I'm not laid off but actively looking to change after spending a couple of years at my current employer. Despite being a staff engineer, managing 12 engineers, and having a solid revenue stream tied to my current team - I've mostly gotten rejections without interviews, 1-2 low ball offers, or radio silence. I cannot imagine how hard this must be for those laid-off, hopefully this storm passes soon.
EDIT: you cannot make this up, it's a saturday and we got an email 1/3 of our team got laid off (I didn't yet, but I have a feeling it might happen soon).
People assume it's easier for more senior people to get offers, but it's actually the opposite. The more senior you get, the longer it can take to get a new job.
You are much more expensive, so companies are extra cautious hiring you. And it's just common sense that there is an order of magnitude fewer managers than there are individual contributors. And many (most?) companies have a bias to promoting internally.
Also so much of management is personal. Upper management doesn’t have visibility into your day to day and needs to trust you’ll deliver by the deadlines they set for their bosses/customers. It’s hard to trust someone you don’t already know.
Yup. There’s also a heavy emphasis on relevant experience. I’ve found that only a subset of staff+ engineering roles are open to me because of this, whereas it was all open when I was in a junior role.
Freelancer here; this time of year there is always a slowdown. Holiday vacation absences make scheduling all the right people to interview harder.
I set aside extra the rest of the year to smooth over the drop off in responses late-Oct/Jan period. By February I usually get swarmed with asks to tackle projects and can pick ones that are actually interesting.
Then it happens again in summer as people with enough money to not work take another 2-3 months off.
I've not been laid off either. I'm currently taking a break from jobs. I'm starting to think that it's time to go back to full-time employment. But I'm looking at the job market and think it might be better to give it 4-6 months. Let all the companies that are going to do layoffs have their layoffs and then join a company still looking for new devs in a few months.
>But I'm looking at the job market and think it might be better to give it 4-6 months.
I'm fascinated by this. How does one do this? Two options I can think of are being independently wealthy and being dependent on another. Are there other ways to accomplish being so comfortable with, "eh, gonna be unemployed another 4-6 months and see what happens"?
>> Despite being a staff engineer, managing 12 engineers,
So this is actually a warning to me as a hiring manager. Good staff developers absolutely are technical leaders but if they have day-to-day people management skills I'm at best confused, at worst skeptical. Managing 12 engineers is a full time job before you even get to staff developer responsibilities.
I'm also confused. It's my understanding that staff engineers are responsible for taking the software into a certain technical direction. "Upper management" related to engineering. Wouldn't that automatically involve managing those engineers who are involved with the project(s)?
Isn't this a responsibility of a an engineering manager and core competence? I believe Staff engineers work across squads and tribes to help solve various technical and architectural challenges.
Sadly I think we've barely ventured into the choppy waters of the storm.
Considering that, minus the short period of COVID lockdowns, an entire generation has really only known a healthy economy (since ~2008): I think it's going to be a tough transition.
We usually have boom and bust cycles at least every decade. COVID lockdown era gave people the false sense that we had already weathered the storm.
I am looking for a senior manager at a top 5 retailer. We are not as shiny as big tech but pay well with great work life balance. Job security etc. let me know if anyone want to connect. I have 5 positions open for senior dev to lead dev. We are .net and Java shop. But all cloud based.
Red flag for me immediately re: your current company is a staff engineer (no offense meant at all, but staff is not a people leadership role typically) managing 12 people (which is far too many for any individual to manage).
> Despite being a staff engineer, managing 12 engineers, and having a solid revenue stream tied to my current team - I've mostly gotten rejections without interviews
How do you expect the HR folks to validate (or even to have read what you wrote) these claims? A lot of people put the things you’re putting on their resumes.
They’re also getting resumes when from Meta, Amazon, Stripe, … engineers. Is it really surprising you’re not getting a call back?
HR don't validate resumes before you get a call back; that would be super-inefficient. As a hiring manager of course experience at the big co's catches my eye, but unless you're hiring there as well (and most of us are not) I actually figure I can't get them interested anyway, so don't pursue these people. Someone who claims deep technical or experience or people management though? I'm totally going to jump at the chance to talk to them asap, even if I've never heard of their current company.
I keep getting the same amount of emails from recruiters as before, mostly startups.
Found a new job (non-startup) by responding to one of those. Signed the offer and was going to quit FB on a certain date, then got the FB layoff severance package a week before that date as a nice bonus.
I also interviewed at Google and got the thumbs up to proceed to team matching, but no team matches after a month. This makes me believe that they have at least a partial hiring freeze, although their recruiters are pretending that this is not the case - they're just saying that team matching takes a bit longer. Google interviews were useful as practice for the other jobs, but not for actually getting an offer.
A friend of mine has had a similar experience. They started the process in July, did onsites in August, were told they weren't filling roles for a couple of months, and recently started team matching; but it is slow going.
For those of you feeling down about being ignored, keep in mind this is the slowest hiring time of the year, with holidays and vacations, and end of year budgets.
Even in down markets, hiring tends to pick up in January as managers get their hiring budgets for the new year and are back in the office.
Having hired hundreds of engineers, it's the same feeling on the other side as well: The recruiters will tell you that nobody wants to switch jobs around the holidays, so you shouldn't even try. Odd.
What are you hiring for? Just wondering what kinds of companies are hiring juniors right now (I've got a little under a year of industry experience so I'd fall into that category)
This is true but sort of different. Most of them are hiring out of next year's budgets with start dates in May/June. The last time we had a pull-back in tech, a lot of those offers ended up getting rescinded, so if you're in that boat, don't start spending the money until you actually start...
I took ~1.5 years off after 12+ years of FAANG. 1 month ago, I decided I was ready to work again and started talking to recruiters for real. It's been very slow. Most positions I've applied to, I've heard nothing back, even when referred by a current employee. I've had some flat rejections without even a recruiter chat. One recruiter called me to say they were on a temporary hiring freeze, and then she got laid off.
I've had a handful of tech screen interviews, but only one* has progressed all the way to a full interview loop so far, and I got a generic rejection a few days later. I have been waiting 2.5 weeks and counting for a phone screen result from another (larger, public) tech company. Nothing close to an offer yet.
I'm considering just taking more time off until things speed up again - I can afford it, but I worry about how hard it will be to get hired again with a "long" gap of 2+ years.
* for "Senior Software Engineer" at a medium-sized pre-IPO tech company
I have also been out of work for ~8mo for various reasons, and while I’m sorry for your situation, it’s heartening to hear I’m not the only one. I’ve only actually gotten one tech screen in which I was asked a LC “hard” question, which I didn’t pass (I’m pretty good with “easy” and “medium”, but come on, hard?).
So far, I have one other interview from an internal referral, but haven’t heard anything back from the ~10-15 other applications I’ve sent out. I’m getting a bit discouraged and feel similarly as you - it would be nice to take more time off (maybe I don’t actually love working in tech?), but I have the same worried as you. Feels good to vent in this thread, though :)
I felt a bit bad about posting here, because the thread is ostensibly about layoffs, while I quit voluntarily, so any feelings I'm feeling about the situation now are my own fault :)
But it's somehow comforting to see I'm not the only one marveling at the sudden slowdown. It eases the inevitable fear that it's just something unattractive about me or something I'm personally doing wrong.
In 2017 I had taken two years off and went back into the job market after very solid employment history. Only one major company would interview me, and I passed. I got ghosted by regular companies I was "too good for" previously. Before taking time off I was a premium candidate. So yeah it can be hard, you do need some sort of explanation, even in a good market.
Well, I might be over-worrying. But yes, for the last few years I certainly felt like a "premium candidate" as your sibling commenter described it. The last time I changed jobs in the mid 2010s, I applied to 2 FAANGs (only) and had offers from both. Contact with the actual hiring market this month has disabused me of that perception, at least for now!
Find a company whose open source projects you are interested in. Dive in and and start fixing things. Then if you really like it after a couple weeks start nudging around for a job. If you do good work they'll just give it to you, no bullshit funnel required.
I like this method because you aren't just doing l33t coding exercises to work on some sight unseen codebase that makes you suicidal and throw you into existential crisis.
If you need to practice leetcode like things for interviews, aren’t you also doing free ‘work’? Only in that case it’s more proof-of-work than something actually useful. Perhaps one could point at the openly viewable results when talking to other companies.
The strategy strikes me as a little weird but not crazy. If you like open source already, it might make a lot of sense.
This is exactly what my gardener did. One day someone went to my home and started mowing it. I watched. After 4 months of free mowing, he started doing my hedges. I started to talk to other people in my house: "hey we should hire this guy". My wife said "wtf for, he is free? right?" Eventually, I was worried he would start doing free work somewhere else so we hired him - but not for much. He is a great gardener. /s
Im not sure why you are getting so many negative comments. For those that are interested in open source, and would be contributing to projects regardless, I think this is a great idea. Also, it sounds like a good way to distract oneself from the normal expectations/disappointment cycle of interviewing
"Doing work for free", as some others have pointed out in a negative light, is fundamental to how modern software works. If you're not contributing then you're profiting off of the minority that does...
You are making sure your passions align with your work.
If you can find motivation beyond a paycheck and do it then you're more confident you'll enjoy it for the long haul.
Jobs are easy. Satisfaction is the hard thing.
Strictly speaking yes this is uncompensated labor but if that's all you see, let me help a bit.
What if the target is NASA, Wikimedia foundation, maybe some software for Doctors without borders? They all have salaried positions and volunteering is probably a solid way to know if it's a good fit
Yup can confirm, after a decent contribution to a known apache project, had three well known companies reach out, two of which the engineering manager was the one reaching out.
I have started using dapr by Microsoft which has a very active small community and increasing adoption. Becoming proficient in using a tool like this and also becoming a contributor is an example of being in demand for the companies that might be using it if it doesn't mean working specifically for MSFT or one of the other corporate sponsors.
Another strategy for getting intro to users of OSS software is to join discord and start offering help and then possibly leveraging that to mention the help could be more permanent.
Do be careful though not to be explicitly soliciting since that is usually against the community policies so a little bit of a needle to thread.
Please don’t do this. We don’t need workers to do our work for free. It will make it harder for the rest of us to find jobs (or even getting paid for our current one).
If you want to contribute to open source, do so with the mind that you are helping a shared community (or maybe just for fun). Don’t do it because you think it will help you get a job (I’m not even sure parent is correct that it will).
>Don’t do it because you think it will help you get a job (I’m not even sure parent is correct that it will).
As a hiring manager, the open source projects and blogs people sell on their CVs is impressive if it looks like self-motivated interest, and annoying if it looks thinly self-promotive. The two inherently intersect but when it skews to the extreme of self-selling it isn't taken as seriously from what I observe.
I got frustrated by interviews where I told them I've been doing this for over 25 years and they're like "ok how do you show the list of files in this directory at the bash prompt"
I've had the "what the hell job are you hiring for?" response in my head many times
I've got no interest groveling my way up some kind of hierarchy to eventually get to a position I thought I was coming in to do in the first place.
This has turned out to be a perfectly acceptable shortcut.
You could say it's more like petitioning for a job as opposed to applying for one
This is definitely one way to get job, but in my experience watching others do it, a "couple of weeks" is more on the timeframe of a "couple of years" when someone else leaves to make a position available.
Real world example: my company has our react UI library open sourced. I don’t think outside the org uses it, but it’s an open source project “owned” by a company. Another example would be something like React.
I would also look for projects that are being majorly run by a number of large organizations, and see how you could be of help. Look at the CNCF project list and take your pick!
If you are job searching and reading the comments on this post, there’s a >90% chance that "An Engineering Leader's Job Search Algorithm" may help you:
I wasn't laid off but spent Jan-Aug taking time off and then interviewing for a while. Even before the layoffs started things were getting tricky. I was mid-process with multiple companies between June and August that pulled out because they were having freezes, or no longer hiring for the west coast due to budget constraints, etc.
I was still getting a fair amount of interviews though. Fortunately I landed an offer in August, because without it I may still be jobless. But the layoffs, freezes, and continued whiteboarding style interviews and things are definitely a trifecta.
I was laid off as part of a layoff large enough to trigger the WARN act, so I was put on garden leave for 60 days.. I was fortunate to find a new job and start it exactly as the garden leave expired.
It was my first job search in the post-COVID era, aka the era of remote work, and wow was it different. Traditionally, I'd see a handful of jobs that looked interesting each week, and would be one of a handful of applicants. Now that geography isn't really a barrier, there were far more options, but far more applicants. I'd see 20+ roles per week that were a good fit, but each would have 40-200+ applicants, even for the senior (Director/VP) level roles I was looking for.
I've got over 20 years experience from startup to massive tech companies, and applied to 58 jobs. 12 of those led to an initial discussiopn with a recruiter, and 3 of those led to a full interview loop and 1 job offer.
Since accepting the job offer, I've heard from 4 more of the companies I applied to and they were interested in going forward with the process. For each, it was at least 5 weeks since my initial application.
It was pretty much 99% LinkedIn, but with the huge caveat that the job I accepted was one I found on Indeed. That said, I gave up on Indeed pretty quickly because it mostly showed irrelevant jobs (not software engineering, far too junior, etc).
Sifting through the noise was tough. I resorted to a daily alert for each job title, since that kept the number to process each day down to a manageable level, and I made strong use of the "hide this job" function of LinkedIn to keep ones that didn't feel like a good fit from popping up again.
I know a huge part of it is the numbers gain. Since those were all remote roles, they probably had > 200 applicants each. I did develop an appreciation for the companies that at least replied at some point to say they weren't interested vs. just disappearing.
Readit News
EDIT: you cannot make this up, it's a saturday and we got an email 1/3 of our team got laid off (I didn't yet, but I have a feeling it might happen soon).
You are much more expensive, so companies are extra cautious hiring you. And it's just common sense that there is an order of magnitude fewer managers than there are individual contributors. And many (most?) companies have a bias to promoting internally.
I set aside extra the rest of the year to smooth over the drop off in responses late-Oct/Jan period. By February I usually get swarmed with asks to tackle projects and can pick ones that are actually interesting.
Then it happens again in summer as people with enough money to not work take another 2-3 months off.
I'm fascinated by this. How does one do this? Two options I can think of are being independently wealthy and being dependent on another. Are there other ways to accomplish being so comfortable with, "eh, gonna be unemployed another 4-6 months and see what happens"?
So this is actually a warning to me as a hiring manager. Good staff developers absolutely are technical leaders but if they have day-to-day people management skills I'm at best confused, at worst skeptical. Managing 12 engineers is a full time job before you even get to staff developer responsibilities.
Considering that, minus the short period of COVID lockdowns, an entire generation has really only known a healthy economy (since ~2008): I think it's going to be a tough transition.
We usually have boom and bust cycles at least every decade. COVID lockdown era gave people the false sense that we had already weathered the storm.
Deleted Comment
How do you expect the HR folks to validate (or even to have read what you wrote) these claims? A lot of people put the things you’re putting on their resumes.
They’re also getting resumes when from Meta, Amazon, Stripe, … engineers. Is it really surprising you’re not getting a call back?
Found a new job (non-startup) by responding to one of those. Signed the offer and was going to quit FB on a certain date, then got the FB layoff severance package a week before that date as a nice bonus.
I also interviewed at Google and got the thumbs up to proceed to team matching, but no team matches after a month. This makes me believe that they have at least a partial hiring freeze, although their recruiters are pretending that this is not the case - they're just saying that team matching takes a bit longer. Google interviews were useful as practice for the other jobs, but not for actually getting an offer.
Even in down markets, hiring tends to pick up in January as managers get their hiring budgets for the new year and are back in the office.
Hang in there!
I've had a handful of tech screen interviews, but only one* has progressed all the way to a full interview loop so far, and I got a generic rejection a few days later. I have been waiting 2.5 weeks and counting for a phone screen result from another (larger, public) tech company. Nothing close to an offer yet.
I'm considering just taking more time off until things speed up again - I can afford it, but I worry about how hard it will be to get hired again with a "long" gap of 2+ years.
* for "Senior Software Engineer" at a medium-sized pre-IPO tech company
So far, I have one other interview from an internal referral, but haven’t heard anything back from the ~10-15 other applications I’ve sent out. I’m getting a bit discouraged and feel similarly as you - it would be nice to take more time off (maybe I don’t actually love working in tech?), but I have the same worried as you. Feels good to vent in this thread, though :)
I felt a bit bad about posting here, because the thread is ostensibly about layoffs, while I quit voluntarily, so any feelings I'm feeling about the situation now are my own fault :)
But it's somehow comforting to see I'm not the only one marveling at the sudden slowdown. It eases the inevitable fear that it's just something unattractive about me or something I'm personally doing wrong.
Find a company whose open source projects you are interested in. Dive in and and start fixing things. Then if you really like it after a couple weeks start nudging around for a job. If you do good work they'll just give it to you, no bullshit funnel required.
I like this method because you aren't just doing l33t coding exercises to work on some sight unseen codebase that makes you suicidal and throw you into existential crisis.
In this modality you are test driving each other.
> … you are test driving each other.
Unless you think the way they run their open source projects is the way their entire company works, you’re really not.
The strategy strikes me as a little weird but not crazy. If you like open source already, it might make a lot of sense.
There's no guarantees anywhere in this strategy. But there's nice correlations
"Doing work for free", as some others have pointed out in a negative light, is fundamental to how modern software works. If you're not contributing then you're profiting off of the minority that does...
You are making sure your passions align with your work.
If you can find motivation beyond a paycheck and do it then you're more confident you'll enjoy it for the long haul.
Jobs are easy. Satisfaction is the hard thing.
Strictly speaking yes this is uncompensated labor but if that's all you see, let me help a bit.
What if the target is NASA, Wikimedia foundation, maybe some software for Doctors without borders? They all have salaried positions and volunteering is probably a solid way to know if it's a good fit
Another strategy for getting intro to users of OSS software is to join discord and start offering help and then possibly leveraging that to mention the help could be more permanent.
Do be careful though not to be explicitly soliciting since that is usually against the community policies so a little bit of a needle to thread.
If you want to contribute to open source, do so with the mind that you are helping a shared community (or maybe just for fun). Don’t do it because you think it will help you get a job (I’m not even sure parent is correct that it will).
As a hiring manager, the open source projects and blogs people sell on their CVs is impressive if it looks like self-motivated interest, and annoying if it looks thinly self-promotive. The two inherently intersect but when it skews to the extreme of self-selling it isn't taken as seriously from what I observe.
I got frustrated by interviews where I told them I've been doing this for over 25 years and they're like "ok how do you show the list of files in this directory at the bash prompt"
I've had the "what the hell job are you hiring for?" response in my head many times
I've got no interest groveling my way up some kind of hierarchy to eventually get to a position I thought I was coming in to do in the first place.
This has turned out to be a perfectly acceptable shortcut.
You could say it's more like petitioning for a job as opposed to applying for one
Deleted Comment
I totally love this suggestion btw, but I think it serves when you are doing this continuously rather than when you are pressed for the job asap.
Real world example: my company has our react UI library open sourced. I don’t think outside the org uses it, but it’s an open source project “owned” by a company. Another example would be something like React.
Mostly joking but I don't think such a bonus is a crazy idea
https://docs.google.com/document/d/19fr_36WOzKlq_zyGP2RdxMEs...
Good luck!
I was still getting a fair amount of interviews though. Fortunately I landed an offer in August, because without it I may still be jobless. But the layoffs, freezes, and continued whiteboarding style interviews and things are definitely a trifecta.
It was my first job search in the post-COVID era, aka the era of remote work, and wow was it different. Traditionally, I'd see a handful of jobs that looked interesting each week, and would be one of a handful of applicants. Now that geography isn't really a barrier, there were far more options, but far more applicants. I'd see 20+ roles per week that were a good fit, but each would have 40-200+ applicants, even for the senior (Director/VP) level roles I was looking for.
I've got over 20 years experience from startup to massive tech companies, and applied to 58 jobs. 12 of those led to an initial discussiopn with a recruiter, and 3 of those led to a full interview loop and 1 job offer.
Since accepting the job offer, I've heard from 4 more of the companies I applied to and they were interested in going forward with the process. For each, it was at least 5 weeks since my initial application.
Happy to hear you got back on your feat so quickly
Sifting through the noise was tough. I resorted to a daily alert for each job title, since that kept the number to process each day down to a manageable level, and I made strong use of the "hide this job" function of LinkedIn to keep ones that didn't feel like a good fit from popping up again.