24 ms·

I'm seeing a lot of back in forth in the comments between hiring managers and employees discussing who is more responsible for the current situation, but from t

• SanjayMehta 2y ago
  > The only other way I've seen suggested to signal that I'm a real person with real experience is to know someone in the company who can vouch for me (which I almost never do). The last company where I worked, employee referrals were the preferred mode of hiring. The referring employee would also benefit, on successful completion of the new hire’s first year. You might want to revisit this aspect.
• wodenokoto 2y ago
  My advice is to contact recruitment agencies. HN hates recruiters, especially the cold calling kind on LinkedIn, but it has worked great for me. Every other job of mine has been through a recruitment agency and they have been responsible for the highest pay increases and they have been better to talk to about available budget for the role than the employer
  • asymmetric 2y ago
    Recs on specific agencies?
• deleted 2y ago
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• chamomeal 2y ago
  Sorry about your search, and sorry to be another reply that you’ve already been inundated with, but in my experience job boards are nearly useless. Especially now that every job on LinkedIn has hundreds (or even thousands!!) of applicants. I’m sure indeed/zip recruiter/dice are all similarly flooded. During my last job hunt I applied to nearly 300 jobs. Then I recruiter I met at a tiny JavaScript meetup messaged me about a position, and boom. New job. It’s just one anecdote, but it changed my perspective, that’s for sure. When I’m getting serious about my next hunt I’m just gonna attend tons of meetups and get real active in open source
  • wsintra2022 2y ago
    I think that’s the gold standard for finding engineering (software) and work. Get out into the world by attending meet-ups about technology and start contributing to real world open source projects or volunteer at the many projects looking for devs. It may not be a job overnight but it will keep you busy enough to not stagnate and you will also open yourself to bumping into someone who may be looking for someone at one of the meet ups.
    • ghaff 2y ago
      Whether you consider this "networking" or not, the approach is to know relevant people in whatever way. Code, write, talk to people at events, etc. Ideally before you really need a job though because, as you suggest, it's not an overnight thing.
    • no_wizard 2y ago
      Both this and the OP you responded to are good advice if you aren’t in a situation where you needed a job yesterday. What about situations where you were laid off and can’t really wait months to get a new one?
      • ghaff 2y ago
        The advice is probably to promptly ping obvious connections (which is what I did when I was laid off and it worked out). Failing that, depending on financial situation, either do unpaid work or become a barista.
• hilux 2y ago
  I think that getting a good job nowadays requires having a strong referral. The referral is not sufficient, but unless you have an MIT PhD in Machine Learning, or similarly rare and in-demand credential, it is necessary.
• mock-possum 2y ago
  I am in the exact same situation And I wish I had something encouraging to tell you, but I don’t. I’m extremely broke and getting ghosted on application after application, or turned down months later via robot email. Never any human contact any step of the process. I’m looking at getting into another industry, tbf.
• rmbyrro 2y ago
  be creative in any kind of technical assessment some people think SWE is about "logic". it is, in part, but the "engineering" in software is much more of an art than it is in other branches, like construction the current sota AI is great at logic and terrible in creativity and actual engineering. if the technical assessment is not designed for you to show your creative engineering side, do it yourself, do more than you were asked, think about what would be relevant to that company in terms of engineering creativity and offer that that's the best way I know of showing you're a real engineer, not an LLM operator, it's worked well for me in the job search process good luck!
• balls187 2y ago
  > what should I be doing? The current hiring market mirrors online dating. Swiping right as much as you can (as a man) will get you more matches for sure, but is unlikely to result in a long term relationship. There isn't much you can do. It comes down to two things: luck and timing. I do think there are actions you can take to improve your odds, but you gotta figure out what will work best for you. If those actions were somewhat obvious, I'd imagine thousands of others are doing the same thing. > know someone in the company who can vouch for me It didn't take long to establish myself as a relatively skilled engineer in a discord community specific to a mobile development framework. I was able to help many junior engineers solve issues. If I was looking for a job, that community may have provided me an opportunity to at least get my resume in front of a few hiring managers. Me personally, with all these seemingly out of work programmers who are likely as skilled. or more, I'd look to network with a few of them and do something interesting. Start a programming community that lets engineers self organize and launch a projects. Keep the bar to join very selective much like those dating apps that target VIPs and elite people.
• lumens 2y ago
  As someone who works on the other side of this... if you're getting through 10 phone screens and not getting an offer, something is wrong with the way you're interviewing. You've gotten 10 phone screens, so you can probably double your activity and get to 20. If you're actually going for jobs you're qualified for, 20 screens should net you ~3 offers, if not more. My suggestion: record yourself on your interviews and have friends review the recording and offer critique. You have blind spots you need to address to achieve the outcomes you want.
• whiplash451 2y ago
  Did you get (or asked for) feedback from the interviews you failed? Hiring managers / recruiters are sometimes quite transparent on this front. Ask them if it is possible to re-apply in a few months. Show your resume to friends and colleagues you trust and ask for honest feedback.
  • yosito 2y ago
    Personally, I've just been getting generic rejection responses from no-reply email addresses. There's no way to get feedback. My guess is that they're just sending out mass rejections for anyone except a few candidates they've selected to interview, and the other 1000 applications just get automatically tossed.
    • throwaway173738 2y ago
      I was just hiring for an associate role recently and we got more than 800 applicants within a day, and our recruiter had a short list within a few days. If we gave everyone individualized feedback we wouldn’t do anything else for months. You might need to pay someone to look at the roles you’re applying for and the resumes you’re sending in for the kind of feedback you’re expecting.
      • nextn 2y ago
        If you required applicants to pay a sufficiently high cost to apply you wouldn't get 800 applicants within a day. I want to see a site or ATS that makes it non-free to send an application and non-free to ghost an applicant.
      • hansvm 2y ago
        Did more than a few ask for feedback?
      • yosito 2y ago
        I'm not the OP, but I've paid many people for feedback, and I actually have a very strong resume when a human being looks at it. I suspect that I'm being filtered out automatically because I don't meet the parameters of some automated system, probably on some relatively arbitrary metric set by the recruiter or hiring manager to filter the thousands of applications they receive.
• randomNumber7 2y ago
  If you can't stand out from an LLM then why can't it do your job? Also, not using LLMs might be a red flag. I wouldn't want a dev that is not open to this technology...
  • MrMember 2y ago
    >If you can't stand out from an LLM then why can't it do your job? My job isn't writing resumes and cover letters. > Also, not using LLMs might be a red flag. I wouldn't want a dev that is not open to this technology... lmao this is exactly the issue. There are hiring managers in here saying they're trying to filter out people using LLMs in applications and you're telling me to use LLMs.
  • margalabargala 2y ago
    > Also, not using LLMs might be a red flag. I wouldn't want a dev that is not open to this technology... The person you're replying to is a senior, not junior candidate. For junior devs who are still learning, LLMs are a great force multiplier that help them understand code faster and integrate new things. For senior devs, LLMs are a maybe-optional tool that might save a couple hours per week, on a good week. I would consider extremely heavy LLM use a much larger red flag for a senior level position, than not using them at all.
    • randomNumber7 2y ago
      It is the opposite. Juniors can only solve toy tasks with chatgpt. Someone with experience can first think through the problem. Maybe use chatgpt for some resarch and fresh up your memory first. Then you can break up the problem and let chatgpt implement the stuff instead typing everything. Since you are smart and experience you know what chunks of code it can write (basically nothing new. only stuff you could copy pasta before if you had somehow access to all code in the internet yourself). TLDR: It is way faster to use it. Especially for experienced programmers. Everything else is just ignorant.
    • kelvinjps10 2y ago
      What is consensus at the end, I have heard people say that is good for seniors but for juniors is detrimental.
• ericjmorey 2y ago
  Doesn't seem like your resume or approach in applying to open positions is your problem. It seems like you're not connecting well with the interviewers in some way.
  • jagged-chisel 2y ago
    And how does one know how to connect with interviewers when every individual is different, and when there is no feedback from the interviewer’s side?
    • randomNumber7 2y ago
      Some people are able to do that subconsciously. If your not one of them you should probably learn some basics in how to read body language. Then you should also apply some mirroring. I wouldnt overdo it with body language, but mirroring with spoken language can be quite powerful (and is more stealthy). Normally there are many different ways in our language to express an idea. Try to do it in a way that is natural to your counterpart. Look at what you can infer from the appearance of the interviewer. Maybe you can also find out more about him before the interview. What generation does he belong to? Is he conservative/progressive/whatever? What programming languages is he familiar with? ... Does he look rather old and conservative? - Maybe dont talk about your love for the newest tech hype. Put an emphasis on your good cs fundamentals. Is he a Java programmer? - use the word interface Is he a Haskell programmer? - use the word typeclass Is he a nice guy? - try to be nice Is he not a nice guy? - dont be too nice etc...
• belinder 2y ago
  I was hiring manager for 3 positions about 4 months ago and the amount of fake applications out there was mind boggling to me. I would say 90% were either entirely fake or had the exact same generated ai text. It got so bad that we started only looking at resumes that had a working LinkedIn link. Also after so many bad resumes I started being very forgiving for the ones that didn't fully match the job requirements if they had something in them that made it seem like a real person, e.g. a personal hobby section. I think a lot of people discourage writing that but I argue it makes you stand out in an ocean of fake and copy pasted junk.
  • CalRobert 2y ago
    What if we don’t like linked in? Is it effectively mandatory?
  • Amezarak 2y ago
    Well, that's some handy information. I had no idea any employer would care one whit about my LinkedIn, or that a personal hobby section was considered anything but totally superfluous and irrelevant. I suppose I am supposed to actually fill out my LinkedIn too?
  • 7thpower 2y ago
    What did the working LinkedIn link help validate?
    • shalmanese 2y ago
      That you have a decent number of connections and some of them are mutuals so I know you're a respected part of the software community.
  • hibikir 2y ago
    And that's not even enough: A few weeks ago I had to interview someone who had what appeared to be a realistic profile. Everything that came out of their mouth was from chatGPT It was suspicious, but the ruse became clear when they shared the wrong screen, so we could see his prompt, and how everything we said was being read in. At this point every remote internet checklist has to include checks for humanity, because the percentage of straight out fakes is too high. Even the questions to ask me at the end were GPT provided.
• lethal-radio 2y ago
  Just wanna say keep at it! You’re getting interviews and sometimes it just takes time for the stars to align into an offer.
• a13n 2y ago
  Run LeetCode problems until you can crush the technicals
  • lolinder 2y ago
    A lot of companies are reevaluating the technical interviews because they're too easy to cheat at now unless they're on site on your hardware (or on a physical whiteboard).
• easterncalculus 2y ago
  The idea that the problem is primarily (or even substantially) the fault of employees is laughable. HMs put up all the hoops, and keep immeasurably more power in the process from start to finish.
• fijiaarone 2y ago
  Because adding shit to the pool doesn’t help. The jobs aren’t there, and crapping in an empty pool doesn’t help any more than pissing in a full pool.
• mooreds 2y ago
  > So why should I keep doing what I'm doing when it's getting me nowhere? I'd go the other way, towards more schlepping and less automation[0]. Are you reaching out to anyone in your network and asking if they know anyone who needs your skills? Are you joining communities (online or offline) that match up to your skills and interests? Doing either of these, so that you can be warm intro-ed to hiring managers by someone who knows you (or maybe knows someone who knows you) will typically get you to the front of the line. That's the approach I would take if I were looking today. Too much noise otherwise. 0: Works for startups: https://paulgraham.com/ds.html https://paulgraham.com/ds.html
  • all2 2y ago
    This is generally how I've gotten jobs. People who know people, or gladhanding at an event.
• joe_the_user 2y ago
  It seems like the best strategy is automation for both job-seekers and employers and upshot is awful for everyone. So, the sum individually optimum behaviors might not be optimal for a group. Well, back to the drawing board, humanity.
• klysm 2y ago
  It highly depends on what kind of job you want. What kind of company do you want to work for?
• bane 2y ago
  It's absolute insanity. Something has to give, or we're about to see some big changes in how hiring is done. I don't want to retype my recent experiences, but I have a thread from about 6 weeks ago that goes into my specific details here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42137229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42137229 I was in a good position so I could take my time, but I honestly don't know what I would have done if I had needed a position quickly.
  • austin-cheney 2y ago
    Software should have some universal competency baseline, like a license. If AI resume spamming is that straw that breaks the camel’s back then so be it. The best defense against AI would be a license number that identifies a person uniquely, provides their relevant job history from a database, proves some minimal common competency baseline, and confirms conformance to some ethical norm against known liabilities.
    • ttyprintk 2y ago
      Every certification I have is numbered.
    • robertlagrant 2y ago
      I've often thought that this would be an actually useful use of Blockchain tech.
    • GreenWatermelon 2y ago
      In some industries, unions fill this nieche. Come to think of it, this might be a good way for software unions to get a hold in the US. The Union will have a process to validate the competency if its members, and validate their careers, meanwhile hiring managers who are looking for guaranteed engineering quality will be able to find them, and unemployed engineers will be able to find work quickly, only bye the may benefit from the power of collective bargaining. Kinda like a recruiting agency, but without for-profit motives and the shareholders will be the union members. I don't see any downsides, except dkr the usual "corrupt men on top" problem which plagues any hunan organization, though mandating that leaders have extencive industry experience could slightly mitigate that.
• matheusmoreira 2y ago
  > I have 10+ years of professional software dev experience so I've mostly been looking at senior dev positions. Is the job market just as bad for juniors, people looking to enter the field right now?
  • chamomeal 2y ago
    It’s always hard for juniors, but it’s always possible as well. IMO job boards are almost entirely useless. Going to meetups and making friends in open source communities is the way to go.
    • bloqs 2y ago
      I have found that this is the case for really good people, but if you dont have a degree and dont have much experience or expertise yet then this is a great way to totally destroy your confidence
    • DirkH 2y ago
      It is way worse for juniors now. There was a time where merely reading CtCI printed your job offer at Google right out of school.
  • ghaff 2y ago
    Probably worse from what I understand. Seniors are more specialized but also (hopefully) have a network.
  • throwaway173738 2y ago
    Most likely. I was seeing people with a few years experience willing to accept a fairly junior role. As a result we passed on some people that I would’ve hired and trained in years past.
  • StefanBatory 2y ago
    I'm a junior; even getting internship in my city was impossible. And it's a requirement to graduate. I had many of my peers pay people for signing off that they had an "internship" at some companies.
• Aurornis 2y ago
  > So why should I keep doing what I'm doing when it's getting me nowhere? Why shouldn't I switch to an automated "shotgun" approach that applies me to as many jobs as possible to which I vaguely fit the requirements? I’m in a big semi-private Slack where people have been discussing CS application strategies for a long time (since before ChatGPT). The desperate people usually go through an arc where they try automated applications and embracing LLMs. Their response rate is dismal, but they make up for it with shotgun volume. The catch is that when they finally get a job, it’s usually at a company that sucks. Some place with incompetent hiring managers who can’t tell the difference between LLM slop and a genuine application. Interview processes that leave so much room for LLM cheating that all of your coworkers are going to be LLM jockeys too. So you can try it. You might get something out of it, which is better than nothing. However, if you’re expecting a good job at a good company then it’s not going to deliver what you expect.
  • coldtrait 2y ago
    Where are these places where the interview processes allow for LLM cheating? I'm desperate.
    • evilduck 2y ago
      Unless the place has had 100% turnover in the last two years it sounds a bit dubious. Even some of the worst places to work that I know of haven’t churned through their entire development staff since ChatGPT first released.
  • gunian 2y ago
    [dead]
  • fasa99 2y ago
    This is just the first pass. There are second pass strategies that could improve and are even more insidious: - review your generated CV pre-submission, make changes, do this a lot. Eventually you'll have a training set to fine-tune the model - throw 100-200 CVs at a job and see what sticks. That's your training set for that job. Now you have tuned the hiring manager's preferences. Follow up with your actual CV. Side benefit is it will jam up other candidates. An arms race is afoot
• robotnikman 2y ago
  Makes me wonder if we should just mail in our applications by snail mail at this point.
  • geye1234 2y ago
    I've wondered the same.
  • sdenton4 2y ago
    Or, better yet, literally knocking on doors.
    • cellu 2y ago
      I tried that too e.g. messaging talent recruiter managers on LinkedIn - never got a reply or “accepted” to start chatting
      • GreenWatermelon 2y ago
        No no, literally literally knocking on doors. Go to a company's office and ask of they have a job.
        • ghaff 2y ago
          It depends on the type of job. The receptionist at Google or IBM or wherever is going to give you a URL at best.
• bfung 2y ago
  > I really am interested in the specific job I'm applying for. Are you doing anything that shows and differentiates your interest isn’t the same as all the automated “interest”? Ex: understand deeply some parts of the industry the company is in and how it can be improved w/tech? Or is it just “rust is cool”?
  • blakeburch 2y ago
    I've personally found that even when I do my best to exude interest in the industry/company through custom question responses or the cover letter that auto-rejection is still the most common end result. I'm still amazed that the applicant tracking systems don't provide employers with stats like "time spent on application" or "time spent on website researching". At least this would be a signal towards higher interest. Heck, I'd love a "fave 5" system for employers. Something to flag extreme interest in working for their company. Companies would probably love to have a list of high-intent people to recruit, regardless of their current employment status.
    • BehindBlueEyes 2y ago
      wouldn't poeple just flag everything as their fav 5 and put high numbers of hours not actually spent on the application? unless the system can track all a candidates applications, this seems moot, and if it did track all that yuk no thank you, i don't need more tracking in my life to solve a problem we created artificially. Plus it is probably easy to game for anyone with a minimum of programming skills...
      • blakeburch 2y ago
        The thought process was tracking all candidates (not having a user-submitted number). That tracking is already happening for most marketing analytics. I'm surprised I haven't seen it show up on the job application side. As for the fave 5 idea - I don't see an easy way to game this if it's tied to a single user account. You would only be seen as prioritizing the company to the employer if you're actively prioritizing them. Most people are applying to way more than 5 companies simultaneously and don't know where their application stands for the company. It would be too risky to try and rotate it continuously.
• Clubber 2y ago
  >to signal that I'm a real person with real experience is to know someone in the company who can vouch for me (which I almost never do). You ask your friends/past colleagues if the company they currently work for has any openings. If you've worked hard, solved problems and are good to work with, it's a good way to get further employment.
• ta_1138 2y ago
  Today, the hardest part is to get to said first interview, because we are all flooded with fake resumes. Incomprensible amounts. So what you have to do is not send blind resumes, but get a warm intro from someone with a connection to the company that vouch that interviewing you will not be a total waste of time. Networks have never been more important. Now, if on interview you pass rate is low, it's hard to say what you are doing wrong.
  • josephg 2y ago
    > Now, if on interview you pass rate is low, it's hard to say what you are doing wrong. Yep. But this question has answers. You just don’t know what they are. Ask some friends to help you practice by getting them to give you mock- interviews and get feedback about what you need to do better. If you’re unemployed, you have time. Be resourceful and you should be able to figure out where the problems are. (That said, solving your problems may be much harder - especially if you’re going for senior roles. I have met plenty of people who have 10 years experience who are nowhere near qualified to work as a senior engineer.)
  • harimau777 2y ago
    What do you do if you don't have any way to get a warm intro? People still need to get a job even if they don't have connections.
• cs02rm0 2y ago
  I've been looking for a few months. I've got 20 years of professional dev experience, including in an eye-catching domain and haven't used LLMs in the process either. Since university I have never not been offered the first job I've applied for. For 10 years now I could ring any of the firms working in the niche I've been in and more or less set my rate. I still could, but I'm trying to get out of that niche into the wider world. I've put hundreds of tailored applications in and basically had nothing (literally a few interviews with Canonical, which is a complete car crash of a process and an HR screening call for a role on half my previous income where she said they were struggling with the number of applications, that I didn't hear back from). It's an absolute bloodbath out there. I regret I don't have any answers, but good luck with your search.
  • noen 2y ago
    Similar story here. 20+ years experience in leading dev, pm, and UX teams. Launched multiple 0-1 market leading products, worked with dozens of Fortune 500s. Applied to more than a hundred positions - one phone screen and one interview. Then I just went to my large network and within a week I have multiple opportunities - companies creating positions so they can hire me. Spoke to a number of colleagues in recruiting and who are hiring for their teams - the number of ghost jobs, and frozen but posted positions is staggering. Something is fundamentally broken in the hiring world today.
    • kubb 2y ago
      If this is a true story, then it means there’s no point in applying at all. You should just go full LinkedIn, and networking, preferably when you still have a job. I’m not gonna do that so I’ll just keep my job until layoff, and then panic, automate my applications and belatedly start connecting.
      • ghaff 2y ago
        I think that's more or less true. Outside of school (one of which was way back in spray and pray physical letter days), my few jobs have always been through personal connections. Any online applications pretty much resulted in nada.
• cylemons 2y ago
  Is going to the company in person an option?
• newsclues 2y ago
  Networking to make contact that can help you get past the HR filter is the new skill set that is essential not job application automation. Meet people and form connections.
  • BehindBlueEyes 2y ago
    agreed, last application i sent, i had an informational with the hiring manager. They told me to email them my resume in addition to the official submission process so they can tell HR to find and flag my application for interview. I didn't get the job, or even an interview despite that and the hiring manager never bothered to tell me why. (one of their direct reports told me its because i was vastly overqualified) I feel stuck in a limbo where my title doesn't reflect the seniority i operate at so i'm not getting interview for senior roles based on automated filters i guess, but jobs i do get interviews for, I was told no because because i was overqualified for the role more than once. This includes being overqualified for the FTE equivalent of my current job as a contractor in the same company and org. But there's no roles opening at the seniority level they'd hire me at and I can't just rage quit on a 6 figure salary just because I should be making double even as a junior as an FTE by now. So they won't hire me for the work I already do but have no problem keeping me on for half the pay as a contractor. But at least I have a job?