~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.

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.

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.

Anyone that gets into defense because of this thread, remember that the technologies you develop will be used to slaughter the innocent.

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 know plenty of people who took pay cuts to work in cleared jobs at Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. If you're talented, you can make a lot in the defense and intelligence community.

> and your sensitive data will get hacked by China anyway

Hacked? No. Most sensitive data is kept on air-gapped networks. Not really hackable. Can be exfiltrated, sure, but that's part of the point of the extensive background checks.

> it's assumed that you don't know "foreign persons" (hint: This is actually now a mark of the lower-class and uneducated.)

Not even remotely true. You do have to report contacts you know to be non-US citizens, but that's not disqualifying. I knew someone who filled out over 200 pages of foreign contact forms, and still obtained TS/SCI clearance.

> a software engineer without an advanced degree is basically nobody

Not accurate. Most people I knew in the cleared space didn't even have computer science degrees; most of us had bachelor's degrees in unrelated subjects, many even non-STEM (several history/English degrees).

> cloud stuff is mostly off limits

Somewhat true, but surely you're aware of AWS and Azure building out substantial private clouds for intelligence and defense customers?

> work may happen in windowless rooms

Rarely. Most SCIFs have windows, in my experience.

> perks are non-existent

Depends on the employer. But sure.

> and it's embarrassing to answer "so what do you do for a living" if you're trying to exist in blue-state society.

I did cleared work in Seattle. I don't think I've ever voted Republican. I've voted Green on a number of occasions. Same story for most of my coworkers. The most left-leaning people I know never had an issue with my job.

I think there are two ways of thinking about this: First, your presence there means someone more conservative isn't there, and you can maybe effect some small change. Second, any job at a sufficiently large corporation is ultimately killing people, even if indirectly; there's no way you can work to enrich billionaires at the expense of the working class and feel like you're contributing to the net good of society unless you're engaging in some serious cognitive dissonance. At least, IMO.

Caught myself clicking upvote 100500 times. Index finger hurts

It's not insult if it's verifiably true, is it?

There are plenty of people that are okay with their work being used to kill babies. They can work defense jobs. I just wanted to provide a little reality check for downtrodden devs considering defense work for the first time, because I'm sure a lot of them in fact are not okay with their work being used to kill babies.

You are being incredibly uncharitable, bordering on dishonesty. Cars kill babies every year too but it’s not why people get into the automobile industry.

And this isn’t the “reality check” own that you think it is. It’s actually very condescending, and reductionist. You have not even attempted to refute the idea that a defense industry is necessary to maintain peace.

No, I want people that aren't baby-killers to avoid it. That's all. The defense industry is important and needs staff, staff that are OK with babies being killed.

It's starting to sound like you're a baby-killing defense industry employee, and if you are I want you to understand that I don't hate you. I just dislike drone strikes against children and hospitals.

Couldn’t be further from the truth. No defense, no finance is the promise I made to myself when I started my career.

My point is that you are insulting the intelligence of people both in and out of the field with toxic, pithy remarks like that. It serves no purpose but to agitate.

I’m gonna reflect really hard on this

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.

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.

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.

That's how I see the United States and the old USSR, modern Russia and to a lesser extent, China (I tend to view China much more favorably than Russia). Does that mean the U.S. is perfect? Nope, we're not. Sometimes we're wrong and disastrously so. Does that mean every Russian is bad? Nope, I've worked alongside many awesome Russians over the decades. Some were even in the Russian Army at the same time I was in the Marine Corps and we've laughed that here we are now in a bar having a beer together whereas a few years before we would have been on a battlefield trying to kill one another.

In that regard I see Putin and Trump very similarly. Putin has reminded us that Russia hasn't advanced as much as we'd thought, and Trump showed us that our lesser selves were always there under the surface brewing and waiting for a monster such as him to release our demons and let them run amok. They're old-school people from whom the reigns of power should be taken away.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley#History

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.

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?

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

~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).

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).

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.

Did the same. Boy do I feel dumb now.

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.

“ Com­pet­ing with thou­sands of other work­ers for po­si­tions he sus­pected might not ac­tu­ally get filled or get­ting a low­ball of­fer didn’t ap­peal, so Mr. Moyni­han has in­stead been lever­ag­ing his strate­gic part­ner­ship skills to help clients on a project ba­sis at a rate of $300 an hour.

“It’s a cau­tion­ary tale for the ti­tans be­cause I do think amaz­ing tal­ent is be­ing dis­persed into smaller tech com­pa­nies that even­tu­ally end up com­pet­ing,” he said.“

I'm a good 3-5yr, mid-level dev, without FAANG company experience.

isn't it the opposite?. All I see is doom and gloom in the news.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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)

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.

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).

"We need two or three seniors who, between them, can handle the fact that our cloud resources are split between AWS and Azure 80/20, who understand security well enough to enforce least privilege for users, can write reliable if inelegant code in bash, python, golang and - when we have embedded stuff - lua. We'd also like people to be cost aware since we aren't made of money, and to be able to take ownership of CI, observability, logging, k8s in the form of EKS, a few VMs, and some difficult to change legacy stuff. Plus, provide the devs with a sensible local environment to work in that is as prod-like as you can make it, mentor a junior or two, wrap everything into some kind of infrastructure-as-code setup, present options to architects who are sometimes operating outside their field of expertise, and run the standups a d retros when your manager is on holiday"

Or as they would call it, "devops".

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?"

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 <insert language>" 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)

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.

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.

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'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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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...

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

1. Every company wants to show off it's "really high bar" ... For building yet another crud service ... handling 1qps (that is still a 100k qpd so don't laugh at it).

2. So they read about what the fangs do and naturally copy all the terrible parts (impact impact impact, more artifacts just for evidence, write realms and realms of repeated documents before writing a line of code so you can show "influence", leetcode and more). Why aren't they copying the good parts - oh we are still a small company and tight on resources.

3. Naturally they couldn't demand this when the market was hot. Now they feel unleashed. So are going nuts either in the form of taking their sweet time ("evaluate and dig deep into our hiring pipeline") or with ridiculous and arbitrary hiring loops. (I had one cto ask me to demo a personal project only to back out after he felt insecure about what I had built - sure could be my opinion).

Another one I had never written a cover letter in my life before and this time I had to write 2000 word essays on why I thought company X was better than Jesus and why and when Id sacrifice my left nut for the honor of being chosen by them.

Sigh I suppose human nature had to come out. But thankfully I did get lucky and met some amazing people who were there when I needed them. My only advice (ok selection bias) is to network like hell. Good roles aren't coming by just applying on LinkedIn (I don't this was ever true but more so now). If you have to send a resume you've already lost is what I am getting reassured of. Hope ymmv.

When you apply all these filters you're left with... no one.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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

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.

Reminds me very much of the Great Recession.

I hope things go well for you.

Walmart has 1278 job openings with “software” in the title https://careers.walmart.com/results?q=software&page=1&sort=r...

CVS has 458 https://jobs.cvshealth.com/job-search-results/?keyword=softw...

UnitedHealth has 625 https://careers.unitedhealthgroup.com/job-search-results/?ke...

WSJ just wrote about this https://archive.is/2Ll06

Go down the list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_500

https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/fake-jobs-hide-cooler-...

It's sometimes incompetent HR process and sometimes intentional market signalling, but these companies may just be stockpiling resumes for future use without any intention of hiring right now.

It's a wonderful company and pays super well, great people, but good luck getting in.

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.

Or you may be super in demand, too!

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.)

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.

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 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!

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Maybe there are very good reasons you left jobs after 1 year or less, but from the hiring manager's perspective, its not worth their time when there are 100 resumes to choose of people who never left a job in less than 2 years.

Don't worry though, this isn't the same high-pass filter everyone is applying, and your resume is likely to make it past filters elsewhere.

There is nothing wrong with this obviously, just statistically speaking you might still miss out on very good talent (not referring to myself by any means).

From my personal experience though, I wouldn't know if that was the reason why the CV was tossed, but once transitioned into the interview stage it was never the issue.

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

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

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 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.

https://featuresandlabels.notion.site/Join-us-at-fal-cf36c13...

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.

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.

"Willy nilly is an idiom that means "haphazardly" or "spontaneously"."

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/willy-nilly

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 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... :D

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).

then i got an idea. in 2008 i created a company where i wanted to work after not being able to find an agency in NYC that i felt had good culture.. so i should do it again. this time, however, there would be a mission… i want to unfuck how hiring is done.

if, as job seekers we can share knowledge of how recruiters and hiring companies behave, we can spare each-other grief and unnecessary pain and suffering when we look for work.

recruiter reviews, by candidates for candidates.

it’s very new, has quirks that i’m working out, and is simply a chrome extension that runs on top of LinkedIn. reviews contribute to a calculated score, and the details of any review are never shared with anybody. job seekers come first, recruiters get held accountable for the reputations they deserve.

https://hirerank.cc give it a swing, let me know what you think.

would you mind sharing the issue or concern about using a browser extension?

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.

After viewing the comments I see a few things that stand out.

People are mass sending their resumes. I think this shotgun approach doesn’t really work given the state of how many people are submitting resumes. You will get filter out.

The idea is to get you in front of hiring managers.

This is where recruiters come into play. Working with recruiters that has continuously placed candidates at job x is a better approach.

Write cover letters to the hiring manager. Your resume has to be tailored to the role. Write follow up letters showing your interest for the role.

Companies are willing to hire a less experienced engineer over someone with more due to their greater interest in the role.

If you think your experience alone is going to get you the interview or job, think again, FAANG engs are having a tough time securing roles.

You need to make it sound like there’s no other place you would rather work at for the next five years than there. However do this without sounding desperate but with great interest and a desire to contribute and offer something.

In a flourishing or surplus market, I wouldn’t normally do any of these as it’s not required. In the previous market anyone could get in front of managers without much effort.

However we are in dire times where companies are careful who they hire and one has to really stand out to be picked.

Be picky and don’t just chase anything, even if you’re desperate.

Gluck.

I recently made the jump from FAANG and am very content with the decision.

Feel free to msg with questions.

I noticed that the email confirmation links are using http:// vs. https://. Chrome has started to flag http:// links with a full-page speed bump, saying it is insecure. Perhaps those links should use https://?

I did try manually switching to https:// in the URL but Chrome didn't like the cert there either.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.