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I generally tend to interview every year to see what's out there in the world (sometimes I find something worth switching for, other times not). I'm not even lo

• sanufar 8mo ago
  In your experience, what’s the best way to increase signal? I feel as though a lot of devs struggle with the initial process of getting past screening, drawing attention to projects, etc.
  • Aurornis 8mo ago
    Not the parent commenter but I've performed a lot of resume reviews for people and also done a lot of hiring. Most resumes are not very good. Beyond the obvious problems like typos, there is a lot of bad advice on the internet that turns resumes into useless noise. Screen a lot of resumes and you'll get tired of seeing "Boosted revenue by 23% by decreasing deploy times by 64%." This communicates nothing useful and we all know that revenue going up 23% YoY was not attributable to this single programmer doing anything at all. Often I'll get candidates into interviews and they light up telling me about impressive things they did at a past job with enough detail to convince me they know the subject, but their resumes are garbage because they've followed too many influencers. So try to work on your resume first. Try different resumes. Rewrite it and see what makes interviewers take notice and what they ignore. The most common mistake is to write a resume once and then spam it to 100 jobs. I know it's not fun to change the resume or invest time into applying for a job that may not respond, but you know what else isn't fun? Applying to 100 jobs and not getting any responses because every hiring manager has 20 tailored resumes in their inbox ahead of yours. Having a simple but clear LinkedIn profile helps. Many scoff at this, but it works. You don't have to read LinkedIn's social media feed or do anything with the site. Just set it up and leave it for them to find. GitHub portfolios and other things have low relative value at most companies. There are some exceptions where someone will look at it and it might tip the balance in your favor, but it's a small optimization. You need to be perfect the resume first, get a LinkedIn that looks decent second, and only then think about the ancillary things.
    • Gigachad 8mo ago
      At least in my experience, applying at jobs online has been entirely useless for the last 5 years. No company ever contacts you after using the online application forms. And the only way I’ve got interviews is from recruiters contacting me.
      • robryan 8mo ago
        My experience recently was something like 2/3 from referrals (the third I think will eventually get back to me but way too slow), and something like 3/10 from cold applications. Obviously big differences depending on location and experience but I was pleasantly surprised that some of the cold applications went somewhere.
      • jdwithit 8mo ago
        As someone applying right now I agree. I think I've had one company out of dozens get back to me on a cold application this year. Every contact that has led to an interview was from being referred in by a current employee, or a LinkedIn recruiter reaching out to me about a job. I assume the application forms get spammed with hundreds if not thousands of applicants. It's hard to blame someone for not wanting to sift through all that muck when there's already a stream of vetted candidates coming in from their recruiter. Sucks for the job seekers, though. I'm putting more time into cleaning up my LinkedIn profile since that's been my most reliable route into hiring pipelines (other than referrals and networking).
        • Gigachad 8mo ago
          I assume online forms are spammed with thousands of AI generated resumes now. The only reason I apply is it seems to flag your account as active which triggers recruiters to contact me.
    • ryandrake 8mo ago
      > Screen a lot of resumes and you'll get tired of seeing "Boosted revenue by 23% by decreasing deploy times by 64%." This communicates nothing useful and we all know that revenue going up 23% YoY was not attributable to this single programmer doing anything at all. This is the "quantify everything" mantra career coaches have been repeating for decades. As the story goes, no company is going to care that you refactored the FooBar library in order to make bugs in the DingDang module easier to fix. You have to only write down things that moved some quantifiable business needle like revenue or signups, even if the link to that needle is tenuous. Obviously, this ends up penalizing hard working, talented devs who don't happen to be working in areas where wins are easily quantifiable.
• overfeed 8mo ago
  > I'm not even looking very hard but have had 4 interviews in the last month. How many offers did you receive? Companies have also adopted your strategy: interviewing candidates "to see what's out there" - there's a job I interviewed for that's still open after 10 months.
  • tylervigen 8mo ago
    What a time to be alive: Companies post roles that don't exist to interview candidates who don't plan to switch.
    • rimmontrieu 8mo ago
      and waste everyone time
  • Aurornis 8mo ago
    > Companies have also adopted your strategy: interviewing candidates "to see what's out there" - there's a job I've interviewed for that's still open after 10 months When I was doing a lot of hiring we wouldn't take the job posting down until we were done hiring people with that title. It made a couple people furious because they assumed we were going to take the job posting down when we hired someone and then re-post a new listing for the next person. One guy was even stalking LinkedIn to try to identify who was hired, without realizing that many engineers don't update their LinkedIn. Got some angry e-mails. There are some scary applicants out there. Some times a specific job opening needs to stay open for a long time to hire the right person, though. I can recall some specific job listings we had open for years because none of the people we interviewed really had the specific experience we needed (though many falsely claimed it in their applications, right until we began asking questions)
    • fullofideas 8mo ago
      Honest question. Were these super specialized roles with such specific skill requirements that it took such a long time to find the right person? Looking back, do you think the team would have been better off hiring someone who came close enough, and supporting them to learn on the job?
• Aurornis 8mo ago
  > Honestly, a lot of senior devs lose this ability over time. They get comfortable with the idea that as a very senior hire you don't have to do all that annoying stuff anymore. A few years ago, when interest rates were 0% and companies were hiring at an unsustainable rate, I got a lot of criticism for cautioning engineers against non-coding roles. I talked to a lot of people who dreamed of moving into pure architect roles where they advised teams of more junior engineers about what to build, but didn't get involved with building or operating anything. I haven't kept up with everyone but a lot of the people I know who went that route are struggling now. The work is good until a company decides to operate with leaner teams and keeps the people committing code. The real difficulties start when they have to interview at other companies after not writing much code for 3 years. I'm in a big Slack for career development where it's common for "Architect" and "Principal Engineer" titled people to be venting about how they can't get past the first round of interviews (before coding challenges!) because they're trying to sell themselves as architects without realizing that companies want hands-on builders now.
  • Karrot_Kream 8mo ago
    Yes when I saw this happen during the post COVID boom I was honestly shocked. Engineers I knew who were fairly senior thought that they could build the rest of their career in just boxes and arrows on a board. The whole thing just made me really dislike other Principal engineers. I left to a startup where I write code and design architecture. I even had a former coworker tell me "wow you're willing to do stuff like that at this point in your career?"
  • afavour 8mo ago
    > The work is good until a company decides to operate with leaner teams and keeps the people committing code. I'm no AI booster but I think this is exact scenario where AI-driven development is going to allow those non-coding developers to shine. They still remember how code works (and have probably still done PR review from time to time) so they're well placed to write planning documents for an AI agent and verify its output.
  • __turbobrew__ 8mo ago
    If Jeff Dean still codes, so can I.
• ambicapter 8mo ago
  Shipping is only hard when you have to deal with all the loose ends "builders" leave lying around.
  • Rapzid 8mo ago
    Shippers gonna ship.
  • data-ottawa 8mo ago
    To provide a different framing, I’m more of a builder and I’m happy to maintain too. What I’m not happy with, and have left jobs over, is being put into a box or becoming overly siloed. Large companies tend to over specialize and that’s where I see the “I’m a builder” types fall apart. That takes away agency, lowers skills, and removes variety from work. That’s when it stops being fun to me. I would hope most people with the builder architype are otherwise fine to keep building and maintaining.
  • truncate 8mo ago
    There is famous term for those: Tactical Tornados https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33394287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33394287
    • Sharlin 8mo ago
      From 2022. Funny that soon after that we figured out how to automate the Tactical Tornado programmer and collectively decided that they're the best thing ever and nobody needs other kinds of devs anymore.
• Forgeties79 8mo ago
  Hopefully it’s not too much like 2008 and we end up with another huge surge in unpaid internships
• flatline 8mo ago
  I, too, am able to get interviews. The last time I made a serious search was in 2022-23, and companies were clearly eager to hire at competitive rates. This past fall, they were not. My salary requirements stopped at least two interview processes when the question was raised. In other cases it was not clear that the company was serious about moving forward with hiring for the position at all. A three month search ultimately came up dry, which is fine because I'm currently employed, but I do not think the hiring landscape is promising at all right now.
• SirensOfTitan 8mo ago
  I don’t see this reality in the style of interview being performed at all. Everyone has seemingly adopted the FAANG playbook for interviewing that doesn’t really select for people who like getting their hands dirty and building. These kinds of interviews are compliance interviews: they’re for people who will put in the work to just pass the test. There are so many interviews I’ve been in where if I don’t write the perfect solution on the first try, I’ll get failed on the interview. More than ever, I’m seeing interviewers interrupt me during systems or coding interviews before I have a chance to dig in. I’ve always seen a little bit of this, but it seems like the bar is tightening, not on skill, but on your ability to regurgitate the exact solution the interviewer has in mind. In the past I’ve always cold applied places and only occasionally leaned on relationships. Now I’m only doing the latter. Interviewees are asked to risk asymmetrically compared to employers.
• Xenoamorphous 8mo ago
  > I'm very much a "builder" type dev that has more fun going from 0-v1 than maintaining and expanding scalable, large systems. Most prefer a greenfield project.
  • mmcnl 8mo ago
    I don't know, the majority of my colleagues have no idea how to do anything in a greenfield environment. They need guardrails.
  • deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  • icedchai 8mo ago
    My best projects have all been greenfield. The worst were a few years old but required tons of maintenance unrelated to the core product. Example: one place built their own ORM. Twice.
• layer8 8mo ago
  > I'm very much a "builder" type dev that has more fun going from 0-v1 than maintaining and expanding scalable, large systems. Maintaining and expanding is more challenging, which is why I’ve grown to prefer that. Greenfield and then leaving is too easy, you don’t learn the actually valuable lessons. As experience shows that projects won’t stay in the nice greenfield world, building them can feel like doing illusory work — you know the real challenges are yet to come.
  • gtowey 8mo ago
    Yup. You learn the most valuable information from watching how things break and then fixing them. It's kind of like when the FAA does crash investigation -- a stunning amount of engineering and process insights have been generated by such work to the benefit of all of us.
    • toomuchtodo 8mo ago
      “What kind of role are you looking for?” “Technologist flavor of NTSB investigator.”
      • hn_go_brrrrr 8mo ago
        Sounds amazing.
      • eitally 8mo ago
        There was a two year period around 2011-2013 where I experimented with my dev team. We were being "forced" to migrate a legacy enterprise system from .Net/MSSQL to Java/PostgreSQL with replace the front end with a modern, reactive web interface. Only two of the existing developers had Java experience, and both were conveniently senior engineers in two different offices and running their own discrete sub-teams. One of the guys had a very strong opinion that the ideal architecture was something as abstracted and object oriented as possible with single function classes, etc. I let him run with that. The other guy got frustrated with his sub-team's inability to write code to spec in a language they'd never used before and where they were trying to build some new features they didn't clearly understand. He developed a strong feeling that TDD was the most efficient path forward: he owns the PRD and design, so he just created test stubs and told the remote team to "just write code that passes the test" even if they didn't understand the function of the block. So, after a few months where did we end up: 1. The "abstract everything" architect's team had an extremely fragile and impossible to maintain codebase because it was impossible for any outsider to tell what was going on. 2. The "just pass the damn tests" guy had a team that had quickly ramped on a new language and they had a codebase that was incomplete (because they were building it like a Lego project) but that everyone could understand because the code blocks generally stood on their own. What was the next step: to shut down the guy who abstracted everything and force him to drive a quick & dirty rewrite that would be more maintainable, and to also start a major refactoring of the "Lego" team's code because it was so fragmented that it also was fragile and unsuited for production. I saw this as a terrific learning experience for all involved and I was able to get away with it because the stakes were pretty low and we had time to experiment (part of the ultimate objective was upskilling the team), but the more important lessons were these: 1. Docs matter. Take the time to write clear & detailed specs first because you'll be forced to think of edge cases and functionality that you didn't originally, and it provides a basis for system design, too. 2. Architecture & design matter. Adhering too close to any single paradigm is probably a mistake, but it takes experience on the team to understand where the compromises are and make the best decision for that system. That second point will not stop being true with the advent of agentic assisted software development. Like others have said, my expectation in the job market is that pay will continue to be depressed for junior hires as employers reset expectations and generally just want folks who can instruct fleets of agents to do the actual coding. Senior staff will become increasingly critical and their jobs will be painful and difficult, because it'll be assumed they can (and will be willing to) do design & code reviews of artifacts originated by agents. What I am going to be most interested in is what happens in the SRE/Sysadmin world over the next few years as more AI-generated code hits prod in organizations that don't have adequate review & oversight functions.
• atherton94027 8mo ago
  > I'm not even looking very hard but have had 4 interviews in the last month. Did you get any offers yet? It seems the issue is not lack of interviews but lack of offers. Many companies are looking for a goldilocks candidate and are happy to pass on anything that doesn't match their ideal candidate
  • jdwithit 8mo ago
    I got laid off at the end of last year and am currently interviewing for Staff+ DevOps/Platform Engineer type roles. I definitely feel this. I've had a decent flow of recruiter inquiries and had multiple companies go 2-3 rounds of interviews deep with me (not counting the initial "do you have a pulse" recruiter screen calls). Then the communication always seems to dry up and I'm left to wonder what box I failed to check on their hiring rubric. Semi related, holy hell do companies have a lot of interview rounds these days. It seems pretty standard to spread 5-6 Teams calls over the course of a month. I get that these are high salary, high impact roles and you want to get it right. But this feels really excessive. And I'm not talking about FAANG tech giants here. It's everyone, from startups to random midsize insurance companies.
    • xmcp123 8mo ago
      I just had back to back round 6 interviews. Both companies have 8 rounds. And yes, not FAANG.
  • ghaff 8mo ago
    And a lot of it is networks as opposed to applying to a job position. My last position--that I had for many years--was reaching out to someone knew for not even a posted position and having one created for me.
• cucumber3732842 8mo ago
  >I generally tend to interview every year to see what's out there in the world (sometimes I find something worth switching for, other times not). I'm not even looking very hard but have had 4 interviews in the last month. You've been interviewing forever. You're the well practiced pickup artist of job searching. Of course you'll be getting the call backs over the other 1000 applicants who don't have the same experience level applying. You "just know" how to read between the lines and tailor a resume, whip up a cover letter, etc whereas they're making mistakes.
  • quectophoton 8mo ago
    And even then, getting interviews is one thing, but getting offers is something completely different. And there's also the advantage of having a current job, instead of an increasingly larger jobless gap that not only decreases your chances over time, but also contributes to the cycle of "less chance -> wider gap -> increased anxiety -> less chance". Fumble the first few months due to a combination of a lack of interviewing practice, and of job postings that never intended to hire anyway or that are looking for someone that checks literally all their shopping list of boxes, all while still dragging you for a 4-8 journey, and suddenly your position is not that good anymore.
• ta9000 8mo ago
  Interviews are easy, offers are hard.
• kitsune1 8mo ago
  [dead]
• mancerayder 8mo ago
  >I generally tend to interview every year to see what's out there in the world (sometimes I find something worth switching for, other times not). I'm not even looking very hard but have had 4 interviews in the last month. The Pick-Up Artist's Guide to Tech Interviewing, you should be writing. The first 100 subscribers get a 50% off discount the month of March, you should be announcing on LinkedIn and Tiktok, and making passive income. The rest of us experienced people with proven track records have to learn algorithms on the weekends despite having white hair.
• eucyclos 8mo ago
  When I was in corporate I'd talk about cover your ass mode and get'er done mode. And while realistically I know both are necessary, I was always annoyed at the need to have a cya mode. I get a bit of schadenfreude from the thougt of the market being harder for the people who don't seem to have a get'er done mode, and a bit of his at the thought it might be because there's less concern over whom to bother if something needs to be fixed later.
• b3ing 8mo ago
  Interviews are easy to get, going through 4-8 rounds and making it through is not.
• maldev 8mo ago
  Seeing a lot of the same. Never studied leetcode and didn't work at leetcode companies. I could do them, I passed AWS and Microsoft cloud at L5 levels with no prep, but never was my strong suit. But I ship, and I can play politics very well. Especially in crusty organizations. Lots of callbacks, very hot market. My friends who are "book smart" and leetcode geniuses are struggling. They're my friends, but they come off a bit "off" at first glance, the stereotypical nerd vibe. They're all really struggling since they can't sell themselves properly and lack the interpersonal skills.
• yieldcrv 8mo ago
  interviews aren't the problem, you know full well that "getting a call back" means nothing in this space, but the insane and unresolved technical round process and sure, lots of people can't get a call back too, but starting the process means nothing should say how many offers did you get, that's a better way to normalize it