applies, the one update that we haven’t gotten out yet is that you must know terraform really well. Comp is scaled for engineers outside the USA. Apply at https://moduscreate.com/careers/5984037003/?gh_jid=5984037003 https://moduscreate.com/careers/5984037003/?gh_jid=598403700... and feel free to mention that you saw Boris (me) post this on HN.
- MarcelOlsz 2y ago
  This looks fantastic. Applied!
- shnkr 2y ago
  God's work. Simple process but didn't find a matching profile to apply - boring backend principal engineer with 10+ yoe.. will keep an eye though.
  - bberenberg 2y ago
    Not sure what you mean by matching profile? The link above should be a direct link to the role I am hiring for.
thaumasiotes 2y ago
> The bar has also been raised significantly. I had an interview recently where I solved the algorithm question very quickly, but didn't refactor/clean up my code perfectly and was rejected. Bearing in mind the implicit comparison to "a few years ago", a few years ago I interviewed with Google, at which point the recruiter told me I'd passed the interview, wished me congratulations (!), told me to expect a job offer, and finally, ~6 weeks later, informed me that while I'd "passed" the interviews, my scores were too low for them to make an offer. It remains a mystery what it might mean to "pass" without actually advancing beyond the threshold you passed.
- equity 2y ago
  There will be a pool of candidates who "passed", and hiring managers can search through that pool to decide who to take for their team. If there are fewer openings than candidates who "passed" or hiring managers aren't interested in taking someone, then these folks won't get an offer.
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    Is it normal to congratulate those people on the fact that you're not offering them a job?
joshuaturner 2y ago
I think a lot of this comes down to AI. In a recent hiring round we experienced multiple candidates using AI tooling to assist them in the technical interviews (remote only company). I expect relationship hires to become more common over the next few years as even more open-discussion focused interview rounds like architecture become lower signal. So with that in mind I'll see you all at ReInvent
- rsanek 2y ago
  If you're giving remote interviews, your loop should assume candidates can use AI. it's like giving a take home math test that assumes people won't use calculators at this point
  - joshuaturner 2y ago
    I disagree. We pretty explicitly ask candidates to not use AI. While it's fine when doing the job the purpose of the interview is to gauge your ability to understand and solve problems, while AI can help you with that you understanding how to do it yourself signals that you'll be able to solve other more complex wider-spanning problems. Just like with a calculator - it's important for candidates to know _why_ something works and be able to demonstrate that as much as them knowing the solution.
    - Toorkit 2y ago
      Oh, if you give it the old "pretty please" then of course no one is going to use AI.
    - randomdata 2y ago
      There is an interesting dichotomy in your interview process. You say you want someone who can solve problems, but then go on to say (perhaps unintentionally; communication is hard) that you only want someone who has already rote-memorized how to solve the particular problems you throw at them, not someone who can figure things out as the problems arise.
smugma 2y ago
As someone with a couple of open (not engineering) recs, I can agree this is the toughest market I’ve ever seen. For both recs, we received many highly qualified candidates with relevant skills, often in a relevant domain. I’ve never seen this before. It’s always been very hard to find a single highly-qualified candidate.
- thesuitonym 2y ago
  The media seems to think the great resignation has ended, but really it’s just that jobs have dried up. Professionals, especially good ones, are eager to leave their current jobs, but the pool is so small, there’s just nowhere to go. And with so many people looking for new positions, if you’re not highly keyword targeted, you won’t go anywhere.
  - dartos 2y ago
    I can’t wait until linkedin charges people to boost resumes a la tinder.
    - thesuitonym 2y ago
      They already sort of do. Every time you apply to a job on LinkedIn, even if you click through to the company's ATS, LinkedIn tries to upsell their premium services, which allegedly promotes your resume. I saw no difference in the applications I submitted during the trial, which I assume is similar to the results folks see with super likes on Tinder.
ericmcer 2y ago
Anecdotal but I felt it was worst during the mass layoffs in late 2022/early 2023. It has been very slowly recovering since then. The late 2020 period was the absolute best time though. I got multiple offers almost instantly, and after I signed on it felt like the org was bloated with engineers just fiddling away on meaningless projects.
- wyclif 2y ago
  That's always the effect of free money.
- sertraline 2y ago
  This is not surprising. The companies received grants during covid lockdowns, so they started listing a lot of fake jobs. When the money dried up the layoffs followed, which was an expected outcome. Media does not let people know about the grants and presents everything in such light that it seems like the market is getting absolutely destroyed, while in reality it only slightly declined. The bigger problem are HRs employed by big companies who autoreject every application and take no responsibility for doing this.
bubbleRefuge 2y ago
My observation as well. Going remote makes it harder to switch jobs because of loosing the personal connections and networks that get developed working on site. Going through the front door when applying for opportunities is usually more difficult than the back door. Back door as in getting introduced via your network. As a result, I've learned that a good recruiter is now a necessity because they have those relationships with hiring managers which can put you to the front of the line and also prep you better for the process.
- ghaff 2y ago
  Essentially post-school every job I’ve been hired for was through strong personal connections. And I certainly feel I don’t develop the same kinds of connections remotely. Maybe some folks who grew up in that of remote environment are better adapted.
- obeid 2y ago
  I don't mean to sound harsh, but it does sound like front/ backdoor metaphor is code for filtering people by the social biases that form much of the personal connections and networks you mention. The effect of remote work, seems to be leveling the entry point for everyone; an advantage for people who got discriminated against before and a disadvantage for people who enjoyed their privilege for far too long.
  - authorfly 2y ago
    The comments above you replied to were saying something different to your interpretation, I believe. They were saying that by going remote (the last 5 years), people haven't formed as many deep connections by legitimate social connections at jobs and their reputation. You could say this is the "good" or "reputation" based way of getting jobs in the back door and it's not all just likeability. So there is less of this kind of back door hiring right. I don't know if this is true or not. But the back door hiring for nepotism or "my brothers girlfriend" is still as ever present, since the connections aren't predicated on real life in person social interactions. Discrimination or disadvantage comes in to neither of these hiring methods innately. Subconscious bias could exist for back door recommendations ofcourse. So if anything, it's not really leveling anything. It just means for increasingly experienced engineers, benefits don't accrue so much when looking for work if remote. If anything these backdoor references could help people (e.g. from poor families) get a shot even despite other innate culture differences (e.g. style of speaking). And nepotistic hires will remain.
rachofsunshine 2y ago
For what it's worth, it is definitely thawing (at least if what we're seeing in our client base is anything to go by), it's just going to take some time for that to work its way through everyone looking for work.
dvsjr 2y ago
2009 recession no work for almost two years tough?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- randomdata 2y ago
  Or 1930s Great Depression no work for almost five years tough? I expect most people here won't have a good sense for 2009. While it wasn't great for many industries, for tech it was the "app" boom. You couldn't hardly go outside without someone throwing money at you.
brailsafe 2y ago
Is that the reason you were rejected, or was that just an attribute of what you did && you were rejected? What stage of the interview, what level? I truly don't doubt that's what happened, I've had it happen, but when it did their feedback was (insultingly) not up to their professional standard. I say insultingly because it was an amateurish evaluation of what I did, specifically because it was like the 5th god damn interview by that point and really they should have been looking for more than trivialities like the coding style I chose to use in HackerRank with a visible ticking clock. The reason I ask is just for context; if people are interviewing for Senior roles and being rejected for code formatting problems, something is even more deeply wrong than it seems, since they probably shouldn't be concerning themselves with that _at_all_. If it's possible though that you were rejected for some other reason, but that your code style was the strongest negative apparent signal, that's also worth exploring. In my case, that's a possibility, that they were looking for just one more reason to narrow the funnel, but it can be hard to accept.
david-gpu 2y ago
> I had an interview recently where I solved the algorithm question very quickly, but didn't refactor/clean up my code perfectly and was rejected. It sounds like they intentionally present a simple problem because they are not filtering by who can solve it, but by who writes clean maintainable code. I wish I had thought of that when I was interviewing candidates, because it is a good criterium for a well established organization.

trentnix 2y ago

I’m not sure the bar has been raised. It’s been weirded, but not raised.

realityfactchex 2y ago
Weirded how, if you don't mind elaborating slightly? For example, does it mean: the actual skill level (e.g., smartness) people actually look for and hire hasn't changed, but the activities that hiring teams require candidates to have experience with are (seemingly weirdly) not a great thing to need anyway and therefore lots of great candidates end up twiddling their thumbs? In that way, the "height" of the bar is the same, but it's a "weird" bar, in that one could have to accept it for what it is, or even stoop to it, or perhaps shift over to it, in order to pass it? Or more that the overall interview experiences are weird caricatures in and of themselves? Weird is a great word, but it can be a little non-specific, so I'm left curious about the intended usage/meaning.
- rdfc-xn-uuid 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - MrVandemar 2y ago
    > It hurts when you see posh privileged urban women having much more chance of getting into a good company than a man who worked his way up through sacrifice. It's not a gender issue. I would be looking to hire someone competent who works hard, not someone who makes "sacrifices" and then expects a job/promotion. The latter never works. That's not the work culture in most places. I've seen it many times, people who make "sacrifices", allowing themselves to be exploited, expecting some promotion from it, and are then passed over for someone who actually has demonstrated they are good at the job and ready for more responsibility, and not being a doormat. Then they become resentful. Don't be bitter. Be better.
    - sambapa 2y ago
      But they are better, that's his point lolwut
      - MrVandemar 2y ago
        That is not the poster's point. The poster contends women are being prejudicially hired as "diversity" rather men who have "sacrificed" and worked hard. "lolwut" indeed.
        throw111424 2y ago
        [flagged]
        latentcall 2y ago
        Your perceived truth maybe. The truth you’re looking for to fit your world view.
        sambapa 2y ago
        The best track on elseq 4
        InsideOutSanta 2y ago
        Are you asserting that companies in a free market are intentionally hiring people unqualified for their jobs and paying them wages as if they were qualified? To what end?
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        randomdata 2y ago
        Right, but certain careers have figured out that women are, on average, better at the socialization game and thus, broadly speaking, a better fit for the job. Ain't nobody "diversity" hiring on the oil rigs or other jobs where the physical act is more important than interpersonal interaction. However, it is difficult to measure those positive traits for what they are, so employers are selecting based on gender hoping for positive correlation. But that's illegal, so "diversity" hiring was created as a scapegoat to help avoid legal fire.
  - greenie_beans 2y ago
    > * Diversity hiring: Big US/EU companies are trying to hire more females here because cost is low and they can show great diversity numbers. It hurts when you see posh privileged urban women having much more chance of getting into a good company than a man who worked his way up through sacrifice. do you have any examples of this happening? or is this just a boogie man? my experience has been different: so many mediocre men in this industry. all of the women i've worked with have been brilliant.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - kmmlng 2y ago
      I always got the feeling that the distributions were different for men and women. Male professionals seem to be normally distributed, with a lot of mediocrity, some excellence, and some incompetence. In women, the mediocrity part of the population seems to be missing, so the distribution looks more bimodal. If that's actually the case and not just a warped perception on my part, it could easily happen that, depending on your own skill-level and environment, you'll be more likely to work with one of the two groups in the bimodal distribution.
    - memtet 2y ago
      [dead]
    - consteval 2y ago
      I've had the same experience, and I've reasoned it as follows: It's very difficult to be a woman in Computer Science. CompSci is uniquely awful for women. Like other STEM, it's overrun by men, so you get all the subtle discrimination of that. But CompSci men also tend to be, for lack of a better word, asocial weirdos. Civil engineers have to work with people, CompSci people built up their skills in front of a screen. All this means that the large majority of women are filtered out. The ones that remain are the ones most skilled with navigating tough situations, and who have a strong passion for engineering. A passion strong enough to wade through the downsides. I also think they have to constantly prove themselves, which also builds up their skills.
- trentnix 2y ago
  Many companies are filtering candidates in favor of mercenaries while pretending they are looking for dependable, committed professionals. If you don’t have specific experience with some CTOs favorite esoteric API or don’t have experience in the same, specific corner of some insurance or usury industry, your ability to actually engineer solutions is considered irrelevant. It’s as if the industry has forgotten that building software is about the application of algorithms to data structures to accomplish some user need. Instead, company after company wants to hot glue some service via some API using some framework on some cloud platform. And because the MBA decision-maker can write Excel macros with GPT, we don’t need programmers to build systems anymore. Just wire up foo SaaS to bar SaaS and MVPFailFastLeanAgile our way to success! Sorry for the rant…
  - dartos 2y ago
    Yeah well what do recruiters know about software development? They just know the keywords the EMs and C suite sent them in the headcount request.
    - trentnix 2y ago
      That EMs and the C-suite think solving their engineering needs is to add "headcount" is the bigger problem.
      - dartos 2y ago
        That’s what they thought in 2021. Now that money isn’t free, they think the problem is too many engineers.
  - realityfactchex 2y ago
    Thanks, much appreciated
  - scott_w 2y ago
    > It’s as if the industry has forgotten that building software is about... This really isn't new. A look at Slashdot will give you similar complaints as far back as at least the 2000s. I'm sure someone older than me will dig up Usenet posts with exactly the same complaints and tell me to get off their lawn ;-)
briandear 2y ago
The bar has been lowered in many respects. 14 years experience, 5 of them at a FAANG. Successful startup exit for a small company I founded, and and endless array of India-based recruiters that, for example, want me to mention “Ruby 3.2” in my resume when the resume says I have 14 years of Ruby experience including using it daily in my present job. I could literally say “I invented Ruby and have worked with it daily for 20 years,” and they’d say, “but you don’t have 3.2 listed.” I play the game then they pass me off to another Indian who is less understandable than the first guy and then they offer $45/hour. I say yeah sure, submit me to the potential client. Then I never hear anything back. The Indian 3rd party recruiting industry is absolutely horrible. Another anecdote was spending 10 minutes explaining how Java and JavaScript aren’t the same thing. I am convinced there is rampant discrimination happening as well against non-Indians, and especially those who aren’t H1Bs. (H1B is a trap that makes it easy to hire people at lower wages and then also makes it harder for them to switch employers.) I’m not well articulating the problem, but anyone who has done this dance knows exactly what I’m talking about. By the way, I used to contract at $95/hour and now I can’t get calls back for $45/hour. The outsourcing offshoring business needs to be significantly reformed. I had a gig at Best Buy ($70/hour) and I got to spend 3 months training some Accenture H1Bs to replace me. I thought H1B was to fill “critical shortages of highly skilled workers?” Best Buy didn’t have a shortage — they fired my entire team and replaced it with Accenture. Best Buy should be heavily taxed for that and Accenture et al should have their offshore labor tariffed into oblivion. (They typically have onshore H1Bs directing offshore teams.) The Best Buy CEO talks all sorts of DEI crap, while firing people to cut costs. Not very inclusive if you ask me.
- mathverse 2y ago
  Indians,Brazilians,Portuguese,Ukrainians,Russians are possibly the worst clique of discriminative nationalities. You can be 100% assured that you will be driven out of a company/job if more of them take a hold and get into higher up positions. This is not racism. This is a pure fact based on statistical evidence. You will be sold a dream of infinite scalability by hiring "talent" in those countries for cheap and what you will get is usually disfunctional teams riddled with incompetence and nepotism. Even if a job/team is meant to be multicultural,diverse they will find a way how to hire more and more of their countrymen until knowing the language is basically a requirement for the job. I am not even an american and i've seen this happen in Europe as well so I imagine in the US it must be 1000 times worse.

ziaowang 2y ago

Though FAANG offers are usually more attractive than startups (considering pay level and stability), some startups could be more selective since they couldn't afford to hire the wrong candidate.

hnfong 2y ago
It's also a numbers thing. Startups generally hire a couple people, while FAANGs hire in the tens of thousands. (Used to, at least.)
lumost 2y ago
It’s more about calibration. If you interview 100 people at a FAANG, you get an idea of where the bar is. This idea gets calibrated with a panel of interviewers, along with shadow interviewers. At a startup… who knows? I had an interviewer burn up 25 minutes on a 45 minute coding question trying to “hint me” towards the solution I mentioned in the first 2 minutes.

bberenberg 2y ago

I can’t solve everyone’s problems but I can say that I have 1-2 (depending if an outstanding offer is accepted) open principal engineering roles directly working for me. The process will be talking to the recruiter, then two tech interviews, then an interview with me. This will take you a couple weeks to go through because of our team is tiny and we’re fairly busy. Team is 100% remote and async. All the stuff in the JD applies, the one update that we haven’t gotten out yet is that you must know terraform really well. Comp is scaled for engineers outside the USA. Apply at https://moduscreate.com/careers/5984037003/?gh_jid=5984037003 https://moduscreate.com/careers/5984037003/?gh_jid=598403700... and feel free to mention that you saw Boris (me) post this on HN.

MarcelOlsz 2y ago
This looks fantastic. Applied!
shnkr 2y ago
God's work. Simple process but didn't find a matching profile to apply - boring backend principal engineer with 10+ yoe.. will keep an eye though.
- bberenberg 2y ago
  Not sure what you mean by matching profile? The link above should be a direct link to the role I am hiring for.

thaumasiotes 2y ago

> The bar has also been raised significantly. I had an interview recently where I solved the algorithm question very quickly, but didn't refactor/clean up my code perfectly and was rejected. Bearing in mind the implicit comparison to "a few years ago", a few years ago I interviewed with Google, at which point the recruiter told me I'd passed the interview, wished me congratulations (!), told me to expect a job offer, and finally, ~6 weeks later, informed me that while I'd "passed" the interviews, my scores were too low for them to make an offer. It remains a mystery what it might mean to "pass" without actually advancing beyond the threshold you passed.

equity 2y ago
There will be a pool of candidates who "passed", and hiring managers can search through that pool to decide who to take for their team. If there are fewer openings than candidates who "passed" or hiring managers aren't interested in taking someone, then these folks won't get an offer.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  Is it normal to congratulate those people on the fact that you're not offering them a job?

joshuaturner 2y ago

I think a lot of this comes down to AI. In a recent hiring round we experienced multiple candidates using AI tooling to assist them in the technical interviews (remote only company). I expect relationship hires to become more common over the next few years as even more open-discussion focused interview rounds like architecture become lower signal. So with that in mind I'll see you all at ReInvent

rsanek 2y ago
If you're giving remote interviews, your loop should assume candidates can use AI. it's like giving a take home math test that assumes people won't use calculators at this point
- joshuaturner 2y ago
  I disagree. We pretty explicitly ask candidates to not use AI. While it's fine when doing the job the purpose of the interview is to gauge your ability to understand and solve problems, while AI can help you with that you understanding how to do it yourself signals that you'll be able to solve other more complex wider-spanning problems. Just like with a calculator - it's important for candidates to know _why_ something works and be able to demonstrate that as much as them knowing the solution.
  - Toorkit 2y ago
    Oh, if you give it the old "pretty please" then of course no one is going to use AI.
  - randomdata 2y ago
    There is an interesting dichotomy in your interview process. You say you want someone who can solve problems, but then go on to say (perhaps unintentionally; communication is hard) that you only want someone who has already rote-memorized how to solve the particular problems you throw at them, not someone who can figure things out as the problems arise.

smugma 2y ago

As someone with a couple of open (not engineering) recs, I can agree this is the toughest market I’ve ever seen. For both recs, we received many highly qualified candidates with relevant skills, often in a relevant domain. I’ve never seen this before. It’s always been very hard to find a single highly-qualified candidate.

thesuitonym 2y ago
The media seems to think the great resignation has ended, but really it’s just that jobs have dried up. Professionals, especially good ones, are eager to leave their current jobs, but the pool is so small, there’s just nowhere to go. And with so many people looking for new positions, if you’re not highly keyword targeted, you won’t go anywhere.
- dartos 2y ago
  I can’t wait until linkedin charges people to boost resumes a la tinder.
  - thesuitonym 2y ago
    They already sort of do. Every time you apply to a job on LinkedIn, even if you click through to the company's ATS, LinkedIn tries to upsell their premium services, which allegedly promotes your resume. I saw no difference in the applications I submitted during the trial, which I assume is similar to the results folks see with super likes on Tinder.

ericmcer 2y ago

Anecdotal but I felt it was worst during the mass layoffs in late 2022/early 2023. It has been very slowly recovering since then. The late 2020 period was the absolute best time though. I got multiple offers almost instantly, and after I signed on it felt like the org was bloated with engineers just fiddling away on meaningless projects.

wyclif 2y ago
That's always the effect of free money.
sertraline 2y ago
This is not surprising. The companies received grants during covid lockdowns, so they started listing a lot of fake jobs. When the money dried up the layoffs followed, which was an expected outcome. Media does not let people know about the grants and presents everything in such light that it seems like the market is getting absolutely destroyed, while in reality it only slightly declined. The bigger problem are HRs employed by big companies who autoreject every application and take no responsibility for doing this.

bubbleRefuge 2y ago

My observation as well. Going remote makes it harder to switch jobs because of loosing the personal connections and networks that get developed working on site. Going through the front door when applying for opportunities is usually more difficult than the back door. Back door as in getting introduced via your network. As a result, I've learned that a good recruiter is now a necessity because they have those relationships with hiring managers which can put you to the front of the line and also prep you better for the process.

ghaff 2y ago
Essentially post-school every job I’ve been hired for was through strong personal connections. And I certainly feel I don’t develop the same kinds of connections remotely. Maybe some folks who grew up in that of remote environment are better adapted.
obeid 2y ago
I don't mean to sound harsh, but it does sound like front/ backdoor metaphor is code for filtering people by the social biases that form much of the personal connections and networks you mention. The effect of remote work, seems to be leveling the entry point for everyone; an advantage for people who got discriminated against before and a disadvantage for people who enjoyed their privilege for far too long.
- authorfly 2y ago
  The comments above you replied to were saying something different to your interpretation, I believe. They were saying that by going remote (the last 5 years), people haven't formed as many deep connections by legitimate social connections at jobs and their reputation. You could say this is the "good" or "reputation" based way of getting jobs in the back door and it's not all just likeability. So there is less of this kind of back door hiring right. I don't know if this is true or not. But the back door hiring for nepotism or "my brothers girlfriend" is still as ever present, since the connections aren't predicated on real life in person social interactions. Discrimination or disadvantage comes in to neither of these hiring methods innately. Subconscious bias could exist for back door recommendations ofcourse. So if anything, it's not really leveling anything. It just means for increasingly experienced engineers, benefits don't accrue so much when looking for work if remote. If anything these backdoor references could help people (e.g. from poor families) get a shot even despite other innate culture differences (e.g. style of speaking). And nepotistic hires will remain.

rachofsunshine 2y ago

For what it's worth, it is definitely thawing (at least if what we're seeing in our client base is anything to go by), it's just going to take some time for that to work its way through everyone looking for work.

dvsjr 2y ago

2009 recession no work for almost two years tough?

deleted 2y ago
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randomdata 2y ago
Or 1930s Great Depression no work for almost five years tough? I expect most people here won't have a good sense for 2009. While it wasn't great for many industries, for tech it was the "app" boom. You couldn't hardly go outside without someone throwing money at you.

brailsafe 2y ago

Is that the reason you were rejected, or was that just an attribute of what you did && you were rejected? What stage of the interview, what level? I truly don't doubt that's what happened, I've had it happen, but when it did their feedback was (insultingly) not up to their professional standard. I say insultingly because it was an amateurish evaluation of what I did, specifically because it was like the 5th god damn interview by that point and really they should have been looking for more than trivialities like the coding style I chose to use in HackerRank with a visible ticking clock. The reason I ask is just for context; if people are interviewing for Senior roles and being rejected for code formatting problems, something is even more deeply wrong than it seems, since they probably shouldn't be concerning themselves with that _at_all_. If it's possible though that you were rejected for some other reason, but that your code style was the strongest negative apparent signal, that's also worth exploring. In my case, that's a possibility, that they were looking for just one more reason to narrow the funnel, but it can be hard to accept.

david-gpu 2y ago

> I had an interview recently where I solved the algorithm question very quickly, but didn't refactor/clean up my code perfectly and was rejected. It sounds like they intentionally present a simple problem because they are not filtering by who can solve it, but by who writes clean maintainable code. I wish I had thought of that when I was interviewing candidates, because it is a good criterium for a well established organization.