For context - I’ve made 4 personal projects that currently have over 1000+ daily active users (numbers are ~1500, ~6000, ~14,000, and ~430,000) all created within the span of the last year. I’ve also sold software.

On top of all that, I have an Engineering degree, 4 years experience, no breaks in employment, study on my afternoons and weekends (C, Go, C#) and take extra university courses, and have some other high level achievements/recognition.

I apply for Intermediate and Senior positions.

So far I have 3 interviews lined up out of ~30-40 applications. About 10 rejections so far. 1 of those jobs is actually decent, the other 2 are desperation applications.

It’s brutal. I’m trying my absolute best, I don’t see how people that have been coasting have any chance.

You should be able to coast a bit in life.

I’m sad at the state of things, and sad for people trying to stay in the industry or break into the industry.

Makes me want to become a gardener

The bar has also been raised significantly. I had an interview recently where I solved the algorithm question very quickly, but didn't refactor/clean up my code perfectly and was rejected.

I don't get it. If these companies really believed that working in an office was so beneficial they would invest in them. But they all come across like "I need an office to appear like a real company but I don't want to spend a lot of money". They're these millennial gray warehouses rocking the sad-bachelor aesthetic.

1. Layoffs happening regularly.

2. Less Senior positions and virtually no junior jobs.

2. AI accelerating and reducing the number of software engineers.

3. Job postings being reposted with less salary and equity in US, EU and especially the UK.

You might as well take yourself off the job market / stay in current job, build a paying SMB company or side project on the side and make that your third income.

If it gets better and reaches sustainability you can choose to leave your job and live off it, or choose to get funding if need be.

After applying for over 60+ jobs after graduation and getting rejected over and over, I took myself off the market and started a pest control SaaS 4 years ago now it's bringing in over $2.2M+ ARR.

While the jobs I was applying for have now either shut down or not even bringing in anything over $100K ARR.

I don't mean to discount anyone's unpleasantness but you'd be surprised how much worse the rest of the world is.

To me at least, that removes a lot of the uncertainty, since I now know that if I apply to X jobs, I will have a Y percent chance of getting at least one offer, etc. Or maybe all of this is just an indictment of current hiring practices that I no longer think in terms of individual positions but in terms of aggregates of them.

however, there are tech transitions and it appears we are in the midst of one - after which a new set of tech careers seem to emerge. internet/web/mobile/cloud/saas and whatnot. i fully expect the same to happen here.

so, hang in there, and keep your sword sharp.

- The end of 0% interest rates

- The 5 year amortization of the R&D tax credit as part of the 2017 Tax Act (versus same year since 1981)

If you still went for a job that had dropped by that much, but it was still a meaningful amount of money and an interesting sounding job, well ... Good luck and all, but I kind of wish I had your problems.

Times are tough

I also see it everywhere I look. I have never had this many unemployed friends. People spend a lot longer trying to find a job and don’t seem very successful at it.

An interviewer last week was straight out of a Silicon Valley storyline, asking a “if you were on an elevator with Marc Andreessen” question and explaining his devotion to Malcolm Gladwell’s 10000 hour “rule”. The week before I got ghosted twice by a company who’s leadership team apparently pays no attention to the Calendly invites they forced me to set up “for my convenience”.

I know I’m capable and do good work, so I’m not having any sort of crisis of confidence. At least not yet. But the process is definitely frustrating.

In my case, the process became so awful, humiliating, and hostile, I just gave up, and retired, ten years before I had planned. I’m very fortunate, that I could afford it. I now develop software for free, for outfits that can’t afford people like me.

It’s tough, but looking for work after 50, especially when pivoting from management, back to IC, is unbearable. My heart goes out to those without the means to walk away. I think some companies missed out, but I am under no illusion that I’m missed. I doubt they had any regrets in passing me up.

In my case, it was probably the best thing that ever happened to me. I left a lot of money on the table, but I have been happier than I ever dreamed, while working twice as hard as I ever did, when I was getting paid for it.

I have been looking for a job since the middle of the July with not much to show off. I have decreased my salary expectations but that is not the main problem, there are just no jobs to apply to.

For the last 7 years I have been working remotely for various companies inside the EU but it looks to me remote jobs are almost dead now. Everyone wants people back in the office.

My, probably controversial, opinion is that before Covid remote jobs were jobs for the more skilled people, so companies offered them knowing what they will get in return. But during Covid, when everyone worked remotely, some people not doing that that well, the companies just started considering remote jobs not worth it.

Local jobs are almost not existent too here, sometimes there is an opening at a bank but immediately fills in with tens of applications.

Last time I was looking for a new job, in 2022, after 1 month of the search I had 3 offers to choose from; 1 remote EU job and 2 remote local jobs.

Now, after 4 months, the furthest I got was remote EU job where after 5 rounds I was told I made it into top 3 candidates but was not chosen.

I started brushing up on C#/.NET I did over a decade ago as something to switch to, I am definitely not an Apple fanboy to stick to iOS at all costs, but the situation with those kinds of jobs does not look that much better either.

Or is it a lot better when you're physically in the Bay Area?

I had posted something about jobs and looking for jobs some time before here, but the best advice I can give is that all of this "What color is your rainbow" and "Cracking the coding interview" and so on isn't really applicable or it never seemed applicable to me and my experience.

To expand on my previous comment, I'm now on my 9th job in 10 years. Over the last year or so I've had another 30-40 interviews give or take. It was probably more, but this is as close as I can get. I would have liked to spend more time on some of these jobs, but circumstances didn't work in my favor so I had to make changes. What I've learned throughout the process is that all of this is a numbers game. It also helped me spot red flags and cut the process short.

For anyone else looking for a job and for the OP, here are some things:

1. Someone who is motivated to hire someone for a job will be quick/good to communicate

2. They need to set a clear timeline and steps in the process (and if they don't, ask for one and any deviation will be a red flag)

3. They might also tell you how many others are applying for the role (not mandatory, but it's good so you have a rough idea of what your statistical chances are)

4. Be clear about salary expectations early on and if someone pushes to find your current salary, feel free to say it's higher than it actually is. Any deviation from this or if someone doesn't want to say, it's a red(ish) flag and I'd be careful. It doesn't matter and if a recruiter will comment on this - I don't care what your theory about this is, you will aim to pay the lowest amount you can humanly get away with. It's also the reason we have minimum wage laws, not because companies were showering employees with money, but because they would have kept slavery going if that made sense to their bottom line (and they still do).

5. Ask why they are hiring - did they fire a bunch of people previously, are people leaving every few months or is the team/company growing; these can help you save time later on and at least have an idea of what culture you might be joining

6. Ask how widespread the technology you're going to be using is within the company. If a company has 99% Go roles and you applied to the 1% of the roles that are in Java, why is there such a discrepancy? Is it some old code carcass left over with no documentation, testing and with no desire to further develop it but they just want a body in the chair in case something goes wrong... not sure, but that's not something I'd want to do.

7. Be CLEAR about remote work/hybrid working policies - unless it is clearly stated in the contract, it CAN be changed with no notice. A change in contract would at least generally give you some time, but without this being in the contract, you can't really back out of it (case and point, Atos had remote-ish contracts for some of their teams, then they said they updated the terms and conditions, issued a new contract and forced employees to sign or resign). At a previous role I left I was told that the team is highly flexible and remote working is normal, but it's not in the contract, but it's ok, because everyone likes it. On a Thursday we were told that from Monday its 5 days in the office.

8. Anything outside of your salary or contract is NOT guaranteed, so don't pick a job based on perks. Those tend to vanish at the first sight of trouble and also, don't be one of those people that drinks the free coffee at the office just because its free. Stuff costs to make, grow, ship, build - pay for it.

9. Don't be pressured into accepting. This is a bit weirder, but it can happen. Let's say you are interviewing at 2 companies at the same time, one is more motivated to hire, but you don't like it as much, the other has a longer process but you like their domain more. Be upfront about this - "I am interviewing with another company and would like to see both outcomes to make a decision". Being forced at this stage to drop out, being bullied into saying the company name or anything of the sort is a red flag to me. If you have an offer but you need to wait a few days or a week - say so. "I am waiting for a reply from the other company too and I can provide an answer at the end of the next week".

10. Just because you accepted a job doesn't generally mean you need to take it. This is not legal advice, so take it with a grain of salt, as it depends greatly on what you sign, how enforceable it is and where you reside. But the general idea is that, if you accepted a job, but a week or two after you get a better offer, just tell the company you accepted the offer "No". "No" is a complete sentence. You do not need to give justifications, you don't need to take abuse or anything else. You have to think about yourself. They won't. If there is some legal rationale through which you NEED to start that role, just start it and hand in your notice on the first day. Most of these contracts will have some sort of "1 week notice by either party during probation". So you can join, give your notice, work the week, get paid for it and start at the other job.

Also, it will suck. Searching for a job will suck. More and more companies (especially recruitment companies - Noir, Tietalent, Aristo Group, RM Group and Hays to name a few) are really just mining for data with little to no interest in pushing you to any of their clients. They will also tend to try and say that just because you had read about COBOL during Uni, you are now 100% COBOL dev and set you up with a rather terrible interview with some client. There are more, but I'll stop here. On a side note, if you do end up working or answering to a question from a recruitment company check their reviews, look up the person that contacted you, look up the client and apply the same rigor to them as to the company you would end up working with. This entire industry is focused on selling out people to whomever, so don't end up pushed into stuff you don't want to do by one of these enthusiastic second hand car sales people.

Apply at https://moduscreate.com/careers/5984037003/?gh_jid=598403700... and feel free to mention that you saw Boris (me) post this on HN.

Bearing in mind the implicit comparison to "a few years ago", a few years ago I interviewed with Google, at which point the recruiter told me I'd passed the interview, wished me congratulations (!), told me to expect a job offer, and finally, ~6 weeks later, informed me that while I'd "passed" the interviews, my scores were too low for them to make an offer.

It remains a mystery what it might mean to "pass" without actually advancing beyond the threshold you passed.

I’ve never seen this before. It’s always been very hard to find a single highly-qualified candidate.

So with that in mind I'll see you all at ReInvent

I truly don't doubt that's what happened, I've had it happen, but when it did their feedback was (insultingly) not up to their professional standard. I say insultingly because it was an amateurish evaluation of what I did, specifically because it was like the 5th god damn interview by that point and really they should have been looking for more than trivialities like the coding style I chose to use in HackerRank with a visible ticking clock.

The reason I ask is just for context; if people are interviewing for Senior roles and being rejected for code formatting problems, something is even more deeply wrong than it seems, since they probably shouldn't be concerning themselves with that _at_all_. If it's possible though that you were rejected for some other reason, but that your code style was the strongest negative apparent signal, that's also worth exploring. In my case, that's a possibility, that they were looking for just one more reason to narrow the funnel, but it can be hard to accept.

The late 2020 period was the absolute best time though. I got multiple offers almost instantly, and after I signed on it felt like the org was bloated with engineers just fiddling away on meaningless projects.

It sounds like they intentionally present a simple problem because they are not filtering by who can solve it, but by who writes clean maintainable code.

I wish I had thought of that when I was interviewing candidates, because it is a good criterium for a well established organization.

Of course things can change rapidly; perhaps the influx of ai-produced applications may bring this practice back.

People have been saying that since I was in school in the 90's. I've never found it to be helpful. In fact, even back in the days when there were still jobs to be had, by far the worst jobs I ever held were the ones I was referred into. The reason was pretty obvious at the time - the person who referred me in had to "talk me up" so I was starting in a position where I could only disappoint. The "cold applications" didn't have huge expectations, so when I turned out to be good at what I was doing, they were happy to see it.

This September, I finished up a 10 month job search (had a job that was going nowhere, so looked for another) In that time, I started with careful analysis of each role, custom resume building, and applying to one or two jobs a week. When that yielded no results after a few months, I crafted a few resumes to match the broad categories of roles that I saw that were good matches and started applying in bulk. That yielded much better result in terms of actual human contact.

I did also leverage my LinkedIn network, and that yielded lots of nice reconnections with past coworkers, but zero job opportunities. The one reach out that led to anything was to the manager for the FAANG job I rejected in 2019 (always say no very nicely!). That manager made it to VP in that timeframe, and a VP recommendation to the recruiting team WILL get you in the door to talk to someone. Of course, a multi-month process resulted in a kafka-esque situation where the team that wanted me got laid off and that killed the entire process. Oh well.

In the end, I'd sent out over 300 applications, had a few dozen recruiter calls, and 7 full loops (4 offers, one of which was a lowball and 3 that all happened at the same time). Ironically, the job I ended up taking came as an inbound opportunity via LinkedIn from a recruiter at the company.

The good news seemed to be that by the August timeframe, activity had really picked up. The same resumes started getting a lot more traction.

social network might not be great for someone who just broke out of their underclass social network to try make it big.

This advice assumes you have such a network anyway.

Do you have experience with doing this in a way that doesn't come across as desperate or too forward? How close do you need to be with this network? Is Linkedin connection enough, or would you only do this approach with people you've worked with?

To be clear, I’m not saying you’re wrong: in a distorted market it’s absolutely about who you know and get on with. So it’s nothing personal that your (astute) observation irks me.

I just can’t see advice like this without feeling a little tick: I’ve been in this business for more than twenty years, and there have been downturns certainly in that time, but I’ve never seen it so firmly in the iron grip of monopoly and nepotism with such predictably grim results for the software outcomes.

And don’t get me started on the party line that “the economy is doing great”.

Since you mentioned a specific number of applications (60+), I just wanted to share my job hunt story. When I was last looking for a role (8 months ago), I started out thinking 5 applications a day was good, but then I spoke with an industry mentor, and he laughed me off saying that wasn't close to enough. Turns out he was right.

On his recommendation I started aiming for 50 a day. At first it's very slow, but you build up a corpus of cover letters and other material to submit applications.

This would have been easier if I was employed at the time, since so many places auto-reject if you aren't currently employed. This was also looking for fully-remote in APAC, which has far fewer opportunities than other regions/timezones.

And you might say "but I don't want to work for all these companies" and I would agree. But provided you are applying for a role that you are at least curious about, those ones that are not great fits can provide good interview practice.

How does this work? Are we talking computer bugs?

Leetcode stuff sucks, but it is kind of nice being an industry where I can have no college degree and no references, but over the course of a few 1 hour interviews demonstrate competence.

Yes, it is sales. You are doing sales. Leads -> chats -> due dilligence -> offers -> negotiation -> conversions.

This is also how the hiring side looks at it. “How many leads do we need to get a conversion to this role?”. It helps when both sides understand this.

I suspect we will see startup founders trending older if it isn't already happening. Companies stuck in the old way of thinking that older is slower will probably be disrupted in the next recession.

What kind of outfits? Might be interested myself.

How does this work for you? I feel like by the time you would "ramp up" and actually start to have a good idea of the job you'd be moving on

also:

> I'm now on my 9th job in 10 years

like, i'm all about job hopping every 2-5 to get that $$$ but 9 for 10 is a red flag.

I experience the other end of the spectrum. The skilled Indians that made it to Germany and write to me through my website are usually delightful people.

Consider just how different your experience of most countries would be if you just interacted with their people with the most imbalanced incentives. This is sort of what’s happening.