Ask HN: Is the job market brutal? or is it just me?

Not just you. I would guess, optimistically, I’m averaging a 5% conversion rate of applications to recruiter chats/“stage 0 interviews”. That is, ~95% of applications yield silence or a generic email rejection without any human contact.

~15 YOE, FAANG experience, usually only applying to roles I feel I’m at least a halfway good fit for (i.e. not a complete scattergun approach).

I’m (financially) fine for now, which is very fortunate. I wasn’t even laid off – I quit voluntarily and took a sabbatical while the good times were rollin’. But since I started looking seriously again, it’s been hard to shake the sense of time disappearing with nothing to show for it. I’m better at Leetcode (ugh) than I’ve ever been, but so is everyone else, and with the slow drip of actual interviews, I only get to demonstrate it once or twice a month 🙂

ETA: A few of the recruiters I have talked with have mentioned that they’re getting hundreds of applications within hours of a posting going live. So there is likely a “lost in volume” effect as another commenter mentioned. In fact, for some of the roles where I thought I was a great fit but got a generic rejection without a recruiter call, I’ve had some eventual success simply reapplying for the same role, at least when the recruiting platform allows it (some don’t). For reasons of culture and upbringing, it took me a while to get comfortable not taking that initial, faceless “no” for an answer, but it has worked at least twice so far.

If you are a US citizen try defense companies.

Edit: I should have explained my reasoning. They have a much smaller eligible applicant pool – US citizens who are eligible for security clearance. Because of this they’re continuously looking for good talent.

Yeah, would be great to live in a magic land, where the US has no competitors, adversaries and sworn enemies. But this isn’t magic land. US defense contractors are very much for profit and deliver a product that deters or kills some very bad people, more and more discriminating between collateral damage and intended targets – far more than can be said of Russian in Ukraine, for example.

There’s an entire generation in this country that thinks the US is safe, a villain even. How wrong they are, and how much they stand to lose if the US loses.

If the alternative is a world where these weapons systems don’t exist? I’m afraid that is a fantasy world which would quickly be ceded to the bigger stick. So consideration of military force requires balance, reverence, and respect. Posting something like “btw if you work in defense you’re a baby killer” is more insult than reasoned debate.

> … remember that the technologies you develop will be used to slaughter the innocent.

I totally agree. One should think carefully before helping to arm a nation or its people. It’s a weighty decision.

I wish the answer was as straight-forward as armament is bad, pacifism is good. Unfortunately, AFAIK unarmed nations don’t last very long.

Cold War Kid here. I grew up in a neighborhood where a significant faction of the fathers were engineers working for a major defense contractor. The Tomahawk Cruise Missile, the Aegis Anti-Missile System, the Abrams Night Vision system – those are just a few of the projects our dads were working on.

Everyone in the community, us kids included, considered this to be serious and vital work for defending the US from the USSR, an adversary who’s brutality has been revealed for the umpteenth time in the Ukraine attack. I, for one, would like to see the US strive to actually live up to our stated ideals. Unfortunately, Reagan showed the neocons all you have to do is act like you care about your ideals.

WRT your link – that video was obtained via a FOIA request. Do you think Putin would allow such a video to be released? Yeah, we’re not perfect but at least we’re still allowed to talk about the bad things we do, openly gripe about our government, and demand more accountability. THAT is something for which US citizens can still be envied.

> Everyone in the community, us kids included, considered this to be serious and vital work for defending the US from the USSR

Yes, because the US had one of the most effective propaganda machines of all times.

You know, participants of a war always believe their side is right and they’re fighting the good fight. Otherwise they wouldn’t do it. And while you’re certainly right that Putin shouldn’t be considered harmless, a victim or even an opponent with equally valid interests, it’s still naive to think the US is just defending against the Putins in the world.

Dude, you don’t need high tech to slaughter the innocent, any fool can do that. What gold-plated weapons systems do is credibly deter a Chinese landing force from showing up in Taipei, or help the Ukranians achieve the 5+ K/D ratios they need to survive as an independent nation.

I’d be happier to know that my code would let a shaped charge target a J20 cockpit in the unlikely event of Really Bad Decision Making, than to know that it was targeting teenage girls with contagious mental illness.

On the other hand, I can give you plenty of reasons not to work in defense. They don’t pay enough for you to ever own a house in a desirable place; security clearances are an invasive relic of the J. Edgar Hoover days (and your sensitive data will get hacked by China anyway); it’s assumed that you don’t know “foreign persons” (hint: This is actually now a mark of the lower-class and uneducated.); a software engineer without an advanced degree is basically nobody; cloud stuff is mostly off limits; work may happen in windowless rooms; perks are non-existent; and it’s embarrassing to answer “so what do you do for a living” if you’re trying to exist in blue-state society.

But ethics? Compared to FAANG? I wouldn’t worry about that.

I don’t know about the foreign persons 😉 – being a naturalized citizen there are plenty of foreign citizens the wife and me know. They pay decently though but not big tech level pay. You definitely can’t answer the what you’re working on question. We live in Illinois and there’s plenty of people around us who work at the same place.

Agreed. It’s hard being ‘the good guy’, and the uninformed will make you a villian sometimes. Not easy at all, sometimes no matter what you do, it’s criticized.

Can confirm, defence (related) and security clearance requirements largely limit the applicant pool. One, because for some reason Lockheed is dirty while Palantir or Facebook isn’t. And because a lot of people are, by virtue of country of birth, ineligible of getting a security clearance. Also decent money and job security.

But while I draw my moral.line at small arms (those have the nasty habbit of ending everywhere, and the likes of Heckler and Koch have their long list of export scandals), others draw their line at weapons in general. Both view points are fine, as is working for the likes of SIG Sauer.

> Lockheed is dirty while Palantir or Facebook aren’t

Said nobody with any common sense, ever. Palanthir or Meta are in my eyes as bad on CV as… as… wait is there a way I don’t go Godwin’s in this thread?

Agreed. Where I work we hire people from Lockheed all the time. Meta? We wouldn’t touch them. Move fast and break things isn’t the mentality we’re looking for when working with what the Department of Homeland Security has classified as National Critical Infrastructure.

If our service goes down, civilization goes down. We can’t afford to hire people who’ve spent a career playing games.

> Meta? We wouldn’t touch them.

is this your employer’s policy? Or do you just fail them in in the interview regardless of their performance.

Their performance would be considered very carefully – and I’m not talking about leet coding exercises. We don’t prioritize solving silly problems. We prioritize people who can get stuff done, using a technology portfolio that ranges from ultra-modern to 15 year legacy and make it all work together. The ability to estimate and deliver are highly prized.

It’s depressing for the same reason why the military getting pushed onto people as a way to afford college, and the way that frequently works out in reality, is depressing.

Well, I can’t speak for parent, but those of us that aren’t U.S. citizens are already having a hellish time.

To those of us with work visas, this is like saying, “if you’re homeless, just go to your vacation home,” and then being surprised that people without vacation homes express feelings of despair.

I think most people realize that people on visas can be in an additionally tough situation during layoffs.

I think the commenter’s helpful suggestion has an implied “Unfortunately, this doesn’t help everyone, but…” In an attempt to help the people it can help.

For people currently in certain especially difficult or unfair situations, it might hurt less to know that people are sympathetic, though they might feel powerless to help right now.

Knowing that, maybe some of the people getting the short end of the stick would prefer not to have that constantly articulated. I can only guess at when is the right time to articulate, and when to leave it implied.

Yep, and I have no beef with the original comment. However, someone explicitly requested an explanation, and so I gave one.

I’m not a citizen, but I’m holding out for a pure “tech” company for now anyway for various reasons.

Thanks for the hint anyway – perhaps someone else will benefit.

May I ask why? I’ve done both pure tech companies and tech jobs at non-tech Fortune 100 companies. I much prefer the latter. In my experience there is less stress (I work about 30-35 hours per week), great benefits, competitive salary, interesting projects, don’t have to live in one of the tech hubs, good coworkers and boss, etc.

Have worked at non-tech companies (finance) for most of my career. Currently at a FAANG-tier company.

Needless to say, the pay at non-tech companies is substantially lower than FAANG and FAANG-tier tech companies. I quadrupled my TC going from the finance industry to my current company – and finance is known to pay above average for a non-tech company. I would say the junior SWEs with <5yoe at my current company make at least as much as the staff SWE equivalents (10+ to multiple decades yoe) at my previous company (bank).

But money aside:

– The onerous bureacracy.

– General lack of respect for tech employees (you’re the cost center).

– Dull/depressing office (assuming you’re not WFH).

– My colleagues at the non-tech companies I’ve worked for were nice, great, people. I keep in touch with many of them. But objectively speaking I would say the overall technical caliber is noticeably lower than that of my current colleagues at the FAANG-tier company. For what it’s worth, most of my colleagues at the non-tech companies that I felt were great technically…eventually also jumped ship for tech companies.

That’s why posted it. Most people ignore them but they do have good opportunities and generally don’t have issues with ageism that exists. They are very invested in tech though. Mostly devices and embedded systems from what I know.

I went through the process in the fall (starting about a month before being laid off, as it turns out) with almost 25 YOE. My background includes significant startup experience at all levels, plus FAANG and some bigger companies. It took me about 3 months to find a role.

The process itself was unlike anything I’d ever experienced before. I’ve always been very targeted in applications, so prior to this the largest number of jobs I applied to in a job search was 5, and the grand total of job applications to date that didn’t result in a phone screen was 2 or 3.

This time around, I was looking for a management gig, and sent about 54 applications. Due to a combination of being very targeted and being a little early in the layoff cycle (early fall last year), I managed to get about 10 cases of actually talking to a recruiter, 4 speaking with the hiring manager, 2 going through the full process, and 1 offer. I did also have another 10 recruiter conversations through my own network of recruiters and inbound LinkedIn requests.

A not-so-fun fact is that all but one large-company recruiter I talked this has since been laid off. One of those companies laid off the first recruiter I was talking to, and then laid off the second a couple weeks later.

> A not-so-fun fact is that all but one large-company recruiter I talked this has since been laid off.

So 9 out of 10 were laid off? That’s pretty shocking and dire if so…

Not exactly shocking if you’ve been following tech layoffs. Companies only need recruiters when they’re hiring.

Very similar story here on the PM side in the US.

~15 YOE (FB/Meta most recently), ramping up a search after a sabbatical, targeted job search to roles where I have non-trivial experience and domain expertise, customized cover letters, leveraging my network, open to relocation, open to hybrid or remote, etc.

I’m seeing 3-5% response rate over the past few months. It’s rough out there. No response for seemingly great matches. Slow moving recruiting process, even at early-stage startups. Rejections after screenings and first round interviews where the mutual fit seemed excellent.

Hiring manager friends and talkative recruiters tell me that in contrast to the past decade where they’d routinely screen people who met most of what they’re looking for, they’re now dealing with a massive volume of very qualified applicants (and trudging through a massive volume of unqualified applicants). Deciding who to screen and who to do a first round of interviews with is taking a lot more time and effort. And the first round of interviews might include 6-8 unicorn (i.e. perfect) candidates, where in the past they’d be elated to find 1 unicorn.

I’ve been through a couple down cycles, so I’m focused on grinding away till I find something. I think every level is feeling the pain in some proportional way. Big sympathy for early career folks. Even if we reset compensation expectations, it’d be a shame if the sector ends up losing out permanently on a range of talent. There’s no way tech needs are going to decrease on a medium-term horizon (though they may shift).

> A few of the recruiters I have talked with have mentioned that they’re getting hundreds of applications within hours of a posting going live

I think a good example of this is on LinkedIn. I see “Over 200 Applicants” and “See how you compare to 421 applicants” on their Easy Apply job postings.

If it’s brutal for a person with 15+ years of experience, I don’t even want to imagine what it’s like joining the job market with 0 years of experience now.

” I wasn’t even laid off – I quit voluntarily and took a sabbatical while the good times were rollin’. “

Did the same. Boy do I feel dumb now.

I don’t really regret quitting – I was getting pretty depressed at my previous job, and not working at all was a vast improvement. I perhaps could’ve persuaded myself to jump back in 3-6 months earlier, before the job market fell off a cliff.

Actually I lied, I was laid off at the height of covid (company folded), I just decided to take a long sabbatical and try other things rather than going right back to a job; looking after family (kids were off school for almost a year), side projects etc. I also don’t regret the time doing other things, only the lost opportunity to make bank and I suppose the ‘not-a-wage-slave hole’ in my CV, but now I need money sooner than expect, for reasons.

Most jobs themselves do not appear to have become much more attractive since last time, to say the least, and on top of that, it seems they’ve turned recruitment into some kind of hunger games competition.

I think in general the level of trust and loyalty workers are going to be willing to give will be much reduced, let’s say, so I think this little game, and I do think it’s game rather than necessity, is going to cost them in the long run.

I don’t doubt that the market is tough…I wonder if some recruiters are shying away from FAANG resumes due to the implicit expectation of high comp

Yeah, I’m about to hit 6 months of looking with a few final round interviews but no hire. It’s very discouraging. Especially when I see headlines talking about how the overall job market is hot.

> FAANG experience

From a recruiter’s perspective, this can be a red flag because they know how much you are worth, and the fact that you worked successfully there means you can probably return. So they might not want to hire you thinking “this guy can leave us for Meta/Google any day”.

> ETA: A few of the recruiters I have talked with have mentioned that they’re getting hundreds of applications within hours of a posting going live. So there is likely a “lost in volume” effect as another commenter mentioned.

The real question is what’s the signal to noise ratio?

Getting 500 resume for a job posting is not really a new thing for any in-demand, remote friendly company in the bay area. From experience, most applicants on these postings are underqualified (it’s free to apply).

> FAANG experience

Probably the reason. Most companies need people with experience in more than just one layer of a stack. Hard times for those who cant own a full stack, unfortunately.

Would you reconsider the stereotyping if I told you I’m a generalist who has worked up and down many kinds of stacks?

It’s proving hard to sell generalist-ness to recruiters this round. They often lock on to the most recent specific domain I worked in. If anything, they seem to be filtering for people with very specific experience in a specific layer of a specific stacks – because they are getting so many applications, they can be very choosy.

T-shaped is a good way to go, career-wise. Being a generalist with deep knowledge in some specific area (in my case video processing/computer vision/firmware) turns out to be very marketable if you apply to places looking for the area you’ve got deep knowledge in. The fact that you’re ALSO a good generalist make you a very attractive candidate.

If you can, look at new jobs/companies as opportunities to get deep experience in a new area since over time, stuff you’re good at now will sometimes go away.

Thank you. I think this is actually already me, but I need to get better (and/or more confident) at selling/marketing the “leg(s)” of the “T”. Particularly when it’s something I did more than a few years ago, but I know I still have expertise and good instincts there.

Sometimes the marketing is looking through the job description/requirements and thinking ‘Oh, I know something that’d really help out in this situation’ and tailoring your resume to that. (That sort of tailoring is somewhat reusable, too. 🙂

And cover letters are really good for this sort of thing as it lets you lay out some specifics that make you the type of person who can really help them out.

I look at FAANG experience as a negative for startup work. I’d much prefer to hire someone with five years of experience at three startups than five years of experience at Google.

I am very good at all layers of the stack (except maybe just decent on the frontend), yet it’s hard to stand out when any open position has 500+ resumes applying for it.

My self esteem and confidence is at an all time low. It is soul-crushing to have had a brilliant career and get barely 1% response rate. I can’t only blame it on my CV being terrible (went through half a dozen iterations already)

This is what the job market has been like for non tech workers for the last decade.

You can’t take things personally, focus on the process and just understand that things are outside of your control. You’ll get bites eventually but it’s a slog.

I took their meaning to be that at any large company you work in a pretty niche area because there are so many other employees. You get used to “not my problem” which isn’t an attitude that makes sense in small companies.

The problem though is assuming that the majority of jobs are with small companies. Although 99% of US businesses are SMBs, only 45% of employees in the US (from quick Google checks) work for SMBs. So the majority of jobs are at large companies and I don’t think FAANG would be so much a penalty (except for that you might have compensation expectations that don’t fit these companies).

The point is that an engineer at a FAANG likely owns a miniscule fraction of the stack, whatever that may be. The average company doesn’t need or want someone who is so deeply specialised.

This is such a ridiculous notion to be that I find a hard time lending it any credence. The reason average companies pass on FAANG is generally that they can’t afford them. Not “oh, this guy isn’t Jack-of-all-trades enough, we’re really looking for a midrate web contractor that still uses jquery but also knows some SQL”.

This – over specialism is career suicide. Most places I’ve worked have a maximum of three tiers of skillset in their mix, namely devops to handle CI, prod, etc back end devs for caring about API side stuff, and frontend for giving a damn about the users.

I realise this sounds basic, but that’s the point: almost all of those things are everywhere. Bury yourself in a tiny slice of one of those things and you’ve become un-or-over qualified for most of the market.

Hiring manager here with open REQs. I’ve been doing multiple phone screens daily, and it’s been brutal on my end, too.

I structure the hour-long phone screen to be 1/3 coding, 1/3 behavioural questions, and 1/3 career growth and questions for me.

We rarely get out of the coding question block. It’s a fairly simple question that ChatGPT solves easily. The tightest solution is about 10 lines of code. It can be answered either with iterative, recursive, or functional code. There is a general case, an empty case, and an exceptional case. It’s the type of code I was able to write after completing CMPT 101. I had to change the question since it was so easily solvable by ChatGPT.

Engineers with years of experience at FAANG and similar companies cannot solve this straightforward problem. It’s like, what have you been doing with your life? Did everyone do nothing during ZIRPy times and have accumulated years of rust that they now need to shake off?

My experience is that some developers can write code but most memorize patterns and follow trends. If your questions require some solution different from a memorized pattern they will fail.

Another way to approach this: can the candidate communicate? If they cannot write original code odds are they probably cannot clearly write steps of simple instructions explaining a problem or solution as they do not have experience thinking through the problem without a lot of help.

Most places I interviewed at last year claimed to be looking for senior developers but in practice were only looking for trend chasers doing things in a very limited way that appeals primarily to beginners memorizing patterns.

ChatGPT is passing quantum physics tests. “ChatGPT can answer it” should not be a thing that we say. ChatGPT can recite every single algorithm known to man, wondering about your interview process.

ChatGPT can regurgitate existing answers, it is very bad at programming when met with novel questions. See how far it can go in AdventOfCode.

Is the coding question that is representative of the work you do at your company, and that you expect candidates to have done? Or is it a toy, “write a function that does X” question? “ChatGPT solves easily” suggests to me that it’s a toy question.

If it is a “toy” question, then I’m of two minds about it:

On one hand, I am used to solving higher level problems, so it might take me a few minutes just to realize you are asking a much simpler question. It also can feel just a tad insulting to be drilled on CompSci 101 questions.

Oh the other hand, I think candidates should be able to solve such questions, as long as the scope is clear. You need to filter somehow and I’ve met people who could not do that.

> Is the coding question that is representative of the work you do at your company, and that you expect candidates to have done?

The solution is a while-loop with a couple of if-statements. I would hope an engineer would write code like this many times per day. Whenever they need to marshal a blob from A to B.

> It also can feel just a tad insulting to be drilled on CompSci 101 questions.

I wish I had this problem! In these rare cases, I just say, “Great job! This was to just double-check you could write code. You’d be surprised how often a candidate isn’t able to solve this! Let’s talk about your career. In what aspects would you like to grow next?”

I ask a “toy-ish” question for a phone screen since we have a higher level coding section on-site. I get LC is the standard, but I’ve always considered how easily someone can adapt to be as much a signal as anything.

It’s one thing if we paint it as Leetcode and then ask for fizz-buzz, but when I start the interview off by saying “no algorithms involved, we’re not even compiling, it’s mostly a way for us to talk about ” and 15 minutes in you’re still looking for a place to shoe horn in a hand rolled hash map, it might just say something about how your approach to engineering.

Many would argue filling FAANG to the brim with people who actively seek complexity is what has directly hurt their ability to innovate (and the fact OpenAI is full of ex-FAANG doesn’t disagree)

An hour? Why would a phone screen be an hour. I don’t want a hiring manager to ask tech questions and I don’t want to talk to one for a whole hour.

Are you thinking of a recruiter screen? I absolutely want to talk to the hiring manager for an hour, or more. This person will be my new boss, the more I know about them the better.

With the hiring manager? How they manage their team, how many people they manage, what does the team make-up look like, what does the day to day look like, how do they measure success, what are the traits they want someone in this position to have, is it easy to get time off, what challenges is the team facing, what are the opportunities for advancement, what’s the worst thing about working there, or anything else that will help me understand both them and the team I’m coming in to. Also of course addressing any questions they have about me, since this is the person who will decide if they are offering me the job, and if they do and I accept, the person who will decide what I work on, have the most influence on raises, promotions etc.

Some of this is stuff that the actual engineers will give you a more accurate picture (ex what’s the day to day like), but even for those things asking both the engineers and the manager and comparing them can give you an idea of how in touch the manager is with the realities of the team.

> We rarely get out of the coding question block. It’s a fairly simple question that ChatGPT solves easily.

well I guess now we know why its all so brutal. We are being compared to a state of the art AI. Also we gotta have a compiler installed on our heads.
That aside, if you are a hiring manager, ask yourself what your company really needs. Because this format of interview is so outdated, its insane.

I mean, I sure hope any junior intern developer is better than ChatGPT at writing actually working code. Converting from one language to another of a solution that exists in its knowledge base is not how one should program.

I’m reading it totally differently. I’ve been giving an interview in a similar vein, and for years have been an outspoken opponent of leetcode for exactly what this interviewer is explaining.

We have a proper domain-specific programming test in the later stages of our pipeline, so my phone screen is a smoke test I expect most devs to complete in 10 minutes (we give the full 30 just in case).

We talk through a simple word problem, and at no point do I even require it to compile because I understand that not having your coding development environment choice can throw you off. At most if I spot an obvious syntax error I’ll nudge to make sure they spot it and move on.

–
Yet the feedback I get is extremely bi-modal: People who write code for a living love it. They had mentally prepped for inverting binary trees while some CS-guru stares them down over Zoom, so having a collaborative problem that takes the same mental process your day to day does is great for them.

But for people who have hyper-optimized for leetcode, it’s like their brains shut down. Simple problems they should be able to solve with basic control flow suddenly become these insurmountable wall because they can’t pattern match against something they memorized.

It’s extremely brutal. I’m a staff engineer and a tech lead of ~12 engineers, I’ve either been getting low ball offers, or ending the last round of interviews to get no offer. I’ve employed but have been looking for a job for ~6 months with terrible results. I graduated from a T5 school, have worked at a “unicorn” startup, and have an average of 3 years at every role. My conversion rate is a little better – 3 interviews for every 40-50 apps, but I’ve gotten 2 offers for 6 months of searching.

My most memorable was this tier 3 hedge fund trying to convince me to take a junior IC role for a new team that had also hired a manager and director from outside the company for a new endeavor/initiative, and the manager had been at his last 3 jobs for roughly over a year each, get out of here lol.

I interviewed from Jan-Feb pretty much as a full time job. Lots of applications out, maybe 5-10 well-researched applications a day which yielded one or two interviews a day for that time period. Three went to offers and I’m pretty sure I could have closed a few more if I hadn’t taken the job I did.

I’ve done everything from UI to cloud to embedded stuff, but I was mostly focusing on embedded roles thinking that a) I like that sort of work and b) the competition wouldn’t be as bad, though Amazon did layoff a lot of device folk in my geographic area.

Salary expectations seemed to be a big thing at companies, and I’d expect that FAANG folks looking to find that sort of compensation at smaller companies are likely to be disappointed or possibly even weeded out at the start.

That said, some companies are definitely low-balling but most seem willing to pay around ‘market rate’ for folks. I took a slight step-down in pay, but I like what I’m working on and the people and the companies that we offering more money we’re offering enough more to overcome that.

> most seem willing to pay around ‘market rate’ for folks

What does this mean? What do the quotes mean?

This seems to be nearly a tautology; the market rate is what people are willing to pay.

It means that when companies would ask me what my salary expectations were, I’d tell them I was looking for something “market rate”. Exactly those words. I’d often follow up by asking “Do you have a range in mind for this position?” and go from there.

At that point I’ve answered their salary question and probably not scared them off and if they really want to put a number on it, it’s up to them. At this stage, if they don’t have a range or just won’t say, it tells you a bit about them.

When you say low ball, do you mean compared to what FAANG companies pay (paid?) or do you mean compared to what non-tech Fortune 500 companies pay?

non-FAANG – I’m familiar with Disney’s salary levels, and would say I’m getting offers at a level below what I would expect (or 40k-60k below on base).

Looking up Disney salaries, I’d say outside of the main tech hubs ~$40-$60k less is about what I’d expect.

> had been at his last 3 jobs for roughly over a year each

And yet the manager would be your boss. Not sure why you think how long someone has been in a role is somehow a worthwhile signal.

As you get more senior, it takes time to understand your sibling teams, the business itself, etc.

If it takes 6+ months just to get “up to speed”, are you really having much impact when you leave 6 months later?

I’m a principal software engineer. If it takes me more than a month to get up to speed with an organization (I usually work with small-mid sized companies), I consider that a failure. Six months to first contribution is insane.

First contribution is not the same as up-to-speed. I’ll also note that a manager often needs a broader view of the company than an engineer, though at principal level I’d expect the gap to be less (but it isn’t always).

Regardless of how good you are, you’re ramp up time is very dependent on the place.

If you’re walking into a place with very little in the way of documentation and process, it could take a while to learn enough to be effective (ex: 50 different microservices and 5 different stacks, nuanced environments, etc.)

On the other hand, if everything is very standardized and well documented, you can jump right in.

First Contribution and Up to full speed ramp up are completely different things.

Expectations at FAANGS is that it might take a month or two for the contribution to start (one week, if you count bootcamp tasks at Meta), but it takes about 6+ months to full ramp up at the Senior+ level.

At small startups, it is very different.

Yup, everyone should work in places they feel comfortable. I don’t want to work in an environment where it takes six months to ramp up.

Oof. Are you going out for L6? Is the goal a big company, or a startup?

Reading all the comments in this thread, I wonder if there’s some correlation to specific areas of the tech industry. e.g., Are people working in the AI space (or even something like ML infra) just inundated with job offers right now?

fwiw I’m a backend engineer – primarily building out services in Java/Scala/Go. I would say the market probably isn’t as good as someone with a Masters/PhD looking for ML engineering roles, but that would be anecdotal after chatting with friends.

> have an average of 3 years at every role

Better than people who job hop every 1-2 years but maybe they’re looking for someone with longevity?

> I’ve either been getting low ball offers

Are they all junior IC level low balls, or is this accidentally revealing why staff level+ engineers aren’t getting calls?

I’ll be honest and say if tomorrow morning I get laid off, I’m not expecting my current pay to get matched.

Sorry for the confusion, I’m trying to interview for only staff/senior staff level roles. This company just had a job listing for “Software Engineer” to build out a new initiative so I decided check it out. And yeah, not getting the 20% pay bump between job hops that I’m looking for.

There’s no confusion… I’m asking is your definition of lowball something like “offering Junior-like pay when I wanted Senior/Staff-like pay”

> And yeah, not getting the 20% pay bump between job hops that I’m looking for.

That kind of answers my question lol. This isn’t the environment where I’d consider not getting a pay bump a low ball.

And ironically that mentality is what I infer when I hear stories like OP’s: These companies assume that people from certain backgrounds have expectations forged in a much more favorable market, and they’d rather not waste their time interviewing someone looking for a 20% pay bump in a down market…

I was looking at some internal metrics for applications. We were seeing ~1000 applications per week for SWE roles and around 500/week for senior SWE.

I’m not sure how many are genuine compared to scatter-shot applications but it means that a lot of recruiters have to dig through huge piles of resumes and odds are good that you’re just being missed in the volume.

There are much fewer resumes for specialized/higher level roles than for junior roles. Infra or Security roles get much fewer applications than junior SWE.

On a personal note, I’ve noticed that recruiter reach outs have increased since mid-February.

I am <1 YOE as an SWE (had other technical roles prior) and I, too, have seen a huge uptick of recruiter emails since the beginning of March.

It’s hard out there. I was laid off in January, and still I don’t see signs of ending this job search soon.

Context for you: I’m a mid-level Growth PM based in Europe who worked mostly in early stage B2B YC startups.

How am I doing? This is my 11th week in job search, 96 applications, 10 interviews (1 still active), and 0 offer.

My insights so far:

– there’s definitively no rush from employers to close their openings, and for the first time in a job search (this is my 4th) I got 2 interviews suspended because they decided to prioritize another leadership hire before closing for the role that I was interviewing for;

– most of the mid level openings are masqueraded senior roles;

I feel so bad for people early in their career, for the first time I think I’ve never encountered an entry level opening… I was trying to also help my wife to get a job in tech (she is very early in her career), but currently it doesn’t seem possible.

Luckily we are financially ok, which is the main thing that allowed me to stay positive, in relatively good mood, and don’t feel overwhelmed with the daily rejections.

Caveat Lector: I’m east coast, so YMMV.

Everything I’ve heard suggests there’s a lot of decisions that are waiting on financial reporting for the quarter before the C-suites make their hiring decisions. MS is not just laying off, they have frozen internal hiring between groups and even projects inside of groups. AWS is waiting on financials, my contact over there is looking to move back to MITRE because he’s worried, and he has high-side access. I know a couple of start ups in the area have had their buyouts put in a holding pattern. Nothing is dire, but the general vibe is “calm before the storm”.

USA, remote. I recently (Feb) found work. I did about 10-15 company interviews at various stages, lots of recruiter calls. I screened out easily 3x the amount of companies due to position requirements or salary. During my job search I probably had 100 or more messages from recruiters on linkedin. Got to the final round on 6. Received 3 offers, accepted one of them.

Not a lot of equity in the comp packages this time around (real equity anyway, plenty of funny money from startups). I accepted a salary of $200k, 20% annual cash bonus, small signing bonus. My overall comp is lower, but my cash is a touch higher and the stress is a lot less.

My background is Linux, k8s, golang, and python. I also write C/C++ occasionally. Don’t really ever touch front end work or databases anymore. I don’t have FAANG experience, but I have contributed to some large open source projects here and there. No degree.

I know the exact feeling. I have over 10 years experience in tech and ~7 years in product. Typically I am looking at 2-3 offers when interviewing for a me job but this time around I methodically applied to nearly 100 jobs with only a handful of interviews and only 1 offer! (which wasn’t even a tech company). I know the job market is supposedly in good place but for tech workers it seems to be the worst market I have seen since I’ve enter the workforce.

In my experience its terrible for juniors, and tough right now for senior devs. I’m applying for Snr SRE/Devops roles — I maybe get a 50 percent response rate since my resume looks good.

Get the call with the recruiter — bla bla bla – we will submit your profile to hiring manager and typically ends there. Its like they are playing games and intentionally messing with you. Somewhere in the process I fall between the cracks, and its rinse and repeat.

Its time consuming and you basically do free work (take-homes), or even assessments as part of the application. Very morale reducing.

Seems like the jobs in demand are for principals/leads/ or management roles.

A year ago with less experience it was much easier to get final round interviews.

I’ve cast a wide fishing net, applying to jobs on Linkedin, through Slack channels, and posted on Hackernews. But to be frank, basically it goes nowhere.

I’m using my time to upskill and read books on tech topics, take video boot camps, and sharpen my coding skills. Its hard to stay motivated without an incentive really. Seems like techies are disposable at this moment and requires a huge ego check.

It sort of baffles me — tech jobs are abundant and I’m not picky — like trying to work as a game dev at a AAA studio or be a screenwriter in Hollywood.

BS and recruiting hell seem to be the norm now

I’ve been searching for about 2 months (laid off early February), and I’ve not had a lot of luck.

Lots of recruiter calls. Several phone screens. A handful of post-phone-screen Round 1 interviews, but no Round 2. One company reached out to me, rejected me after round 1, but put me on their marketing email distro list.

I did have a phone screen yesterday that I think went well. (For that position, an internal recruiter reached out because they saw my post in “Ask HN: Who wants to be hired (April 2023)”). I have two more scheduled for tomorrow. That makes this a relatively busy week.

My last job I was at for nearly 10 years, so I can’t compare this experience to the last few years, but it certainly _feels_ brutal.

This week, I’m feeling positive, but in general, I’ve been worried. I have some severance left and some savings (but not as much as I should). I am also the sole income for my family.

CTO here… great thread! Things are definitely taking longer even if the company really wants to and need to hire! But I agree with some of the comments below that for some positions you get a lot of inbounds thus hard to have enough time to review it all so screening for most relevant skillsets first and go from there. I’m certain 25% of the applicants can do the work but you’d want someone that has work on the tech stack already versus someone that hasn’t. I have confidence they (or anyone) can learn it.

As for compensation differences, the total comp went crazy upwards the last 3 years thanks to the billions of dollars going into a few company that decides to pay 30-50% above market and everyone else need to keep up.

The downside is that the cost structure for many companies ended up to be too high to ever have a profitable company. It’d be great to get back to the early 2010s… where cash burn is the right level and equity is the upside versus startups are paying cash more than some very profitable companies.

We are actively looking and I read all my DMs on LinkedIn so please take a look here. https://boards.greenhouse.io/getbuilt if your actually have the tech experience we’re looking for, send me a DM and I’ll make sure you get a phone screen! But please look at the Guiding Principals as well to make sure your values align with it. Everyone company is different make sure it’s a great fit from both sides.

Another thing that I do screen people out is too many short stints at companies. Unless your startup when under or some personal emergencies, I look for people that stay at least 3 years at a given company before switching. It takes at least 1 years to learn a domain and be proficient at it. Year 2 or 3 is where you’re learning and implementing technologies with deep understanding. By this time you should be at the point to be promoted or get next equity grant. Sometimes it is worth the wait and sometime it’s not so definitely understand if people changes company after 3 or 4 years.

The fact that you have guiding principals already puts you in the top bracket of the firms. Kudos!

I wouldn’t disregard people with short stints, there is so much context out there. Obviously the higher salary hunters is a concern but I have 3x -> 1 year stints on my resume not because I am a terrible human being but others, layoffs, loosing visa, toxic boss, had to move countries due to family illness and all of them in the end ended on good terms. Just saying, give people a chance to explain.

Keep at it. It definitely takes a while to ramp up into doing daily interviews/technical assessments (take homes) but once you are in a good flow, it becomes easier.

I would say that your time is probably better spent leveraging your network, and using Linkedin/Work at a Startup/RemoteOK to find better leads, as there is more favorable signal/noise ratio on these more ‘intimate’ sites (excluding linkedin, but there is still value in Linkedin)

It definitely sucks. Especially when unemployment insurance takes forever (been trying to get a piddly $400 a week from MD where my last employer was located for the last 5 months, and honestly no one there is sympathetic for someone earning 100K+ who now is submitting all the documents and doing everything needed to get unemployment checks)

It’s tough out there. If you are really hard up for money, take whatever is available or try to get into consulting. I wish I had better answers, but I’m in the same boat.

I’m in the process of considering a change, still not actively applying, but I do get several LinkedIn DMs every week from first party recruiters. I don’t work with third party staffing agencies.

There is a common theme: they are looking for leadership roles with active contribution and with deep expertise in the tech stack used by the company.

So, where’s the issue here? IMO, the market is saturated with generic software engineers, that is, people who can code, who are good at leetcode, but who really don’t stand out of the crowd in any particular technology. That’s your typical FAANG engineer. And don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of talent in FAANG, but most engineers commit to the grinding to join and then just coast through.

And related to that, there is the unrealistic expectations game. As others have mentioned, people in FAANG were living in their own bubble of unreal financial compensations. Now that the bubble exploded, some have unrealistic expectations that decline even high offers just because it’s not what they had before.

It’s brutal. I’ve been looking since January and only just found a new role. Usually finding a new job has just been setting my LinkedIn status to open to work, tapping a few people in my network and sitting back and waiting for the offers. It’s rarely taken more than a month.

January and February frankly scared me. Aggressively looking as opposed to my usual passive approach and I was getting nothing back. Just silence. I was refereed to a position I was a perfect fit in terms of background for by a previous colleague, and got no reply. They asking internally weren’t able to find out anything either. No one’s been hired and the listing is still up.

March things finally started gaining some traction and I was finally able to land a new position. I actually had two offers, one I frankly didn’t want and was feeling like I’d have to do anyway given I had no other leads, and a couple days later one I was pretty excited about.

So there is hope. I’d say things are visibly improving, but I expect it to suck for awhile. I think I may be a little lucky in that my primary skill-sets are a little niche, so while there are less jobs out there that are a match, it also means I’m competing with 10s (or less) instead of 100s that are a strong match. So for the average Java/.NET/React dev I expect it’s harder to stand out.

One thing I’d note since you mentioned Apple/Facebook, I ended up taking a ~25% pay-cut with this search, and I wasn’t making anything like a FAANG salary. I don’t know what your targetting, but if your providing a range when submitting applications, you might want to research salaries for the company on sites like Glassdoor and consider if you need to set your sights lower.

Walmart is serious, or at least I think they are. They had around 1700 job openings at the end of last year, culled that significantly in Jan/Feb. At that point there were about 1000 remaining, and it’s been creeping up again. So I think these are real.

I’m not looking right now but I have several friends that are. It’s not just you. With so many layoffs there’s a lot of folks looking all at once and a number of companies see this as a chance to get very experienced talent at a steep discount _or_ don’t know where their headcount funding will be in six months to a year and are looking to hire very, very sparingly.

Reminds me very much of the Great Recession.

I hope things go well for you.

I’ve not been actively looking for a new role, but the number of inquiries in my LinkedIn inbox has dropped from 6–10 per month to 1–2. I think there is an overall slowdown in hiring, especially in FAANG, and given how many open positions they were hiring for, it’s a significant drop that can be felt, especially in the Bay Area. I believe that with the recent news coming from Twitter and Facebook (cutting middle managers), there will be significantly fewer open positions in middle management roles.

> believe that with the recent news coming from Twitter and Facebook (cutting middle managers), there will be significantly fewer open positions in middle management roles.

This still hasn’t materlized at META though. There have been no middle managment layoffs at meta. Reamins to be seen if mark was just bluffing.

Depends on the role. Lots of companies are cutting out middle managers. Existing engineering managers across the industry are being asked to lead larger teams and even write code. From what I can see senior ICs are still very much in demand.

Well yeah, all the big companies have hiring freezes and there’s currently a ton of talent looking out there.

Give it some time and investors will demand growth which can no longer come from cutting people, so they’ll have to start actually growing their products and will need people for that.

Are you based on SF/SV region? This might explain it (due to a saturation of “high-quality” generalist developers).

I don’t know man. I am employed but I still get 64 recruiting emails a day. Seems like business as usual. FWIW I have never had luck with applications. The last time I was unemployed I sent out 10 or 15 and heard nothing. I reached out to a recruiter and was drowning in interviews within a week.

As for the other side, I do hiring on my team. We posted a Senior SRE on linkedin and got 30 applicants within a week. That was not our experience 2 months ago(more like 5). Maybe something has changed. I don’t know I don’t pay too much attention.

I keep seeing things that suggest recruiters are keeping active to look active but not much going on beyond that. That is, people may be getting hit up for things that aren’t going to pan out for any of the people they touch – they just want full schedules.

Or you may be super in demand, too!

> but I still get 64 recruiting emails a day

Recruiters recruit. When it’s harder to get people hired, I suppose that means recruiters have to work harder/smarter.

If you’re getting more recruiter outreaches than most people, maybe it’s what you’re plugged into, or (I suppose) some recruiters might still be operating on the old rule that a poached hire is preferred to a currently unemployed one.

(Even though, given the large number of layoffs from prestige/upscale companies lately, I’d think that being laid off isn’t a bad signal on someone. And the laid off person might be more likely candidate to get to accept an offer, and therefore maybe preferable to spending recruiting time on.)

My experience may be off, but FAANG salaries the last 5 years have been so huge maybe normal looks cheap now.

Most companies don’t need or care about good people. They need cheap people who can keep the machines running and not break anything too badly until they either get acquired or they absolutely have to invest in fixing their stack.

It’s not just you. I’ve been applying to junior/mid-level full stack roles with ~2 YoE with little luck for the past 2 months. I also sent around 100 applications a month and got a single interview. I’ve started tailoring my applications more and moved away from LinkedIn which is flooded by third-party recruiting agencies who take a 10 second look at your CV before you’re binned – to platforms such as Cord, Otta and Hackajob, which I’m having much more luck on. I got 3 interview offers today, it’s looking better.

I can only speak from the hiring side: I’ve been working at the same large-ish enterprise company in the Bay Area for 9 years out of college. Up until this year, it was nearly impossible to hire anybody qualified. We are now drowning in candidates from FAANG, rejecting candidates that would have passed with flying colors just last year.

150 job applications in a week! Last time, my strategy was to send out one a day, but do a bunch of research about whether I would actually be good for that company, and also very specifically tailor the resume to the job. That worked pretty quickly for me, but as you say, it’s a different market right now. Best of luck.

Might help if folks post locations of where they’re looking? I get a general vibe (with no hard data) that the NYC area has no shortage of work for SWEs, but other cities might not? I’d be curious to hear other folks’ thoughts on their locations.

Yes, I had my LinkedIn location set to NYC since I was living there before and forgot to update it. As soon as I set my status to #opentowork I started getting messages from recruiters for roles in NYC (and some in Chicago). To be sure, it was still nowhere near the same level as the “good” times before the recent round of layoffs, but it was something.

I changed my location back to the west coast where I’m currently located, and the drop in messages has been noticeable. So I’m inclined to believe that the west coast tech scene (what I consider “new” tech) has been hit harder. On the east coast there’s still a decent amount of tech openings in finance, defense, and other old school/traditional industries.

It has been for a couple months, yet HN keeps trying to convince us there’s plenty of positions open, just a little slow.

Personally, this is the worst I have experienced in 16 years, also because I’m in Britain and we have our own sets of issues on top.

I am barely keeping afloat with underpaid Upwork gigs. Contracting work is pretty much dead in UK. Recruiters have not landed me a single interview after connecting with two dozen of them. Not a single one in two months.

I went from getting 1-2 recruiters a day sending messages via LinkedIn (with my profile marked not looking) to 1-2 a week (some weeks 0). It seems as if companies across the board have just decided not to hire anyone while laying people off. We’ve laid off like a dozen people in our 50 person engineering team and we’re building more than ever (the people still on the team are _tired_). We’ll see how it all plays out over the next few months.

There is also a compounding factor happening at least in EU.

Because many candidates are now readily available without notice period, companies can hire much faster and as a consequence decide to hire more slowly because their hiring budget for H1 is almost entirely spent already.

FAANG haven’t got a great reputation in other walks of life. People see the perks and pay you’ve been given and with little expected return. There’s huge attitudes to work that need to be unlearned by ex-FAANG. Many won’t even interview you.

> Have normally found a new job within a few weeks, but this time it has been 4 months.

That’s because during COVID, tech had unprecedented hiring rates.

Google, Facebook, etc literally 2x their employee count in just a couple of years. And these are companies already at massive scale with 10s thousands of employees.

How easy it was to find a job over the last few years was not normal.

Even before Covid an experienced competent engineer could easily find a decent job in around a month. Longer for large tech companies due to the lengthy interview process but you’d at least be in the pipeline.

It is brutal. Even with 20+ YoE and a couple of FAANGs on the resume, the response rate is 1/10th of what I saw a couple of years ago.

Tbh it was always not that great with “too much experience”. I feel that the best response rate is on that sweet spot of around ~5 years, probably because you already know enough but are still relatively cheap for the employer.

I imagine that with that much exp and FAANGs on resume you are still negotiating FAANG salary, which are kind of the outliers of the industry.

Idk, the dev market in my country (Poland) stills seems to be in a good shape, but we’re earning pennies comparatively (50k USD would be a top 1% senior position) so not sure if that’s actually better. I might get a stable salary and lots of companies to choose from if there’s anything I don’t like, but you can beat my earnings with a 3-month side gig, so… 😀

Staff engineer here, I can confirm the market is brutal.

Readers, if you are wondering how to help: please read my résumé before interviews, and ideally, look at my github. I’ve been rejected for roles because I did not mention something in the interview, even though it is clearly on my résumé. Also please take cultural differences into account. I got a rejection because during the architectural interview, I phrased some of questions as “In this case, if X, I would…” instead of asking a direct question. English is not my first language, I did the best I can, it was disappointing to be rejected for that.

> I’ve been rejected for roles because I did not mention something in the interview, even though it is clearly on my résumé.

That’s gonna happen unfortunately. People don’t read resumes closely. If you think it’s important, make sure to mention it during the interview. Unfortunately you have to learn to talk like a politician and answer the question you want to answer instead of the one they asked, while still making them feel like you answered their questions.

I’m reading a lot of comments saying before it took them 1 week to get an offer and now it takes 4/5 months… that’s not a lot. It is basically the same time it used to take me to get an offer for a non IT job in the past.

Location is irrelevant to most, if not all, forms of knowledge work. The pandemic pushed remote work style and it’s unlikely to put that genie back in the bottle. Butt-in-seat mentality is for dinosaurs.

While I agree that location shouldn’t be relevant, the fact is that many companies will absolutely use (and probably already are using) this period of time as leverage to push for hybrid/full on-site roles instead of remote. The few remote roles advertised get quickly flooded with applications.

Can confirm from the other side. Our company is not famous, and it takes us a few weeks to make a hire instead of months —- without lowering the bar.

Meta point (pun unintended): the gravy times are over for us SW engineers, and I won’t be surprised if looking back many will see the past decade as a wasted opportunity for some sort of collective bargaining, or a greater seat at the table of businesses

People said that in 2002. There’s always been ebb and flow since the beginning of time. Irrational exuberance is the nature of crowds of speculators.

during a previous downturn, I just took six months off

if the market is lousy, its lousy…even if you get something, the offers could be lowball or inferior positions

no one judged me or questioned this, it seemed sensible to take a time out during a crappy market

not everyone can swing a “sabbatical”, but if you can, I doubt anyone will judge you for it

My issue is that I’ve taken an 18 months sabbatical, worked on my mental and physical health, and was ready to get back in the market, pumped, with the worst possible timing.

So now I’m broke and still without a job after 3 months of looking. I am honestly terrified.

I am in exactly the same position, if our experience are the same though at least we aren’t burned out anymore. I am uncertain what the next move is though. The timing indeed couldn’t have been any worse lol.

I’m getting a lot of recruiter spam lately, but a lot of it is low effort and AI driven.

A local unicorn reached out recently on LinkedIn with what looked like an organic message, so I gave them a chance. The interviewer was stand-offish and bitter. I then checked out their LinkedIn page and they had laid off 10% of their workforce in the previous 6 months.

I am not a big fan of interviewing, but I have noticed a corporatization trend among small companies, where they tell you things like “it’s up to the hiring manager” which means they are not actually hiring anybody, or you are making enough money that you are out of their league, etc.

One of the things I miss the most about the 2020-2022 period is how honest those companies used to be, and how smoothly money was flowing even for the average Joe.

I’ve been doing okay, lots of targeted recruiter interest, but I have a pretty specialized set of domain knowledge that is useful for a specific industry (energy efficiency, basically) and gets me in the front door for most companies doing the stuff I know about, since they aren’t as affected by the current tech downturn (everyone always needs energy). I not as worried about AI powered software engineering or other SWEs taking my job since I write algorithms that AI just can’t do, yet, but someday when there’s a glut of software engineers some will probably learn what I do and apply it better than I am able to. I’m hoping my current small startup survives and does well, so I don’t have to try finding another job, though.

Applied to 3 companies in the last month, got 2 offers. Senior FE dev, Europe. Got lucky I guess, but we’re still extremely privileged. I’m getting 8 spam messages from recruiters weekly, used to get 20 daily. The big question is – is getting approached by recruiters a few times a week brutal compared to other jobs?

I wonder if finding a job was easier in 90s and 2000s.

It feels like finding employment is getting harder and harder. There is much more specialization required nowadays (so many YOE in exactly the same field and software frameworks), rapidly shifting trends (that can leave out many people who are not lucky working in an area that is in demand), elevated expectations (see the number of the rounds of interviews) and increased competition (more and more people having access to the same jobs due internet).

It was definitely easier in the 2000s. At that time there was so much to build and not that many people to compete with.

Seems brutal. No prestigious company on my resume and I’m trying to switch fields – so far only no-responses and auto-rejections.

If you have a “name” in the industry, meaning you are some sort of 10x developer, which 99% is not — companies will actively poach you like you are some NBA all-star. For the normal people out there — even having a big-name company on your CV won’t get you far. And forget telling them you got laid-off or out of work — you’ll be tossed out. Hiring has never been an honest process — eliminated my expectations that any company is trying to help you.

I was recruited proactively just through linked in. Try banks. They still try to digitalize afterCOVID not fun but pays well.

I’ve definitely noticed it’s a lot softer market than any other time I’ve seen it. Not totally dead but not great, especially since I’m really trying to find a role I actually want to be in this time (historically I haven’t been very picky other than the comp number and it led to a bit of burnout).

Working for a living is always as far from a “sure thing” as possible.

Government jobs tend to be the safest.

Making less and downsizing is sometimes necessary.

If you have the talent, always be doing something on the side.

No the market is not brutal. We dont know your bubble we can’t possibly know what kind of jobs you are apply for nor do we know what comp do you expect.

There is a high possibility you are applying to jobs where you are not a good fit (i.e overqualified).

Everyone mass spamming their resume blindly to hundreds of positions in response to the flooded market is only making it harder for companies to sift through applications or actually read resumes.

AI is getting people past initial screen and then ghosted and the “right fit” people not even getting looked at.

It’s self fulfilling and will eventually resolve itself when the market picks up and standards are lowered. (Assuming that happens before GPT5.

If you can sit this cycle out for 6+ months and work on your own stuff or take a sabbatical you can help accelerate us out of this period of chaos.

In EU it’s brutal right now for senior/lead roles. But it’s fine for medium ones. Nobody needs a rockstar to do a boring enterprise work.

Mass applying to hundreds of positions with a single non-tailored resume has never worked and will never work. If you want interviews you need to get a referral.

That depends on the company. Some you need a referral to attach to your resume. Some you need to send your resume to the person referring you – who will then personally give it to the hiring manager. Some the hiring manager isn’t allowed to know about the referral (the company like that I know of gives to the referring employee – but that is only about generating leads, not hiring decisions).

You have to figure out what is the way your target company works. Note that companies change how they work over time so make sure you have the latest information for the department you want to be in.

That likely implies an opportunity play for the category.

Some categories are vacant because of no first movers (frontier migrants get slaughtered) while others are vacant because there’s not enough money in them.

I see the possibility of having AI agents interview and quiz people: far more people than any human hiring manager could ever interact with. And then, the algorithms would deliver the best fraction of candidates for final/manual review. Throw away the résumé algorithms and interact with humans to discover their talents and qualities that keywords cannot locate.

This is possible in narrow specialized AI domains such as coding and chat bots. Clearly, AGI is 10-100 years off in the distance.

The extreme value potential is apply similar discernment of exceptionally talented hiring managers in narrow domains that AI could not necessarily be fooled as easily by. Interrogation by chatbot seems a plausible future in most human activities.

Have you considered moving abroad? I’m a mediocre engineer compared to the rockstars in my field and I regularly get interviews at startups, and medium to large companies here in Germany.

I feel as though the jobs are for me to take or the interviews are for me to fail.

Honestly think about it. I do interviews for the company I work for (though I’m a senior data engineer I really like being people facing and meeting folks) and the market here is hungry for talent.

The larger companies might be laying off like their American counterparts but smaller (less aggressively tech focused) firms (like real estate, banking, manufacturing, pharma, etc) are hiring like crazy and so are startups.

Good luck to you!

How did you handle your initial relocation?

I’m an American with German citizenship and a decent (~C1) grasp of the language and I toy with the idea of moving there from time to time.

But it seems like first you need to get a company that’s willing to hire you and wait for you to relocate before starting, no?

As jselysianeagle points out in response to this it seems it’s tough here, too. I guess that’s the case. I had a former colleague who is very much a stronger Data Engineer than I am take about 3 months to find their ideal role. The thing is when the layoffs happened at his old firm he got the 3 months notice period that is common here plus some severance that held him over for a few months on top of that which meant finding new work was not a stressor.

But as the OP points out if you’re a competent person and interview well and are good at what you do (and one would hope someone at the highest tiers of the industry working at places like Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc. are) then finding work here in the EU is not hard.

From what I have seen EU companies would all but kill for really strong US talent. They can’t get this talent because would be folks be they in the US or abroad want to go or stay in the US for those bonkers high salaries. But if living and working in the EU is appealing then the perks are really, really nice. ~30 days of vacation time on top of public/bank holidays. Family leave for the birth of children. Really long notice periods in the case of being fired or laid off. Good severance. And then all the perks of social welfare states like subsidized or social medicine, good public transit, good travel to other countries etc., etc.

So to answer sneed_chucker’s question:

A few years ago while perusing the Who’s Hiring here on HN I saw that a startup based in Hamburg (I didn’t know where that was at the time) was hiring for a Python engineer. I applied (only having taught myself Python to an beginner+_level but was eager to learn) and I got the role!

They handled all the visa paperwork and for a while my visa was tied to my employer. It’s called a blue card here. Think of it like a green card. And as long as I was making > 50k euros and such I could live in Germany. When I changed employers I had to get my blue card updated. Since I’ve been here about 5 years now I have an open ended one so when I change employers I do not have to get it updated.

I really do like it here a lot.

Small plug: DeliveryHero, based in Berlin, — the company I work for currently — regularly (well we used to, let’s see when hiring picks up again) hired folks from abroad and upon the first salary was often a relocation bonus of 5k euros or more to help folks get settled here. It’s based on where you’re coming from so if you were coming from the US I’d think it’d be closer to 7.5k or 10k even.

Hope that helps!

> But it seems like first you need to get a company that’s willing to hire you and wait for you to relocate before starting, no?

Yes. DO NOT JUST SHOW UP IN GERMANY ON A 90 DAY VISA HOPING TO FIND WORK. Most apartments won’t even give you a lease without a job and it’s hard to get a job without a proper visa. Do the work before hand.

Someone elsewhere in this very thread is claiming that the market for Senior/Lead level roles in EU right now is in fact tough. In your experience is getting a visa sponsorship in Germany as hard and limiting as it is here in the US?

I’m not too familiar with the H1B visa situation in the US but from what I understand if you lose your job there’s a clock to get another one or get deported.

In Germany for example there’s a longer lead time to getting laid off or being fired. And the bigger companies often help, especially those on visas, find work. I’d say the only “easier” thing is the time and that you don’t lose healthcare and such. And there’s an unemployment insurance that taps out at some 2500 or so euros a month that you can tap into.

>Submitted 150 job applications last week.

Try customizing a few of the applications for the specific position you look to fill.

Yeah this was what I noticed too. I write custom cover letters for jobs that I apply to, and it often takes 30-60 minutes. Sometimes I’ll even tailor my resume for the ad. But I also only apply for a job every week or two, and I only apply to ones that I’m actually very interested in.

Not just the cover letter, also the experience. Look at the job description and keywords. Make sure your relevant history is there early and the things less relevant used as filler.

In the US we mostly use resume which is a short summary and you are expected to take off things that are not relevant. In Europe I understand they more use the CV format which allows for more length for experience that we don’t care about.

Has this been working for you?

At times, I’ve had panic mode set in and _feel_ like I need to apply to every little job that looks remotely decent, but I don’t know if that’s _actually_ helping.

The more remotely decent the job is the more important it is to customize. I have hired people who have never worked in my niche before, but if all I see is irrelevant experience with no indication you want a new field you go in the pin. Convince me that despite not having the right experience you want a new field and you get a chance.

150 resumes sounds like you’re just shotgunning them out there willy nilly. Maybe take a more nuanced approach and work your network a little bit. Your network could even just be people you’ve worked with in the past who respect you and enjoyed working with you, doesn’t need to be people you actively keep up with.

It’s hard to keep morale up after spending multiple hours composing a few thoughtful, “good fit” applications, just to be auto-rejected immediately upon submission without them even being seen by a human. I don’t even bother anymore unless I have someone on the other end who’s willing to usher my application straight to a hiring manager.

Yeah tailoring your resume is an exercise in futility when the most common outcome is either no response or an auto reject email.

Changing a few keywords or whatever is one thing, but trying to go bullet-point accuracy for the listing is a total waste of time when 95% of the time the resume is never viewed by a human.

I agree – that’s why my advice isn’t to merely spend more time studying who you’re sending resumes to – instead, ask friends and friends of friends for recommendations to get your foot in the door. I worked at a company that a lot of techies aspired to work at at one point, and if your resume came in through the unsolicited form, you had basically a 0% chance of anyone even seeing your resume. But if your resume was recommended by a current employee (not vouching for them absolutely, just telling the recruiters – hey, check this out), then you had like a 1-2% chance of getting hired. Which doesn’t sound great but it is far better than 0%.

What’s your vantage point though? Are you a “normal” senior seeing salaries going up from $175k and GP is a FAANG seeing salaries going down from $400k?

note: I don’t have data points for either, I’m genuinely curious

This seems extremely counter-intuitive. I’d figure with so many experienced and talented people looking, it would be an employer’s market and they’d use it to reign in pay at least a bit. Why do you think this might not be occurring?

I would expect that from the employer’s point of view, it’s not a sea of “amazing candidates to choose from, any of which would be a good fit for my company.” When they find someone who ticks all the boxes, they can expect that person will tick the boxes for other companies as well, so best to make a reasonable offer that the candidate will take.

Are average companies offering $300K to Senior/Staff Engineers this days? Not often. Are they offering < $150K? Not if they're serious about hiring people. The numbers are somewhere in the middle.

This. You can try lowering your salary for the job req but you’ll end up with unfavorable candidates. So you go for the good ones and the good ones know what they are worth and are holding out collectively. Strange how economics works sometimes. Now, ask me again in a year.

that is just simply not true. all evidence including anecdotal points to much lower salaries than we saw in last 2 years. Where and for which roles are you seeing salaries climb?

All the salary benchmarks. If you look at the trends overall (not entry level, those have dropped 4%, and not outliers, the $300k+ folks) compared to last year, it’s up. For how long I can’t say. I do think there will be a downtick in general for all folks but there’s still a lot of companies looking for talent. Whether or not they still have the budget is yet to be seen outside of FAANG and co. Most won’t know until end of quarter at best.

Not everyone had their chips in FTX and SVB. People are still hiring.

Salaries only rarely go down. They might stagnate for a while (and thus go down relative to inflation!), but nobody likes making less money than before so it is very hard to reduce salaries no matter how much someone is overpaid.

Here in Europe I have noticed that the task of auditing software for safety/privacy compliancy is going to lawyers, chartered accountants, and business consultants.

Is it because they are cheaper? Not really, in most of Western Europe these people make the same or more than software developers.

We tech people need to be more assertive and protective of our cake.

Why does the EverybodyShouldLearnToCode™ movement even exist? I don’t see lawyers, accountants and business consultants pushing for their cake to become smaller.

I know this probably isn’t helping, but have you ever thought about building a startup?

This lull might be a good chance to launch something or find a scrappy team to join.

Hardly advice if your situation demands something more stable. I just wanted to speak to the possibility.

Four startups in. One break even, one still going (micro vc fund). Two failed.

Not sure if I’m up for it at this moment.