Ask HN: How's the Job Hunt Going? Greetings fellow engineers. I wanted to share my experience as a software engineer, which is that USA based job seekers are currently having a difficult time. I would't call the global market overall bad though. What is your experience? |
Compare this to a year ago when I got a reply to almost every application I sent out.
I'm kind of kicking myself for being so picky; I haven't had a job in a few years and running out of money (I was never that well-off, but coming from a working-class background I don't live an expensive life). I've had a few bad experiences and I wanted to find something I really liked (I actually had a very well paid "Silicon Valley type" job for a company most here will know last year which I quit after 3 months because they gave me fuck all to do and I felt their engineering ethos was horrible – it just didn't feel right accepting a huge salary and not working for it).
Fortunately, a friend of mine needed dev help with his growth stage company so I've been keeping the lights on contracting and sort of price gouging my hourly rate.
That said, I've really been hoping to land another proper full-time gig. On that front, things are not looking good. I had about a year under my belt as a newly transitioned (4YOE SWE 1YOE TPM) TPM so I'm sort of double fucked. Tech companies don't want to hire flip flopping devs and product people with less than a year of experience are basically un hire-able.
It's been four months, but at least I have some income to show for it. Had maybe three interviews, two recruiters reach out in this entire time. Probably around 100 applications.
I can’t get interviews anymore. Every now and then I get one and it goes nowhere, and I almost never make it past the first round. My LinkedIn profile views now show mostly as “salespeople” instead of recruiters.
I’ve lost a lot of money thanks to emergency expenses that happened towards the beginning and have been steadily bleeding my savings through general cost of living. I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be able to keep it up, but at this point I’m pretty much convinced I’ll run out of money before I can get a new job.
If I had to guess, I imagine that in this market, there are just a lot of other people seeking work with much more impressive resumes.
Bleak.
And the spreadsheets are good because they make it easy for someone who isn't connected to the network to view data from ARCH.
And ARCH is helpful because it keeps track of the orders, makes sure the products get printed out, packaged, and shipped to the right places. ARCH can do billing too, but I think we use quickbooks to do that.
Also the printers are necessary because we print out designs on paper and then use heat to sublimate the ink onto the textiles. I've heard rumors that we might start doing direct-to-garment printing but that would require a lot of changes to our process and I think it might not even be cost effective.
I'm curious about the location, you can share your area if you wish, or just country.
Are these applications for positions that are flooded with resumes? (can be seen on linkedin)
I'm looking for a FT remote position (as I'm based in central PA). I've previously worked in the NYC area for about 10 years and prior to that was a traveling consultant at IBM.
Some of the positions have received quite a few resumes. Others have not or were applied to outside of LinkedIn/Indeed. LinkedIn has listed me as being in the Top 10% or Top 25% of applicants for some of the positions. So far this seems to be the toughest job market that I have been searching in.
higher wage expectations and lower tolerance for BS.
companies know this.
Luckily my personal expenses are very low so I don't NEED to work, but I'm definitely discouraged right now.
A little over two weeks of submissions, 20 sent and 4 rejections so far.
Magically, automatically. You are really giving employers too much credit. It only takes a few years of watching middle management to see how silly planning is. Don't raise management on a pedestal.
That said, it looks like your timing isn't the best :-(
I can't give you any more concrete advice based on this, and it may also depend on where you live, but you're welcome to email me your CV and I can take a look if there's something that you can improve (email in profile).
The doomspelling of the tech job market is both overly exaggerated and heavily biased toward experiences of junior and intermediate developers. If you have a decade or more of experience, it's business as usual.
Other's experiences may suggest it's not. Some experienced people spend more than half a year - and sometimes more than a year - to get an offer, even a modest one. 12-18 months ago the situation was reportedly better.
When I go to look at jobs, and I put on the remote filter, it significantly decreases options. For example at the current moment if I look at jobs on LinkedIn with the search I’ve been using that have been posted within the last day, I get a little over 500 results. However I used uBlock to cut out “promoted” positions which are often stale and irrelevant to my search, so there’s probably less than that. What remains are mix of weird niche positions, low quality agency spam, a bit of non-dev or otherwise irrelevant listings, and a minority of jobs that I actually look qualified for worth applying to.
Comparatively, when I switch to filter for only on-site or hybrid positions with the same search, I get over 3000 results, with many more jobs relevant to my resume.
I really, really, really do not want to move right now, and I’m not sure if in the end I’d rather just settle for an on site position that will force me into a costly move, or just cut my losses and try to start my life over from scratch while I still have the chance.
I do think remote was a "fad" to some degree, people were ushering in a "new era of work that will forever change things", and that clearly wasn't going to happen. While I do really like remote work, it's not without its downsides, both for employees and employers. I think almost everyone who worked remote before COVID realized this.
That said, certainly for software development, I don't think remote work is going away. It existed before COVID and will exist after COVID, and in that sense it's not a "fad". I also think software dev is the best example of where remote works well because fundamentally it's an individual activity, and it's also an activity where I feel text communication often works better than verbal communication (although verbal still has value, of course).
My point is they have someone in mind for these "senior" positions and it is hot an older professional.
Maybe we can have AI spruce up our video call avatars to be better looking and more mature. Haha.