I'm not really what the official definition of blitzscale is (or if there is one). I assume it means scale (specifically grow head count) really fast.

Labor stats don't agree. The reason technworker pay has soared is scarcity.

To be frank, "too inexperienced to get a job? time to contribute to open source!" is almost always a glib and unhelpful retort. If someone can't get recruiters to reach out, they probably don't have the expertise to build open source, and vice versa. Open source is not a dumping ground for inexperienced newcomers.

You still haven’t given your advice. If you’re going to be critical of mine you could add something positive in counter.

So I guess depending exactly on the specifics, "my TC dropped by 50%" might not really be a very meaningful statement without more context.

That's usually because so much of the total comp is from options/RSUs. You can take a new job that pays more in base pay but take a huge cut because it's a startup (so the option are worth nothing on paper today) vs. a public company with RSUs that have value on the open market.

Or, as the current market is showing, you could take a huge cut in pay even while staying on the same role, simply because the RSUs are suddenly underwater.

My base salary has been on a slow but steady increase for decades. But my total comp has taken wild swings up and down. It's an industry where pay is very unpredictable, due to most of it being in options/RSUs.

And families can live on $100k or less per year, so one partner can take a 50% pay cut without it destroying their life.

There were, and still are a ton of recruiters hitting me up. Most of them are garbage, probably 95%. I still feel like a broke the salt circle by telling people I was actively looking for a new opportunity.

I have a family and need insurance for one of my daughters with special needs, so I went hard at interviewing. It took a solid 6 months, but I had half a dozen offers for Sysadmin work that met the pay I needed. The hardest part about comparing offers is the benefits... Different copays, deductibles, OOP max, and premiums. Also different pay schedules can make it difficult to compare premiums. Then you have waiting periods...

I ended up with an excellent opportunity and I've been super impressed, but it was a rough 6 weeks.

The majority of offers I received were from companies I applied to directly. I had some I cut short in early interview phases because I started my new job. Stability trumps the chase for afew more dollars. The market is still good, but remote hiring is slow, although in person wasn't really much faster at most companies.

You need competing offers to get a good offer - so you need to interview at places you have little interest in actually working for.

I would expect a lot of these people either got a good enough offer, or good enough competing offers, or just didn't get an offer from where they actually want to work - so don't need competing offers.

Additionally, there's a lot of people that interview for practice just to keep fresh for when they do need a job, and a lot of people that interview at a few places as practice before they interview at the places they're really targeting.

I'd expect a lot of no-shows from this cohort.

They pretty much fell into two categories.

The first was person companies who wanted you to commit 1-2 days of in person interviewing after completing the phone screen and a at home test. If you are interviewing at multiple companies and are already employed, this is pretty much a no go unless you are already really enticed or want to work there. Even interviewing at just 3 of those places means taking off so much time from work that you'll either tip off your boss that you're on your way out, or use up all your PTO that you ideally use to have a life and not burn out.

The other category was remote interviewing companies. I observed that they did the same number of interview steps as the in person companies but instead of a day or two gauntlet they schedule an hour here, an hour there, an hour another day. This worked well for interleaving interviews in the regular work day without disrupting your current job, but it meant the full interview cycle would take 3-4 weeks on average as both your schedule and the schedule of their mandatory interview members(hiring manager, heads of various departments, whatever their companies "important" person was, etc) had to align. And that is all before there's interruptions like illness, or getting paged to an on call event.

Every company was doing a minimum of 4 hours and an average of 6 hours of interviews with the common gates being 30 minute phone screen, 45-60 minute take home code interview, 60 minute technical interview with 1-2 engineers, 60 minute system design with 1-2 senior engineers/architects, 60 minute interview with equivalent people in product to make sure you have similar philosophies, and then another 45-60 minutes with the hiring manager. Occasionally companies would also add in an hour with prospective teammates to see if you click, and/or an hour with some specific department they felt it was important to have engineering work directly with.

Its frankly a lot of work when you also have to prep for the typical interview questions that exercise a different skill set than the common job, and are likely doing this gauntlet with multiple companies simultaneously. Its also a high amount of spend on the company side when you add up all the man hours they are using per perspective candidate. My take is that the ghosting seen on both sides is because no one wants to deal with all of this once a match has been found.

It's really on companies to fix this. Candidates aren't clamoring for more and more interview time. When I speak to friends in professions outside of tech they are flabbergasted at the the length and depth of the interview process the tech industry has developed. Bad hires can be a problem but I think our industry has overcorrected for that. I won't believe that companies are truly "desperate" until I start seeing this interview process scale back. Desperate companies would be trying to hire a quickly as possible, not tick off all the checkboxes on a list of tests.

I see almost as much speculation that "we've already seen the worst" for this recession as I do that "it's going to get much worse". Even among the crowd that thinks it's going to get worse in 2023 before recovering in 2024, they can be right and also wrong (it could continue to get worse until 2025)

All this together: The VC money will get redirected from blockchain-type of startups to climate startups first, which doesn’t create as many jobs for devs, and then to AI startups if they show some results, but again this employs very different profiles from simple programmers. The rest of the economy will keep inflating a little, despite anything the Fed can do, because scarcity causes inflation.

FOMC = Federal Open Market Committee

FFR = Federal Funds Rate

RRP = Reverse Repo Facility

TGA = Treasury General Account

That means nothing (and I say that as someone with much more than 20 years of experience) - unless all that experience is in exactly the area the hiring company wants - someone with 20 years of the wrong experience (cobol for example) is going to be passed over for someone with 3 years of javascript experience, if you are looking for a JS developer. You probably won't even get passed the HR person if the skills and keywords on your resume don't line up exactly.

I've heard it often said that it depends on what kind of experience, not necessarily its length. Someone could have one year of experience twenty times, or be working in old tech and hasn't kept up with modern practices, costs too much to hire, or a myriad of other reasons for not being preferable over greener candidates.