[HN Gopher] Finding a new software developer job
___________________________________________________________________
Finding a new software developer job
Author : Tomte
Score : 179 points
Date : 2024-02-11 19:18 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (henrikwarne.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (henrikwarne.com)
| arter4 wrote:
| >For a typical job there were four or five interviews: an initial
| interview with a recruiter, an interview with a hiring manager,
| one or two technical interviews (either live coding, or going
| through a take-home assignment). There could also be an interview
| with a product manager, and/or one with a CTO or founder. All in
| all, quite a time commitment.
|
| This is not news at this point, but it is pretty crazy.
| leosanchez wrote:
| At this point he might as well have an interview with the
| Janitor the too
| sunsunsunsun wrote:
| We have lost candidates at my company which we had pretty much
| already decided were a fit after 1-2 interviews but we're still
| forced to go through the rigmarole of these extra interviews
| over several weeks. It's not just crazy it's also a waste of
| time and resources.
| brailsafe wrote:
| I've lost out on numerous jobs after the 5 interview mark,
| often only receiving an automated "thanks for your interest".
| In one case it was multiple consecutive shorter interviews
| with random people on the team, after a take home assignment,
| etc.. it's incredibly defeating.
| mgaunard wrote:
| Now think about being the people doing the recruiting, offering
| to 1% of the candidates they interview and still failing 30% of
| them during their trial period.
|
| Hiring is a huge time sink for all people involved. The best
| people are hard to find and the best jobs are hard to get.
| arter4 wrote:
| Sure but do you actually need the absolute best people
| around? An average company probably doesn't need exceptional
| developers. If you're not a tech company and you don't have
| an extremely challenging setup, your survival as a company
| doesn't rely on exceptional IT skills. You can do a lot with
| less than 10 virtual machines, any decent web app framework
| (Spring? Laravel?), and a version control system. Even
| apparently insane requirements are entirely reasonable: 100
| thousands transactions per day is... 1 TPS. Make that 10 TPS
| to adjust for peaks. Unless you're doing extremely complex
| queries, you can definitely handle 10 TPS with reasonably
| limited resources.
|
| Meanwhile, cargo culting and FOMO leads companies to adopt
| tech stacks, interview styles,... that make sense for FAANGs
| and other unicorns, but not for your average setup.
| mgaunard wrote:
| A business only makes sense if they're aiming to be better
| than others at a specific angle.
|
| They need to get the very best for their particular thing
| that makes them different.
|
| Other roles obviously don't matter as much.
| arter4 wrote:
| Indeed. For tech companies and a few non-tech companies
| but with a strong tech environment (think HFT), IT is
| where you gain an edge on your competitors. Everywhere
| else, you win customers because of better prices,
| negotiating nice deals with suppliers, great salespeople
| and a good SEO presence, and so on, not because you use
| the latest Kubernetes version that finally introduces
| support for that sweet annotation you were looking for,
| or because you use Quarkus instead of Spring (or
| whatever).
| mlhpdx wrote:
| > Sure but do you actually need the absolute best people
| around?
|
| No. You need a great _combination_ of people. Over my
| career I have seen teams assembled with "the best" folks to
| great fanfare an expense. Then, over and over they are
| schooled by a team that works great together. If there is
| one lesson for companies to learn in hiring/staffing/team
| building it's this - focus on the team and the team's
| results.
|
| Yes, there are exceptions.
| stefan_ wrote:
| In my experience they could reliably cut out the recruiter and
| hiring manager interviews.
| jedberg wrote:
| The hiring manager is for you, not them. It's to make sure
| you actually want to work for that person.
|
| And usually HR is the one who is getting your comp and other
| requirements so again mostly for you.
| esafak wrote:
| You don't want to interview your hiring manager??
| sys_64738 wrote:
| How has that worked out for you not knowing anything about
| the manager you'll report to?
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| That's not crazy. Some of these are probably what 30 minutes?
| Tech interviews 60 mins? So what, five hours?
|
| Remember when on-site interviews meant an hour total commute
| plus say six hours of total interview plus lunch event. Some
| high demand companies put candidates through more than one
| round of that. Not to mention if you were flying from out of
| town... I remember a friend who interviewed with Google and got
| stuck in SF for three weeks due to snow storms on the east
| coast and got fired from Accenture as a result.
|
| Compared to this four-six hours scheduled at your leisure seems
| great, even if fragmented over a few days
| yardstick wrote:
| Hope they got the Google job then??
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| He did not.
| Clubber wrote:
| I remember when on-site interviews were an hour and that was
| it. All this stuff companies do now is insane. If a person
| isn't performant, you'll know within 30 days, but you'll
| never know by interviewing them.
|
| I haven't had to cold interview in 20+ years. I hope I never
| have to based on how it works now. I get all my jobs from
| previous colleagues. Companies are closing the door to a lot
| of great talent based on this silliness, but they'll never
| learn.
| eloisant wrote:
| I interviewed at Google nearly 15 years ago and it was
| already phone screen + a marathon of on-site interviews.
| Maybe 4 in a row.
| khokhol wrote:
| The problem is companies are having people run the
| gauntlet -- or in any case displaying a cavalier attitude
| about milking folks for their time and patience --
| despite not offering anything comparable (in terms of
| intrinsic attractiveness of the role or compensation) to
| what FAANG-tier companies do. On top of flaky (or flakier
| than the used to be), sometimes weird even,
| communications, etc.
| askonomm wrote:
| Most companies are not Google however. ~10 years ago when
| I applied for jobs in small-to-medium non-FAANG companies
| it was really just a 1hr onsite at most.
| Clubber wrote:
| Ya Google kinda pioneered that. It helps that Google
| makes millionaires out of many of its employees over 15
| years. Would you go through that process for say Baskin
| and Robbins corporate?
| lazide wrote:
| Sometimes you'll know during interviews. A long time ago, I
| interviewed someone who claimed something like 5+ years of
| Java development, and literally couldn't write:
|
| class Foo {
|
| }
|
| On the whiteboard.
|
| In any context.
|
| That one saved us a lot of time.
|
| It wasn't some weird out of context thing either, he just
| literally didn't know how to write Java at all. Even
| approximately.
| Clubber wrote:
| Yes, but you knew that within 1 hour. It (hopefully)
| didn't take you 6 hours to realize this person was a dud.
| Klonoar wrote:
| I hate the modern interview loop as much as the next
| person, but from a business perspective why would you want
| to risk 30 days of nothing vs a few extra hours to verify?
|
| We should fix the modern interview loop (very hard) but the
| idea we'd ever go back to one hour is kind of out there.
| Clubber wrote:
| That is making the assumption that any time spent over
| the traditional 1 hour helps you confirm whether the
| candidate is performant or not. I dispute that assumption
| and figure any time outside of that initial hour makes a
| hiring mistake that much more expensive.
|
| Calculate it this way. I can spend 3x 1 hour (3 people
| interviewing a candidate for 1 hour) and have a 60%
| chance of hiring a performant person. I could also spend
| 3x 6 hours and have about the same chance. When that 40%
| non-performant candidate shows up and I have to repeat
| the hiring cycle, It's significantly less expensive in
| both labor costs and opportunity costs for the 3x1
| interview style than the 3x6 interview style.
|
| This doesn't take into account all the talent that has no
| need or interest to go through a 3x6 interview process (I
| am one of them).
|
| >the idea we'd ever go back to one hour is kind of out
| there.
|
| Ya like I said, the industry just kinda does what it
| does, complains about not being able to find talent, and
| will never learn.
| Klonoar wrote:
| _> I dispute that assumption and figure any time outside
| of that initial hour makes a hiring mistake that much
| more expensive._
|
| Okay, sure - dispute it if you want. It doesn't change
| the fact that the industry seemingly collectively decided
| that 1 hour isn't a sufficient amount of time to gauge
| fit/effectiveness/etc.
|
| My point to you is that given the above, you have to make
| a choice. Spending the extra few hours gives you some
| hopeful assurance of what you're getting.
|
| I once again will note it's not a _good_ system, but
| there is to date seemingly no widely agreed upon good
| system.
| sgustard wrote:
| Microsoft in the early 90s was a half day of onsite
| interviews with 5 or 6 people, plus lunch. And this was for
| a summer internship.
| arter4 wrote:
| It is crazy because it dilutes the interview experience and
| you never know when it's going to end and when they're going
| to decide (and actually tell you).
|
| And why should you talk to all those people? Talk to the tech
| folks, then to the CTO, then the founder, then what, the VC
| investors, the whole board? Can the CTO not describe the
| company vision and how IT fits in that picture? It does smell
| of a lack of vision or an inability to delegate.
| nradov wrote:
| It's largely a way to dilute responsibility and spread
| blame. If a new hire turns out to be a failure then it's
| tough to point the finger at any one interviewer since they
| were all fooled. This type of diffused decision making
| process is typically instituted by the careerists at large
| organizations where being held accountable for any major
| failure will derail your chances of promotion.
| itsautomatisch wrote:
| Most interview loops aren't just 4-6 hours, though. A lot of
| times the virtual on-sites are 5+ hours alone, and then you
| still usually have 2-4 stages of scattered interviews before
| you even get there. It's also not an efficient way to figure
| out if both sides are a "good fit" because you're basically
| doing a whirlwind tour of video chats with people you most
| likely won't work with. Even worse, the entire interview
| process itself can take over a month or two depending on the
| company, making it hard to stay engaged the entire period,
| especially if you're interviewing for more than one place
| (which I assume most job-seekers are).
| eikenberry wrote:
| 5-6 hours is about right on the low end, but on the high end
| you double the hours interviewing and add up to 30-40 hours
| of work for the take homework. It varies _a lot_. The average
| seem to be around the 12-20 hours with homework or 5-10
| without.
|
| Personally I still prefer the version with a take home
| project, even if longer, as I don't like performative
| programming.
| LeafItAlone wrote:
| > I remember a friend who interviewed with Google and got
| stuck in SF for three weeks due to snow storms on the east
| coast
|
| This is literally unbelievable. I cannot remember a time when
| the east coast was inaccessible for three weeks...
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| It probably wouldn't have saved his job to reach any random
| spot on the east coast, so you don't have to think of a
| time when it was _all_ inaccessible.
| LeafItAlone wrote:
| Do you think that the parent I was responding to didn't
| understand my intent? Did you really think I meant any
| random location on the east coast?
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Yes, because otherwise it doesn't seem like an outlandish
| enough scenario to justify literally saying you don't
| believe him. Hurricane Sandy was the first thing that
| sprang to my mind, but there have been plenty of major
| travel disruptions over the years, and I wouldn't expect
| to hear every time some smaller city was unreachable from
| California.
| LeafItAlone wrote:
| Given their response above, they figured out my intention
| even without being super pedantic.
| moron4hire wrote:
| There was a year (maybe 2012? I was in Philadelphia at the
| time) where we had back to back snow storms of more than
| 12" accumulation, about a week and a half apart. It came at
| a bad time of poor investment in snow clearing equipment
| and services, so many places had done no cleanup of the
| first storm before the second one hit. I don't know how the
| airports faired, but the roads were a deathtrap for weeks.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| Snowpocalypse/snowmageddon. 2010
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_5%E2%80%936,_2010_
| N...
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_25%E2%80%9327,_201
| 0...
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_25%E2%80%9327,_201
| 0...
|
| Two back to back storms, there was about 12 hour window
| where you could get in or out. This poor guy was supposed
| to fly back during the first, got pushed to a flight during
| the second, and then the pile-on of rebookings pushed him
| further. I don't remember if he got trapped due to the
| third storm too.
|
| It wasn't completely cut off. During the first storm, I got
| head notice of the next one and rebooked my flight out of
| the east coast to be one day earlier, and threaded the
| needle by politely asking customer service. I was in and
| out of the east coast for a week.
|
| Anyways, Some cities on the east coast are less prepared
| than others for this sort of thing.
| LeafItAlone wrote:
| I'm familiar with travel in that storm. It sounds like
| they didn't really make an effort. They _didn't_ get
| back, which is different from they _couldn't_ get back.
| Which is probably why they got fired.
|
| Overall, though, it doesn't change your original point
| about interviews, and I didn't really need to take us on
| this tangent.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I remember a friend who interviewed with Google and got
| stuck in SF for three weeks due to snow storms on the east
| coast and got fired from Accenture as a result.
|
| It takes less than one week to travel across the country by
| road. There's a whole system of Greyhound buses that serve
| exactly this purpose. How is it possible to get stuck for
| three weeks?
|
| https://www.greyhound.com/bus-routes/san-francisco-ca-new-
| yo... notes that it takes 76 hours and costs $300.
| eloisant wrote:
| You probably don't know it's going take more than a week
| right away. You hope you can fly the next day, then the
| next, etc...
| Klonoar wrote:
| As someone who had this happen to them but in London:
| yeah, this is how it goes.
|
| Once flights resume it's a thundering herd problem of
| annoying proportions too.
| khokhol wrote:
| _So what, five hours?_
|
| Add in the 6-hour take home (which companies delusionally
| believe will take 2 hours, despite being often inadequately
| scoped or otherwise poorly presented; while quite often
| expecting a nitpick-proof solution); and all the random
| delays, and other hoops - and the none-too-occasional
| ghosting (even at the very end of the process) -
|
| Yup, it adds up.
| hansvm wrote:
| It's a long day for sure, but honestly I don't really mind it
| as a candidate, and that boils down to a few reasons
|
| (1) The time cost isn't as high as it seems. If I get as far as
| a phone screen I'm getting an offer, nearly guaranteed. The
| flow chart then looks like (a) if I don't get a phone screen,
| that awful process is no worse than the status quo, (b) if I
| do, I just find out in the phone screen if the battery of
| interviews has high latency (an 8hr day is fine, 8hrs over 2
| months greatly complicates a job search) and drop out early the
| 20% of the time that happens, and (c) from there I have an 8hr
| day to a guaranteed job. Each offer then costs roughly
| 0.95/0.8~1.2 full interview processes, or 1.2x 4-8 hours.
|
| (2) That time cost is a bit annoying when it comes to competing
| offers (a single solid day isn't crazily expensive when you're
| about to get a 40% pay boost, but 5 solid days for a job search
| is ... 5x as expensive ... fine, but not ideal, and hard when
| you have finite vacation days). Somewhere around 1/2 of
| employers don't actually seem to care about producing proof of
| competing offers though. If they make an offer, you counter
| that you're worth some fixed XYZ instead (ideally doing enough
| research to choose the levers they're most likely to
| accommodate) and will sign immediately if they can make that
| happen, they'll go above and beyond to agree to your counter-
| offer. It's a waste of time for the whole industry to require
| counter-offers in the cases where everyone knows what you're
| worth (admittedly, when that's not the case, counter-offers are
| an unfortunate necessity to prove your worth).
|
| (3) The average tech interview is 10-20min solving the techno-
| babble and 30-50 probing what they know about the company and
| the team. New companies are very risky, and they work fairly
| hard to keep damning evidence out of the face of the public.
| You can mitigate a lot of risk by background-checking the
| executive team, but a present-day boots-on-the-ground view of
| things, ideally with the several overlapping/competing views
| you get from multiple team members, allows you to bounce out of
| problem situations early.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Seems like a very personal and fortunate take depending on
| what you do or when in time that experience is based on, not
| that it's irrelevant, just far from generalizable, especially
| right now.
|
| Companies are looking for almost any reason to turn someone
| away, so a guaranteed offer coming from a phone screen, or
| for that matter even getting a phone screen, is either
| exaggerated, you're consistently incredible, or/and you're
| consistently incredible and in a niche with very little
| competition and big names on the CV.
|
| Even the author of the article admits they got quite lucky
| with the low numbers they experienced before getting an
| offer. I don't mean to be dismissive, but the markets are
| quite varying and intensely either saturated, competitive,
| or/and sparse right now, depnding on which market you're in
| and what your CV or skills look like, to the point where as a
| frontend dev I'm considering just switching to knitting or
| something more lucrative
| dt3ft wrote:
| Did I misread or did you end up taking a remote job (specializing
| in crypto, company based in Zug, CH) and you're based in
| Stockholm?
| wildrhythms wrote:
| That's one of those questions I simply could not answer on the
| spot. My brain would immediately go into needing to know how
| long it takes on average to connect, why it takes so long, if
| the user's connection is bad, if we could load the content from
| the connection async, and so on...
| friggeri wrote:
| In my experience, the most effective way to minimize the odds of
| a company never responding is to identify someone who works at
| that company who either you know personally (best) or they know
| someone you know and you ask for an intro. This allows you to
| skip the online application black hole. As a corollary, invest in
| your network and keep good relationships with former coworkers.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Yeah, I really can't imagine cold applying for a place at this
| point in my career. I got my first job via a recruiter, every
| job since has been working with people I worked with
| previously.
|
| This person sounds like they have been in the field for quite a
| while (since the dotcom bubble, at least), but still mostly did
| cold interviews? I have been in the field for a bit less time
| (a little more than 15 years), but I have dozens of former
| coworkers I would go through before going to cold interviewing.
| I wonder why they didn't rely on their network more.
| kevinconroy wrote:
| If you are job searching, it's dangerous to go it alone.
|
| Take this: "An Engineering Leader's Job Search Algorithm"
| https://docs.google.com/document/d/19fr_36WOzKlq_zyGP2RdxMEs...
| sebmellen wrote:
| At 83 current visitors, I think this is the most actively
| viewed Google Doc I've seen!
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| I've seen some shared on Reddit with thousands of visitors
| a_wild_dandan wrote:
| I like the little algorithm. As an aside, it reminded me how
| repetitive some languages can be. You scan the code, seeing
| lines like "Resume resume Resume", "Website site Website", etc.
| Takes me back to my college/first gig Java days.
| almostnormal wrote:
| Why isn't applyWithEmployeeReferral() an overload of apply()
| with a parameter for the linkedin referral(s)?
| qwertygnu wrote:
| I don't question that is takes hard work, even for more senior
| devs like the author, but 30 apps leading to 3 offers is a dream.
| Most early-career people are probably at >100 app with maybe a
| few interviews and hopefully one offer.
| danesparza wrote:
| I agree. Even as a senior dev, I couldn't help but think, "this
| story isn't as difficult as I was expecting from the headline".
| To each his own. ;-)
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| I guess I got lucky in when I started out as a career switcher
| in 2017. Iirc I applied 6 places, had 4 interviews, got 2
| offers. Mind you this was as an effectively junior person
| applying to mid-level positions. I like to think that having so
| few interviews allowed me to concentrate my enthusiasm and
| highest mental energy into the interviews I had, but maybe it's
| just survivors bias.
|
| Since then I've taken 3 interviews and gotten two great offers
| in the 50+% percentile for US based software engineering roles.
| I'm a not-that-bright grug-brained developer, so I'm sure it
| wasn't because I was blowing people out of the water with my
| brain power.
|
| I'm not sure I have the energy to do a numbers-game applicant
| strategy. I hate interviewing generally, and live coding causes
| my brain to lock-up. So I only apply places I am genuinely
| excited to work for, and places that I reason would be
| generally excited to have a good team player who is nonetheless
| a grug-brained developer.
|
| I can get genuinely excited about pretty run-of-the-mill work
| though, and have strong opinions very loosely held. I think
| maybe those two qualities are my secret sauce.
| _dark_matter_ wrote:
| Energy itself is a winning strategy. It translates to an
| initiative in an employers eyes, which is something that
| cannot be taught.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| Can confirm. Energy is about the only way I could rely on
| myself to crack open a totally foreign job market with less
| than a year of experience under my belt when I was starting
| out. I set myself the goal of 10 applications a day, every
| day, anywhere in Finland was acceptable -and within 3
| months I had my first offer.
| rco8786 wrote:
| 2017 was a very, very different job market for us engineers
| pyb wrote:
| The author has 30+ years of experience and was applying to jobs
| paying less than 6 figures a year (USD). His expectation were
| modest, compared to the average US developer.
| occz wrote:
| For the sake of comparison, I applied for jobs mid-2022. I
| applied for 12 positions and got 5 offers, and explicitly
| rejected by 2 - the remaining 5 I either rejected myself or
| didn't have time to complete the process. This was also in
| Stockholm, same as the OP.
|
| This market is far worse to be looking for a job in.
| economicalidea wrote:
| I guess I got really lucky - I just talked to friends and found
| three different jobs through their recommendations. Never had a
| proper job application or interview in my life - I reckon this
| will bite me in the ass sometime
| cdelsolar wrote:
| what's the database timeout answer? i would say something along
| the lines of 5 seconds max.
| jrockway wrote:
| Yeah, that's a pretty interesting question. For long-lived
| connections on networks I don't trust, I arbitrarily set the
| timeout at 10s. On networks I trust, I set it to one second.
| Looking at 99.99%-ile connection times on my production
| network, it's bimodal with peaks at 1ms and 28ms. (Guess which
| connections are from one physical machine to itself, and guess
| which connections are to a different machine.)
|
| I have no idea what the correct answer to an interview question
| that asks this is, though. Like, I never connect to my database
| inside the request flow, I have a connection pool and wait for
| a connection to become free in the pool. So "connection time"
| is really a function of how utilized the pool is, and has only
| a passing resemblance to the health of the database. Maybe 10
| connections are running "begin; lock table foo; select * from
| foo where expensive_condition". All 10 connections in the pool
| are blocked on a lock, and that doesn't mean the database is
| unhealthy and you want to shed load. So do you want to show the
| 11th person "sorry, our site is down, come back later", or do
| you want to wait for the random expensive queries to complete?
| I'd wait. (I suppose I wouldn't take an exclusive lock on a
| table to serve a web page either, but who knows what the
| interviewer is doing.)
| bradly wrote:
| I lot of times questions like these are to see how someone
| thinks about problems. What questions do they ask to clarify
| the problem. I'm not saying this is good question for that, but
| I wouldn't assume questions have a "right" answer.
| flavius29663 wrote:
| Exactly, this is a pretty bad sign for a senior dev, to just
| blurb out a number. What is the connection used for? End
| users, a backoffice tool, or a batch process? then he should
| have asked: what is our SLA? What's in the DB, how big are
| the objects, the queries? How frequent are they?
|
| Even so, I wouldn't venture any number if you don't do some
| profiling or at least some tests with the most common data,
| and with edge cases. It can be anywhere between milliseconds
| and full seconds, maybe more?.
|
| Reminds me of an interview once, I asked: the website is
| slow, you're in charge of it, what do you do? He just said
| "buy more servers"...slow down there, Rockefeller.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| My guess is, very low: it's a shared resource for multiple
| clients, hit multiple times per request, and should probably be
| on a sub 100ms basis tops with a few retries.
|
| Or it's a trick question: you should use shared connection
| pools to minimize the overhead of new connections, and should
| simply be part of the app startup.
| jval43 wrote:
| It's unclear from the question, but they were apparently
| looking for a very small number.
|
| But is that connection timeout, or query timeout, or something
| else? If you have long-running complex data processing or
| ingestion jobs, query timeouts could well be measured in
| minutes or hours. So a small number doesn't make sense there,
| and the connection technically doesn't timeout.
|
| For connection timeouts, if you run a connection pool then
| timeouts of a few seconds or more could be fine and be the
| difference between the system being completely down vs just
| slow in case the load / contention unexpectedly increases. Not
| great of course and it won't hold for long, but might help in
| some very specific bursty scenarios. If you are able to safely
| re-use the connections in the pool most of the time the timeout
| matters even less. Reusing connections is usually possible, but
| it depends on the database and what errors require establishing
| a new DB connection.
|
| And of course with a pool you actually have 2 'connection
| timeouts': one for establishing a new connection to the DB and
| a second one for acquiring a connection from the pool. The
| second one is usually most relevant for an application, but
| both matter.
|
| But even without a pool a higher number (say a few minutes)
| could possibly make sense given a specific scenario. A database
| with a connection limit is equivalent to decrementing a
| semaphore (acquiring a lock), and there are cases where you'd
| want to wait for just a bit longer to acquire that lock instead
| of just timing out. A slightly longer timeout won't hurt if
| e.g. you implement a retry mechanism anyways instead of
| aborting.
|
| Not saying long timeouts are a sign of great engineering, but
| context matters a lot for these sorts of questions.
| jmspring wrote:
| One thing I have heard from people is multiple reputable
| companies have been looking to see if the salary desired is not
| only inline with the range expected; but they are also
| calibrating things against what comparable levels/individuals in
| the team/org make.
|
| The norm, in the last few years, has generally been in most cases
| a new hire makes more than a long tenured individual in the team.
| a_wild_dandan wrote:
| Makes sense. Why spend once maintaining talent when you can
| spend twice acquiring it?
| jmspring wrote:
| I think it makes complete sense, but for years, it's been the
| norm to over pay to acquire.
| Swizec wrote:
| Remember: Finding a job is a sales process. You are selling a
| $1,000,000+ product (yourself over N years of anticipated
| tenure). How would you approach making a million dollar sale if
| it wasn't called a job?
|
| Do that.
|
| Your CV or resume is sales collateral. Focus on warm and hot
| leads over cold calling. Vet your leads with conversation, make
| sure you really can solve their problems, _then_ give them your
| sales material. Preferably optimized for the lead in question.
|
| If possible make the sale before interviews even begin. That way
| they're just a rubber stamp and smoke test for red flags.
| Uehreka wrote:
| > How would you approach making a million dollar sale if it
| wasn't called a job?
|
| I'd be like, "This sounds like a job a professional salesperson
| should be doing. I'm gonna go get a job as an engineer, I'm
| much better at that."
| ravenstine wrote:
| This is also a great time for local tech meetups to make a
| comeback. Others I know, as well as myself, have found great
| jobs through connections found through meetups. Corona
| obliterated a lot of these meetups, but anyone can start one
| and start networking practically for free.
| kdazzle wrote:
| This sounds awful. An IQ test (and needing to prep for one)?
| Failing an interview based on a bad DB timeout answer? _shudder_
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| Yeah the DB timeout answer really stuck out.
| BadHumans wrote:
| Bit of a rant but I also have been job hunting after a layoff and
| their experience sounds like a dream. I have only gotten email
| rejections thus far and only 1 phone screen. It feels like most
| of my rejections are just automatic emails. Some of them come
| same day. The most demoralizing thing happens when you get
| rejected for a job and then see a new listing for that same job
| go up just moments later. You were rejected not because they
| picked someone else but because they decided even talking to you
| wasn't worth their time and they would rather go back to the
| pool.
| cryptozeus wrote:
| Try running it through chatgpt. Give your resume and give job
| discretion. Ask if your resume is a match for this job. You
| will be surprised.
| happytiger wrote:
| What's your learning about this? I just tried it and it's
| very interesting how specific the analysis is.
| BadHumans wrote:
| I've used ChatGPT to improve my resume but have never just
| outright asked for suitability based on the job description.
| I'll give it a shot.
| morgante wrote:
| I'm not sure why you think companies have an obligation to talk
| to every candidate that applies.
|
| It's pretty common to get hundreds of applications for any open
| role now, and the most visible companies get thousands of
| applications. A majority of those applications can be
| disqualified from the resume alone.
|
| It would be a massive waste of everyone's time to talk to every
| applicant.
| sombrero_john wrote:
| OP is obviously ranting because they are frustrated and
| dejected. Have a little empathy.
| BadHumans wrote:
| Thanks for the understanding :)
| BadHumans wrote:
| Never did I say companies should talk to everyone that
| applies but I do think everyone should at least get a
| response. Half of my applications are dead air.
| morgante wrote:
| Yes, everyone should respond. From the hiring manager side,
| it's sometimes hard (especially when people argue with you)
| but I still think it's worth doing.
|
| I'm sorry you're having a hard time. I'm sure it's very
| demoralizing to feel like you're applying into a void.
| andy99 wrote:
| Rejections are great info, especially quick ones. It's the
| companies that never respond or start the process then ghost
| that are the real problem. There you learn absolutely nothing.
| BadHumans wrote:
| You learn nothing regardless. There is never any information
| about why you get rejected or why you were passed over. The
| only difference between getting rejected and not getting
| rejected is that you at least have closure on that
| application.
| patientzero wrote:
| I think quick rejections are a good indication to work on
| your materials and/or position selection, possibly delaying
| your send rate. Ghosting leaves all the variables hidden on
| quality vs volume and even leaves it unclear on whether
| your volume of sends is sufficient (maybe the industry is
| just slow at coming back and will answer all your past
| applications.)
| jonnycoder wrote:
| I have the same experience. I've been unemployed for 5 months
| as a Senior Software Engineer and I hit most of the job
| requirements. The only skill I don't directly match is React
| development for full stack jobs, but I am building an LLM app
| in React so that I can fix that hole. Speaking of LLM, I'm
| surprised I'm not seeing any job skill requirements for LLM
| related topics or even vector database experience. Are the
| bigger companies so far behind the curve here?
| brailsafe wrote:
| If you're not applying specifically to AI type jobs, would
| you expect to see LLM or vector database experience alongside
| React? Seems like that would be a silly set of requirements
| to look for in anything but a low-interest rate environment,
| especially at comoanies that have a real product or have been
| around for longer than a year.
| bradly wrote:
| > One company used an IQ test
|
| This is interesting. I haven't had that one yet, but last week I
| had an application with a "personality" test that asked whether I
| tend to vote for left-leaning candidates or right-leaning
| candidates. This company was in the healthcare space.
|
| GitHub asking for approval for AI to review my resume was a bit
| of a beat too. I did not give permission, and it definitely left
| me feeling at a disadvantage to other candidates.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I thought IQ tests were illegal?
| simantel wrote:
| It has to technically be an aptitude test, but they really
| toe the line. Vista Equity, for instance, requires all their
| companies to use the CCAT in hiring:
| https://www.criteriacorp.com/candidates/ccat-prep
| giantg2 wrote:
| I mean, they could probably get sued for that. The test
| itself says it measures general intelligence.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _last week I had an application with a "personality" test
| that asked whether I tend to vote for left-leaning candidates
| or right-leaning candidates._
|
| That should be all kinds of illegal already.
|
| And "personality tests" in general should be made illegal too.
| neilv wrote:
| > _All recruiters I was in contact with asked for my CV, even
| though it is mostly the same information that is already on my
| LinkedIn profile. It is almost as if it is a sign that you are
| serious._
|
| I think it's a token that they can forward to an employer,
| establishing some degree of your consent to them representing
| you.
|
| (Like in a story of visiting some foreign culture, when someone
| offers you tea they made in some foreign cup, you take a sip from
| it, and then someone else tells you that you just got married.)
| brailsafe wrote:
| Yes, this is why it's good to ask the recruiter whether they
| actually have any direct contact with a hiring manager, or
| whether they work at the company (tons of them have also been
| laid off in the last year). Recruiters are usually third-
| parties who's only job it is to accept CVs from applicants and
| pass them on, just one more stupid layer that gets you no
| further than cold applying. Often, those jobs a recruiter comes
| up with are reposted by other third-party companies on the same
| site without any text changed in the JD. Some recruiters will
| ask for MS word documents so it's easier to remove your contact
| information and add their logo.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| _I later found another good way of finding companies to check to
| see if they have any open roles: google "competitor to" or
| "alternative to" and a company name, to find similar companies._
|
| This cannot be understated. Having inside info on a competitor
| you already worked at is definitely eye catching to a recruiter.
| It may not get you the job, but will get you noticed, and is
| definitely an asset your non-tech interviews if you are discreet
| about how you discuss it.
| AznHisoka wrote:
| >> The second problem is that it is not possible to get only the
| latest ads (in LinkedIn) for example ads that are less than a
| week old. So I ended up having to page through a lot of ads I had
| already seen
|
| This is by far the worst thing about searching for jobs in
| LinkedIn. It is horribly inconvenient to simply find the most
| recent jobs posted in the past 24 hours because all of the old
| promoted jobs are taking up 90% of the search results
| jostmey wrote:
| Yeah, I've noticed the same thing too. It's like all the jobs I
| see are paid promotions and the good jobs are buried in the
| back. I even have LinkedIn premium. It seems that LinkedIn
| forgot I'm a paying customer
| mhitza wrote:
| There is a filter to only show jobs posted in the last 24
| hours. But even when I had searches saves with the 24 filter
| applied, I still had to manually enable it when going back into
| the results page.
|
| Probably because that way they can sell companies the idea
| "look your job post was viewed over 9000 times" even if it's
| noise for people briwsing these ads.
| AznHisoka wrote:
| For me, even when filtering by 24 hours almost the entire
| page is filled with promoted ads, most of which were
| "reposted" in the past 24 hrs
| neilv wrote:
| > _Key Elements for Job Search Microsite_
|
| > * _Have a professional profile picture_
|
| I don't do this, for two reasons:
|
| 1. Being a photographer taught me that I'm much better on the
| _buttons_ side of the camera, not the lens side.
|
| 2. Photos really don't belong in hiring in the US. Due to the
| long history of unfair prejudices, which are still ongoing in
| some ways. Even better would be if we could remove names, for
| being cues as to gender, racial/ethnic background, caste, and
| other socioeconomic status. But photos are easy to eliminate from
| hiring processes, and in fact we were rid of them in the US,
| until "social media"-like sites like LinkedIn reintroduced photos
| to resumes.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I went through interview training and one of the reasons why
| they're so adamant that resumes go into an automated parser was
| to strip photos and other info like that.
| smileson2 wrote:
| Yeah, on my end reviewing resume or when we did take-homes
| things like names and photos were always erased to prevent
| 'bias'
|
| We did interview and hire a lot more women and PoC than other
| firms I've worked with so I guess it works to some degree
| willsmith72 wrote:
| Yeah I was shocked by this as well moving from Australia to
| Germany, it's a euro thing.
|
| Some will even put "single" or "married" on their cv, though
| I'm told that's dying out
| nielsole wrote:
| It used to be common to put in occupation of the parents as
| well.
| Mydayyy wrote:
| From germany here. I removed the photo from my CV a few years
| ago. Never got asked about it during hiring. Obviously I
| don't have any numbers whether/how often I got sorted out due
| to that.
|
| But I hope the expectation to have a photo on your CV also
| dies out here.
| xdennis wrote:
| > it's a euro thing
|
| Yep. The Europass CV standard still uses photos on the CV.
|
| Examples: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=europass+cv+example&t=lm&
| iax=image...
|
| I don't think tech people add photos though. (I don't.)
| krab wrote:
| What about LinkedIn? That substitutes resumes for a lot of
| people. It has photos and it's not a euro thing.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| > Photos really don't belong in hiring in the US.
|
| They don't legally or consciously belong in hiring in the US.
| Doesn't mean it may not be to your advantage to have one.
| appplication wrote:
| Yes it is a fair take to say they shouldn't have a role. It
| is a naive one to suggest they don't.
|
| Unless you want to make hiring harder on yourself, put up a
| professional photo. You're not going to change the world by
| not doing so, you're only going to waste your own time.
| avg_dev wrote:
| I am puzzled. I read the article and I don't see that. Did the
| article get updated, maybe?
| neilv wrote:
| My mistake; I was quoting a different document, "An
| Engineering Leader's Job Search Algorithm", linked from an HN
| comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39338314
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 2. Photos really don't belong in hiring in the US.
|
| The author of the post is in Sweden, not the US.
|
| As weird as it sounds, profile photos are prominent features of
| resumes in many European countries. It shocked me when I first
| started hiring in our EU offices, but that's just the way it
| is. I was surprised because we've often been told so many
| different ways that Europe is ahead of the US in matters of
| discrimination, but then I got there and resumes were full of
| profile pictures and even discussion about their marital
| status. I had our recruiter over there start erasing these
| things from resumes and they thought I was crazy.
| thehias wrote:
| I am a bit surprised, after reading the article I thought the
| author would be a junior with 5 years or less experience. With
| 30+ years of experience the job hunting should be easier, just
| call some people you know...
| brailsafe wrote:
| > just call some people you know...
|
| Probably all unemployed too
| sakopov wrote:
| Is the author in the EU? I'd say outside of maybe recruiters on
| LinkedIn, none of these options work in this shitty market
| conditions in the US at this point in time.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Sweden
| angarg12 wrote:
| I'm a ML Engineer at FAANG and I have been passively looking for
| the last half year. Common wisdom might make you think that I
| should be having companies throwing wads of cash at me, but my
| experience has been very different.
|
| * It's true that my profile attracts many messages from
| recruiters. However ghosting is the name of the game. More than
| half of recruiters have ghosted me at different stages of the
| process. Overall I'd say that attention from recruiters is a
| great vanity metric for your ego, but it means shit unless you
| can convert that into job offers.
|
| * Although there is a lot of demand, the bar for hiring is also
| very high. Specifically companies are looking for someone with
| experience in their exact tech stack. Given there are a few major
| ML frameworks and I'm only familiar with one of them, that rules
| out a lot of jobs. In one case a company screened me out because
| I only had 6 years of experience in a particular tech instead of
| their required minimum of 8.
|
| * So far my only outcomes have been 1 rejection and 2 downlevels
| to senior (I'm targeting Staff+ positions). Although I haven't
| been dedicated to job hunting, I haven't been successful either
| at receiving an offer.
|
| * In terms of salaries, most companies tend to top out around
| half of my current comp. I have only spoken with less than a
| handful of companies that could offer more. I guess that has
| always been the case with FAANG, but seems more pronounced now.
|
| Overall I think that currently the job market for ML Engineers is
| still better than for Software Engineers, but it's nothing like
| the fever dream market of 2020-2022.
| oortoo wrote:
| Obviously, learning all popular tech stacks is not entirely
| realistic, but IMO when a SE or any engineer is looking for
| work, at least 1-2 months of researching and getting proficient
| with the full breadth of what's out there for your interest is
| going to pay off.
|
| Unless you are moving jobs to just do the exact same thing
| somewhere else (who wants that) you kind of have to take it on
| yourself to show up the the interview appearing like an expert
| in skills you hope to get to really grow comfortable with on
| the job. You may even need to exaggerate your experience.
|
| Ultimately, specialization should be more about how you think
| than what facts you know, but the hiring market won't see it
| that way, meaning you need to just get really good at faking it
| and not be afraid to back it up later after some late-night
| study sessions.
|
| The other half of this is that 'levels' don't always translate
| across environments. Just find work that resonates with you,
| and you will move up. Obsessing over the level (or even the
| pay) is probably limiting.
| piecerough wrote:
| As a FAANG employee, working with ML, what do you want to get
| from other companies, besides more money?
|
| It's hard to have more chips, for example. You run less
| experiments, you have less throughput in an already
| computationally tight environment.
| cannonpalms wrote:
| It sounds like a Staff title may be in play, although it
| wasn't made clear whether this would be a promotion.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Some perspective from the other side of this situation: I was a
| hiring manager at a company that paid well but not FAANG level.
| We had an office near a couple FAANG offices. We had a lot of
| applications from people who wanted out of FAANG.
|
| Some problems we encountered when working with FAANG applicants
| and a few ex-FAANG hires:
|
| * Non-transferable knowledge: Many of them had a lot of
| experience working within the abstractions and structures of
| their FAANG company, but struggled to work with foundational
| concepts once removed from their FAANG infrastructure. Some of
| them spent years trying to rebuild copies of the FAANG tooling
| they were familiar with just to accomplish jobs that didn't
| really need it.
|
| * Experience mismatch with the current team. An extension of
| the above point: Some candidates were high level at FAANG but
| less experienced with day-to-day operations than our in-house
| Senior/Staff devs. This put us in an awkward spot where we'd
| have to pay them more than our current high level engineers to
| bring them in, but they'd be operating at a level below them at
| least to start. We opted to promote from within in these cases.
|
| * Compensation cold feet. Many would tell us they just wanted
| out of their FAANG co at any cost and knew it would come with a
| compensation cut. But when it came down to offer time, they'd
| get cold feet about leaving money on the table. Even in cases
| where we paid within ~$50K of their FAANG comp, some of them
| just couldn't let it go when it came time to put in their 2
| weeks' notice.
|
| * Boomerang FAANG employees. Some people would join us, then
| miss the structure of blending into a big, highly structured
| FAANG company. They'd bounce back to the same FAANG or another
| FAANG within 6-18 months.
|
| * Higher rate of candidate ghosting us than with any other
| cohort. It was rare for an average candidate to ghost us once
| the interview pipeline had started, but for whatever reason the
| FAANG applicants had a very high rate of getting half way
| through the pipeline and then disappearing without a word. Many
| times they'd appear again a few months later asking for a
| second chance, only to repeat the process.
|
| I'm not suggesting these apply to you. Only trying to provide
| some perspective. Anything you can do to alleviate these
| concerns early might help an application process.
|
| Of course, if your goal is to secure FAANG level compensation
| and Staff+ titles, you might just have to accept the reality
| that continuing in FAANG is far and away the easiest way to get
| there.
| axegon_ wrote:
| I switched jobs very recently. I landed my current one through a
| friend who was pushing me hard to join his company for well over
| a year. This needs a bit of a background story: I landed my old
| job the regular way and with a bit of deception on the company's
| part(I'll get to that). I applied the regular way, then got a
| call from the HR. The HR - awesome guy, very friendly and kind,
| the experience with him couldn't have been any better-solid
| 10/10. Even though I quit and in a somewhat stormy way, I did
| tell him that beyond him, I can't say I really connected with
| anyone in the company. Back to the point - the rest of the
| process - regular tech interview or two and I was in. The
| problems however started really early on - as early as the "meet
| the team" call before joining. As much as I liked the HR and the
| manager of my team, there were a few people on the team that I
| was very skeptical about from the moment they opened their
| mouths. But you know, benefit of a doubt and all that. 2 months
| in, it was becoming pretty clear that my skepticism had a solid
| foundation - arrogance, talking behind people's backs on daily
| basis, doing whatever they though was "right", all while my
| manager, as much as I liked him as a person, turned a blind eye
| and completely ignored it. Each time a concern was raised about
| something and someone said "I don't understand how this is a
| problem" it was met by "alright, let's not take time from
| everyone and we'll discuss it later" from the manager, which was
| his way of sweeping potential conflicts under the rug - those
| concerns/issues were never addressed. Ultimately it became clear
| that many people in the company are aware of this but it's easier
| to kick the can down the road and hope things get resolved on
| their own, than to address them immediately, even if there is a
| price to pay. The second big issue is that I was dragged in as a
| rust developer. And on day one, a handful of golang projects were
| thrown at me and somehow the rust part was never mentioned again.
| Go would never be my first choice, and I've said horrible things
| about it in the past(and I still stand by them) but I'd be fine
| with it if people are upfront about it. It's really disappointing
| to do a technical challenge in rust and a cool challenge at that
| and then be thrown into stuff that you can't help but hate with a
| passion(this is the deception part I was talking about).
|
| To my current job-as I said, a friend recommended me and the only
| question I had was "are the people cool?". His response said
| everything I needed to hear: "Mate, I'm older than you - I'm
| approaching 40. On top of that my fuse is much shorter than
| yours. I'm here and I'm happy to be here - isn't that clear
| enough for you"? I really can't argue with any of that. And he is
| right. For the first time in more than a year I'm happy to be
| going to work every day. People are cool, the work and domain are
| interesting and insanely cool. And I can already tell that I'll
| have friends for life here once they find out some things about
| me.
|
| My point is that, sure, finding new jobs these days is harder
| than it used to be 3-4 years ago, where you'd apply to 5 jobs and
| your phone would catch fire in the next 40 minutes. At this point
| you should be prepared to wait it out for a month or two, which,
| if you played it safe, shouldn't be a massive problem. The point
| I'm making with my example is that if you can afford it, you'd be
| much better off taking a month or two off and be careful about
| the jobs you apply to, than jump into something head on and end
| up regretting it soon after-EXACTLY THE WAY I DID. And you could
| use the time to work on some personal projects which might take
| you to an entirely different place.
|
| Another thing is the rejection/ghosting: most companies rely
| heavily on HRs to filter out candidates. And in my experience,
| HRs have been horrible at it. It has gone as far as an old
| manager of mine and me having a fight with HR to send us the CVs
| directly to us as opposed to her going over them because she
| decided that someone is unfit for the job. Ultimately she sent us
| all the CVs of the people she was about to reject and out of
| those we found 2 of the best people I've ever worked with.
| Currently there's a lot of supply of CV's and with layoffs from
| big companies+people coming out of the countless online courses,
| and smaller companies being cautious about the economic state as
| a whole, and subsequently HRs are doing an even worse job than
| before. There is still a lot of demand for developers but most
| HRs are not the people that should be reviewing CVs. Which is a
| problem - in most cases developers/team leads don't have the time
| to go through 20 CVs a day. Even at my old job where I had to do
| tech interviews, doing one or two a week was a massive issue -
| the interviews take an hour or so but add the time you take to go
| through someone's CV, look at the tech test they did and prepare
| questions - that's easily 4-5 hours of your day. Now imagine
| having to go over 20 CVs. Do 3 of those in a week and you start
| to see the problem. Hence the reason this is commonly outsourced
| to HR. These days academic credentials are not taken much into
| account(ironically this is my first job where they asked me for a
| copy of my diploma), so what HRs do is scroll through your
| experience, tick off a few mental boxes like experience in
| companies they know/don't know and how much and... I don't
| know... Do you look like someone they'd like perhaps? Beats me.
| Point is, they get dozens of applications on daily basis and
| regardless of who you are, chances are they never looked too deep
| into your CV and just clicked on "reject". Is there a solution to
| this? No idea honestly.
| cabalamat wrote:
| > In the first one I failed, I had to write a limited chess
| program, that only supported two kinds of pieces. It needed a
| project structure, a data model, valid movements for the pieces,
| and tests. I started from nothing, and had to be send the
| solution in within two hours.
|
| I've written programs to play chess and I doubt I could do this
| in 2 hours. If I did do it, it would be horrible buggy code.
| layer8 wrote:
| > I was asked what timeout I would set on a database connection.
| I was more thinking about how long an individual user could be
| prepared to wait for a page to render, so blurted out too high of
| a number.
|
| Interesting, I would have put those in roughly the same ballpark.
| Anyone who can shed light on this?
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