I have hired (interviewing team member, or hiring manager) hundreds of engineers.
If you are hearing "let me know if I can help" (number 5) you might be doing something wrong. You should be hearing some version of " I will talk to my boss" or "I will call for you" or "XXX person I know is looking".
I have a list of about 30 people who if they call me I'm going to go out of my way to get them a job. That means make a spot for them on my team. Or I will reach into the non overlapping parts of our networks to see if someone is hiring.
Im going to do this because they are good, because they don't suck, because they will get the job done. They will make me look good as the person who brought them in/onboard.
Those of us who survived the bubble did so on hard work and a network. We brought along the people we thought were the best, who we got along with, who would get the job done.
Its the new year, it is the perfect excuse to figure out who your network is, and what they can do for you. Make a list of folks you know, call them up, tell them your thinking of changing jobs. If you don't hear a lot of "send me your resume"/"is your linked/site in up to date" then you need to make some changes.
"We brought along the people we thought were the best, who we got along with, who would get the job done"
I really appreciate the sentiment. In my experience such networks have been self-serving and mostly exclusionary, rewarding loyalty more than competence.
"You need to make some changes" is not particularly helpful when you're outside the fold. What's typically unstated is something about loyalty, esp. not disclosing the mistakes of others.
> In my experience such networks have been self-serving and mostly exclusionary, rewarding loyalty more than competence.
I think that's all true except for the "more than competence" part and it's a good thing. Competence is directly related to loyalty. When you recommend someone for a job and they excel, it makes you look good. It makes you loyal to them and giving the opportunity makes them more loyal to you. If someone isn't recommended you for job openings they know about, it's because they think you might make them look bad, either through experience with you or the lack thereof. Unfortunately, it takes time to prove you're competent and gain that loyalty.
Sometimes nepotism can creep in and someone can use their influence to get someone under qualified into a position they shouldn't but that influence was, generally, built through competence, including a history of recommended qualified and competent people.
> The best advice someone could give?
> 1. Achieve impressive things
> 2. Never give anyone a reason to dislike you
I think the real advice is be reliable and don't be abrasive. A recommendation for a position goes a long way because it alleviates the risk of hiring an unknown person that may be unreliable or not be able to work with other people.
I'm someone who tends to get along and work well with others. That part definitely has its advantages for employability (and life in general), and is recommended. However, taking it to this extreme is just dangerous advice. Constantly being a people pleaser can carry enormous risks, especially (but not limited to) to yourself. It's important to learn to be ok with people disliking you sometimes.
Your first comment re: exclusionary is simply a filter for the flip side of your 2nd point.
The damage of a bad hire is 10x as bad as the positive impact of a good hire.
A network of competent, easy to get along with people allows one to avoid the truly bad hires that we've all experienced.
Sure you may view it as exclusionary, but if you're hiring for seniors, and been in your niche a decade or more.. the likelihood of someone no one in your network has ever heard of being a great hire vs a terrible hire weighs heavily on a managers brain. Many of these niches are small and are the same few dozen people recirculating over and over. If you are going to spend more time with these people than your spouse or kids, you would like it be be minimally painful.
The people whom I’d recommend are not on the basis of loyalty but rather on some dot product of competence and willingness/propensity to do hard work.
It’s true that a network referral will inherently be of someone that I worked with (or have other [rare] reason to vouch for). That’s the value of it: if you know me enough to trust my judgment, that vouch has information value for you.
I don’t see any other way it could work more effectively.
Something I noticed in tech is that loyalty is generally a consequence of competence.
If competent people are valued, recognized and promoted that leads to more interesting projects and compensation. That's how you build loyalty.
We all know software shops that are always whining about the "tech talent shortage" and whose technical employees don't stay more than two years. And we know why nobody is loyal to those!
I think you are discounting the social aspect of the advice. Most people do great things, but very few can stand out only on the strength of their work. So for the vast majority doing good work has to be coupled with having a network that knows about one's work.
And frankly looking for a job is probably one of the most self-serving efforts in one's life, by definition. That is a good thing.
>In my experience such networks have been self-serving and mostly exclusionary, rewarding loyalty more than competence.
The point being? That is how human social network and constructs work. The ultimate point is to help yourself and not based on some ephemeral grand concept. No matter how competent someone is why would I want to work with them if they will stab me in the back one day? Incompetent people will indirectly stab you in the back eventually so you really want an adequate level of competence and loyalty.
Dislike and loyalty are also very different things so not sure why you're equating them. There's people who do things I dislike that will support others that support them. There are people I like greatly who have a record of stabbing others in the back even if they were helped by that person. Guess which ones I'd recommend for a job?
> Im going to do this because they are good, because they don't suck, because they will get the job done. They will make me look good as the person who brought them in/onboard.
This maybe makes sense from a hiring manager's perspective, but I think a lot of the people who say "let me know if I can help" are non-management peers. At most companies, the best they can do is enter their recently-laid-off colleagues information and resume into the internal referral system. Yes, that's usually better than going in through the "random applicant from the internet" funnel, but it's still limited. Even if they have a good relationship with the hiring manager, often the applicant still has to go through the funnel, and it's easy to get lost there. This usually isn't an issue with smaller companies that have less process, though.
Regardless, on the few occasions where I (as a non-manager) have referred someone and they've been hired, I don't think it gave me much of a reputation boost as someone who brought someone good onboard. Regardless, there are certainly some people for whom I'd go above and beyond to try to help them get an interview, but I'd do that because they are close friends whom I want to help, not because I of any professional perks of successfully referring someone, which I absolutely don't care about.
> This maybe makes sense from a hiring manager's perspective, but I think a lot of the people who say "let me know if I can help" are non-management peers.
A good number of my management gigs were PEERS hiring me in as a fellow engineer, and me getting promoted to be their boss. Much of the hiring I have done is peers of the good engineers on my team. If your peers think your great, that your going to make them look good by doing well then your name will come up.
Every manager is different, "hire this person" with some sort of resume is going to get my attention! Your peer can do that for you!
I thrived in the dotcom crash while I watched many of my friends go to companies with generic names like "Global Digital Media" with silly business plans like putting Internet kiosks in U.S. airports. It was incredible - their entire business plan was to ramp up over the next 5 years with a massive capital outlay just in time for smart phones to make them completely obsolete. This is an actual example:
I thrived by staying put. I got retention bonuses while my friends got tons of equity in companies that became 0. When they lowered their salaries to conserve money, they gave them more equity to compensate. Again, all the equity became 0.
Everything you said about networking is spot on. I would add to it - don't waste time. Don't think, "I'm going to ride on my severance and unemployment for six months and start on x date." Start literally today. If it's the holidays and nobody is hiring, get a certification. Learn a new technology. Work on networking. Exercise. Do 8 hours of productive something every day.
I have a friend who has been unemployed the last 2.5 years. He now wishes he didn't take a year off without improving himself / looking for a job.
In the dotcom crash, when I was laid off I think the first email I sent the next day was to someone who we were a client of at a previous employer. And we had stayed in touch because I had moved onto a competitor of his (until I was laid off). Just a "Hey. I was laid off. Love to pick your brain." sort of thing. Took me out to lunch with his COO the next week. Discussed some contracting but they ended up making me an offer in about of month.
Things got rocky for the company later. And it was touch and go for a bit. Not the greatest period for me financially but I was never really unemployed and it was a pretty great job in a lot of ways which set me up for my current one. Had I decided to take the autumn off, I could easily see myself being unemployed for 2 or 3 years. Other people I knew never really recovered from the dotcom bubble bursting.
This advice boils down to "be the best of the best" because you'd only go out of your way for someone if they're that good.
I don't think people who haven't reached that bar are necessarily doing something "wrong". It takes hard work to reach it and some people prioritize other things in life over hustling. Others simply don't have the talent to reach it.
I would argue most if not everyone has the talent to reach being the "best of the best" but it takes time. Time, Time, Time... It's everything. Some can reach higher bars sooner simply because they were exposed to something earlier and more frequently.
I, too, survived the dot com crash, and, too, benefited from and serve as part of the kind of network described above. When it comes to job hunting, my two favorite career stats are having helped a friend get a job I was interviewing for and working at least a second time for four different former managers. I actually just talked to one yesterday, we hadn't worked together in 20 years.
If this is what's necessary for experienced devs, imagine all the students and upcoming devs that are not allowed a foot in the door. The great social barrier that keeps jobs in very specific parts of the U.S.
Mainly agree, but maybe can be a bit more generous.
"30" sounds low to me, having worked in large companies for many years. Sure, the number of people you worked super-closely with for years is maybe in double digits but you probably know a lot of other people by reputation (which is still good signal) and there may be low effort things you can do for them. I try to, anyway.
This is a hidden danger that I only understood late in my career. I like working at small companies. You can contribute big things relatively easily when there are only a few contributors to begin with. You can build something and nurture it over time - anything from a technical asset to a working relationship with a colleague. You get a more diverse range of things to do because not everyone has to be pigeonholed and not everything needs approval from three different committees. You don't need to constantly try to do "high visibility" projects that will show up in your promotion panel because everyone in the company knows if you're good and the right person to take the lead on the next big thing anyway. You don't need to job hop every year or two to find interesting and well-compensated work for the same reasons.
But then after a while you've only worked in a few different places and with a few different people at each one. Your professional network is much smaller than someone who worked for a variety of big name tech giants in that time doing no-one-really-cares-what and climbing the career ladder by job hopping.
I'm really not bitter. If I could go back and tell my newly graduated self how their career would have gone a few decades later they'd probably still have made very similar decisions even with that knowledge. I've enjoyed many of my roles at small companies immensely and I can't think of many less attractive jobs in this industry than being a cog in the machine at some tech giant whose primary contribution to humanity is turning us all into spyware targets and then ad targets.
But it's undeniably true that sometimes in a tough market - even many years into a career and having reached the equivalent of staff/principal level or followed the independent/entrepreneur route - you can still end up knocking on the front door of an interesting employer or doing the recruiter thing to make a move when habitual networkers with similar YOE would not need to stoop so low because they'd find something via someone some other way.
Doesn’t necessarily apply to every industry… sure to a growing sector like software then maybe yes. In other parts of the economy, teams can have fixed sizes and budgets. This means no wiggle room to bring in new people. I manage a team but can’t hire a new full time person right now…I would put resumes in a pile..
This is very generational and depends on what sort of work circle you’re in too. There’s people I know would do this sort of thing for me but they literally couldn’t. This sounds like the equivalent of “hit the pavement with your resume” advice
I think the author has come away with the wrong lesson here.
Many engineers, particularly those that don't pay too much heed to social mores, think they have some God-given right to share details of all their private interactions publicly. Every tech test they do is pushed to GitHub with an accompanying blog post. Every interview has a transcript (somewhat one-sided) published and shared to Twitter. This is typical oafish behaviour displayed by mamy engineers and frankly, it annoys people. It's often considered a red flag when hiring. Understanding when to be discreet is an important skill for any employee.
Lying about why you're looking for work is a bad idea. That small lie will escalate, you'll have to start stringing together more lies, and when you get found out it won't reflect well.
This has nothing to do with radical honesty. I'm not suggesting you air all your dirty laundry during an interview. But don't lie. And don't publish all private interactions because you're a fan of free software. It's not the same thing.
We've heard "transparency" so much lately that it now gets confused with honesty.
They're not the same.
If a company asks where else you are interviewing an honest but not transparent answer would be something like "I'm exploring other opportunities at various places but don't feel comfortable providing more details." If you were to ask a company who else they are interviewing for the same role, you would expect the same answer. It would probably cause alarm if they actually told you the names of other people they were interviewing!
during one of the first interviews I ever had, the interviewer took me to a private room where I could do the coding part on my own
on the desk was the laptop they wanted me to use, some pens and paper, and a stack of resumes from other people
the interviewer made no mention of the stack as they were leaving or when they came back, and when I asked about it at the end of the interview, they chuckled and changed the subject... to this day I'm wondering if it was some test to see if I threw the other resumes out (didn't get an offer btw)
If a company asks you about stuff that isn't any of their business you have my permission (not that you need it) to lie your ass off if you think it will help you. The power asymmetry is such that unless the counterparty is extremely careful about abusing that power that you will end up being cornered and taken advantage of. If you present yourself as more desirable than you are based on your current situation and it lands you a job at a higher salary than you otherwise would have: more power to you. But don't overdo it and realize that there is some risk involved.
I think it's healthier to instead develop the social skills and confidence needed to answer any questions confidently while enforcing boundaries about what you will and won't answer. Outright lying can come from a place of weakness and fear which isn't good to encourage.
Lying is always risky, though. If the truth comes to light, you are screwed. Even if it doesn't, you have to remember and internalize your lie, and make sure anything you say in the future is consistent with it. That requires extra work and can be stressful. (And if you mess it up: again, you are screwed.)
I don't buy the "you don't want to work for a company that would ask you XYZ anyway" line. Sure, in some cases that may be true, but sometimes someone (that is, a random person on the interview loop, not a "professional interviewer" like a recruiter) will ask or say something they shouldn't, and that doesn't need to reflect poorly on the company (or even on the person; who hasn't said something dumb on occasion?).
If you think a question is inappropriate, politely decline to answer, using whatever verbal finesse you have available to yourself. It takes practice and confidence to do so, but it's the right thing to do.
Gosh, no - strongly recommending not doing this. (The lying part)
Lying is one of the worst things you can do, it usually speaks to an issue with integrity, a concern that comes before almost all of them even intelligence, education, aptitude, skills.
Learn the skill of polite deferral, of saying things without saying them, diverting or embellishing a bit - and then only if it's an issue not relevant to the job.
If someone in an interview asks you your 'political orientation' (which obviously they shouldn't do and it would raise a big red flag anyhow - but just as an example) you do not have to be candid, but don't lie. You can say "I have a variety of opinions, I try to keep an open mind" - so long as you are comfortable with it and it's true. You have not lied, but not fully answered the question because it's none of their business.
I also think the OP here has misinterpreted 'transparency and candor'.
Engineers who 'over share' are a bit annoying but then again, you don't have to read their posts - but this is not the issue.
The 'issue' here is the absolutely truthful information that is 'just too much' for an interview setting.
Everyone needs to be honest and candid but not transparent like you're talking to the IRS or your accountant.
Suppose they ask you why you might want to work at the company, and you don't really feel hugely inspired, well, instead of saying literally that, you can find at least something interesting about the situation and allude to it. There's something interesting about every situation. And of course, if it's truly a bad situation just say that politely and assume you won't be working there.
It's ok to ask 'Elephant in the Room' questions especially if they are asked politely, if they can't handle that you don't want to work there.
It's ok to be turned away for something arbitrary or mundane (or any other reason) there will be other opportunities.
Getting turned down can make you very cynical and brings out our worst, even conspiratorial tendencies so try to stay grounded and keep your head on straight, don't be sucked into the vortex of weirdness and 'ultra competitive civility' of getting job shenanigans, it's not real, it's a big of a game, recognise it a such.
Kind of like telling people to 'don't be nervous' on a date, what I'm about to write is super glib but I think it's true: stay true to your basic values and identity and I think it will be easier to be more relaxed and authentic in interviews. The 'game' will pull you towards negative behaviours I have found it's a lot easier not to do them if you literally just decide that you are not going to do so for reasons of morality or values or whatever.
I don't know about that. Something that makes me sick to my stomach is the current only accepted behaviour to react to being laid off by being grateful to such a wonderful company to have given me opportunity to learn and blah, blah, blah. There is so much dishonesty and fake gratefulness around that anything departing from that, including just sharing that you interviewed a lot and only found dead ends, is a black flag.
I get that this is marketing, and that's the game in an employer market. But sh*t, no-one is calling out the fact that maybe the responsibility is not only on the incoming recession, but also how dumb a large portion of the industry has been in trying to ignore as best as possible a freaking war, a pandemic, and flying oil prices, and carried on over-hiring at high wages. I'm grateful mine didn't go in that game and froze hiring very early on.
Maybe it's an emphasis, the way I read it is that you should keep your unpalatable opinions to yourself, because being critical of the system is cause to be rejected by it.
> stomach is the current only accepted behaviour to react to being laid off by being grateful to such a wonderful company to have given me opportunity to learn and blah, blah, blah.
No. You have missed the point.
Nobody wants you to e grateful when you're not. But you do not have to say what you think just because you think it
I was shocked by that too. Maintaining such a sheet is a good idea, but never _ever_ share it. It's bad operational security. It's also revealing more about you (what other companies think of you) than it is about the companies in question.
Also in making it public—even with operational security flags aside—if I’m seeing that a candidate has been through 30 interviews (arbitrary number), at a certain point it’s a flag for me about why they haven’t reached an accepted offer by that point, regardless if they’re a strong candidate.
Would you approach dating the same way? “By the way, here’s all of the dates I’ve been on in the past year and I’m currently still single”—maybe there’s a perfectly valid reason for it, but it’s still going to be off-putting to someone who you’re trying to make a good first impression on. It’s got a non-zero chance to put them in a suspicious place instead of an inquisitive or curious one, which, if you’re still looking for dates (or work), probably isn’t what you want.
Edit: I think it's the difference between "honesty" and "oversharing". It's being honest to say "I've interviewed with multiple companies and we haven't been able to come to a mutually beneficial agreement." It's oversharing to give a pile of details about each of those interviews.
Just got back into the job market, and every potential employer has expressed gratitude for my level of honesty and transparency.
I'm "weaker" at negotiations since I've laid out my cards on the table upfront. The other side of the coin is companies are less likely to waste my time unnecessarily, or play hardball too much when you appear to roll over so easily.
My take on Hard Truth 6 is to be careful and strategic with your honesty. It may not always be interpreted the way you intended, so be honest but be wise about what you're disclosing.
I was laid off in April 2020 as well, and while some of my experience matches the author's some of it was very different.
Being laid off was not a relief -- it was terrifying. All indications were that a severe recession was coming. Frankly, it was quite surprising to me that companies were hiring at all given the uncertainty. It was not obvious at the time that broad sectors of the economy could seamlessly move to 100% WFH. It was also my first experience in fully remote interviewing.
I am a software engineer over fifty. I also have three children two of whom were in college, and my wife works in a travel related industry which was very much affected by the pandemic.
Given those things I approached my job search aggressively and with a sense of urgency, and I made it out OK. I was out of work for about two months and accepted a role at flat comp.
Being laid off is profoundly lonely. I was part of a mass layoff (approximately 2/3 of my company was laid off.) So while I was not alone in that sense, we were all very much alone together. Where you had been a team, you were now five people looking for jobs, each with their own problems and constraints. My wife could not have been more supportive, and yet the process of interviewing and landing a job is one you have to do by yourself. One of the hardest things is to maintain an upbeat outlook, and yet it is so necessary because no one is going to hire a miserable sad sack.
On the other hand, I had no stigma whatsoever attached to the fact that I had been laid off. Part of that might have been that the size of the layoff was such that anyone with any glancing familiarity with the place I was at would know that 2/3 of the company were laid off.
One thing that I would emphasize would be maintain your professional network in good times and in bad. I got a number of good leads that way.
> I had no stigma whatsoever attached to the fact that I had been laid off.
This point in the article was weird to me, that you should creatively avoid saying that you were laid off. Sure, some layoffs are just an excuse to get rid of people who the company believe are low performers, so if you were laid off from a prominent company where recruiters know why the layoff happened, this could be a problem for you when looking for a new job.
But if you were caught in the string of layoffs happening this year (or at the beginning of the pandemic), I can't see how there'd be stigma attached to that. And I'd worry that being evasive about why you're no longer at your previous company could be a red flag to recruiters; just doesn't seem worth it.
It is none's business about why you left (or are leaving) your previous job, unless perhaps it is due to some legal issue that would show up on a (criminal) background check. Interviewing for a new job is all about the future, and it's totally up to you to reveal only the facts about your past that paint you in a favorable light.
Whether or not saying you got laid off would hurt your chances is a separate question. My guess is most of the time it wont. But as a flip, would saying you got laid off improve your chances of getting the job? If the answer is no, then its not worth saying - focus instead on the things that for sure portray you positively.
The same goes for jobs with short tenures - if you stayed at some place for a few months and left just leave it off your resume. It doesn't do anything to sell you, so why waste time on it?
Just remember, an interview is a short period of time to sell the best parts of yourself that are most applicable to the job. It is not a 100% confession of all the good and bad things that happened to you.
Yes, when lots of companies are cutting back to their most essential employees, it helps provide a little cover.
But, y'know, regardless of the environment, what does it say about your abilities that your employer didn't consider you essential?
This is a very pessimistic way to view things that I don't fully believe, and of course any reasonable person knows that being part of a layoff is very rarely just the employee's fault. But to perhaps state the obvious, being laid off is never gonna look good, or even neutral. There will always be stigma.
Being able to reframe your layoff in as positive of a light as you can is important.
I have a bit to go before I’m a software engineer over fifty, but I have a lot of anxiety about it primarily from an ageism standpoint. I don’t really want to go into management because I love coding and solving problems, but I fear that one day I’ll will struggle to find work due to my age.
I worry about it too. What I have found is that it's important to keep your skills very, very current. It's OK to be reasonably skeptical about the latest hotness, but it's imperative to know about it and why it's the latest hotness. No one cares (OK very few people care) about the systems you built in perl in the 90's. They will care about your opinion Go vs. Rust vs. C++, even if you are not an expert in any of them. You needn't have used every no-SQL data store, but again you need to know about them.
On the other hand if you are a subject matter expert in a particular domain, then your twenty years of experience are indeed very useful, and while no one wants to replicate the risk reporting system you built in Motif/X in the 90's, they may well want build it in React.
Over 50 in 2022 is very different than over 50 in 2000.
I’m GenX and grew up with the internet but I know life before the internet. I know technology more than most and keep up with it. I play video games (finished elden ring earlier this year) and watch TikTok 2 hours a day. I’m not young but the gap between me and someone younger isn’t a vast canyon like it used to be.
My last job hunt a year ago I got over 5 job offers. I wouldn’t be too worried.
I myself lead a software development team. I am 31 and the last two people I hired were almost 50 and they are very good devs.
In my opinion age alone isnt a reason not to hire someone. What is the "common reason" older people are not considered to be hired? I guess because people think they cant adapt or are stuck in some ways in theire thinking. If your future you can show that this is not the case, I guess you are fine :)
Only "REAL" age related reason is (and I have to admit that I myself didnt hire someone because of that) if the person wants to retire in the near future and you think you want to invest your time in someone who will, hopefully, stay longer.
I think age gets thrown around a lot but it's never really appeared to me from my singular data point.
I think the larger (at least post screener perspective) is that you always need to stay relevant. If you're working for a company 10+ years doing roughly the same thing doing amazing work, that doesn't mean you're employable in the market at large. You need to feed the trends to at least know what the larger community is doing, and keep relevant skills in your resume (and actually know them) to show you aren't a dinosaur (not in age, but in competence in obsolete tech). I update my resume every couple years if I'm looking for work or not. Not helping, there are a bunch of dead end companies that are the only companies willing to employ the people at the level they do, so it can lead to bleak perspectives when you're forced out and try to work outside your comfort level. I've known more than a few exit software entirely as they were unable to find suitable alternatives.
Thanks for taking the time to read this post. I decided to spend Christmas break in CDMX[0] by myself in order to reflect not only on the past year, but just how far I've come since I got laid off. This is the result.
Thanks for making all those hours at the café (instead of at a museum or bar or whatever) worthwhile.
[0] I'll be here for a few more days if you'd like to meet up!
When I was laid off in 2010, I found another way in which honesty bit me. Or maybe it was a lesson in recognizing the limits of offers of help, because it wasn't my "transparency" which was the problem.
Of course I had my friends looking for opportunities and making referrals. One of them had a kind of clunky opportunity for me as an independent contractor for their company. It was a lengthy process to get it done, in part because they didn't really have their own contractor infrastructure so I organized an LLC, got my proper insurance, etc. Of course, I didn't tell me other friends about this opportunity because it wasn't a done deal yet, and I kind of knew the contracting thing was going to be short-lived anyway. Well, it turned out to fall through completely, which wasn't a huge surprise; but I found out that the hiring manager had told all my other friends to stop looking for jobs for me, because I was coming to work for him! So I was back to square one.
> Only in retrospect did I understand the connotations that post broadcast to potential employers.
So, you wanna share with us what the connotations were? Is it just that the recruiter read "oh, you're failing a lot, you must suck"? Or is there something else more interesting to this?
I'm disappointed that this post is somewhat vague on specifics. But on the one situation that is set up very specifically, we don't get the punchline.
Not OP, but I'll take a guess that it makes the OP look like a troublemaker. Someone who has the nerve/gall/gumption to be so open as to name/shame other companies may not pull any punches when it comes to naming 'company X' in the future after something bad goes down.
Posting "here's a list of companies that haven't got back to me" (which is possibly implicit in an open spreadsheet sort of post) is likely perceived as a troublemaker.
Well written thoughts! I've definitely shared many of your feelings more times than I would have thought at the start of my long career.
Corporate jobs disappeared due to the financial crisis one time and a hostile takeover another time (both of those I was personally happy about). And a couple startups were acquired sooner than expected. There can be upsides, yes, but it can still leave you with months of trying to figure out what to pursue next, and that can be a weight on your mind even when you're making the most of your time off. When you are committed to a full-time job, something you have to do every day, you may dread going to work sometimes or just wish you could hike up a mountain or something, but it helps frame your day and reduce the number of decisions you have to make, so when you don't have that there can be a significant cognitive load trying to decide how to spend your time in a way that others may not understand. "Oh, that's nice, you're consulting, how flexible, lucky you!"
Early in my career I learned about how to come out of the gate blazing fast since when I graduated from college a couple decades ago half of the tech jobs were gone, and I had to work hard for months after graduation just to find a specific kind of application development work I wanted at the time. I was fortunate to find that but many others were not and had to take whatever came their way. But it wasn't easy, and like you said, I found out early that lots of interviews on your calendar isn't necessarily promising, so over the years I've tried to find alternate routes to work by meeting with people inside the company first to find out what it's really like, and how much they want to fill a specific position, etc.
And more important than all the above, I recommend finding a listening ear to share your journey with, someone who will try to understand where you're at! I have some friends who have had the same job for a couple decades and even though they may not relate well, we can still try to share our different lives with each other and it's more helpful than you might think!
Given that you now know what it will be like if you get laid off again, have you changed anything about how you approach your non-work life? Things like non-work friends you hang out with, non-work activities that you do for fun, Etc. Sort of "if I'm laid off again, then I'll fill my days with interviewing and ..."
Glad you're back up and running and have processed the layoff!
thanks for the post Steven. I especially appreciate Hard Truth #5. Most folks end up not knowing exactly how you may want to be helped and having a clear and specific ask helps a lot.
#1 it's lonely? April 2020, 1 month into the pandemic.
I found the pandemic lonely. I saw less than 1 person a month for the first 14 months of the pandemic. And i find WFH incredibly lonely. I haven't recovered. I'm utterly alone most weeks. I see no one. Even if I go to work, no one is there. I moved cities a year ago and have only 1 friend and 2 acquaintances in the new city. 2 of those 3 are married and I see them maybe once a month, if I'm lucky. The 3rd I haven't seen since August. The pandemic as killed meetup.com. It used to be full of activities. I don't think there is 1/20th of the activities there used to be.
For what it's worth, I've been working from home for about 8 years now. The only way to make it work for me was deliberate social activities with my neighbors, people from church or local charity orgs (Rotary, etc).
I met them, I got their numbers and I started asking them to lunch at least once a week (sometimes more). That small, very determined activity just leads to more. You have to do it very consistently.
Hosting a poker night is very similar. It will start small and sometimes not happen, but you have to be relentlessly consistent to get it established.
Loneliness is bad in itself, but it can get worse if you are:
- Not going outside every day
- Not keeping yourself fit
- Eating junk food
In my region there is a lot of office only/mostly hybrid (3+ days in the office) jobs, probably for the reason that you mention. Of course when I ask why I need to be in the office people tell me about culture and stuff... But the true reason is probably more along the lines: loneliness, small baby crying at home, apartment not appropriate for remote work, annoying roommates/spouse/during divorce.
Maybe changing jobs right now is not the best idea - so I will not suggest it. I will only suggest to get real human contact, as being on-line and talking on forums/social media does not work (at least in my case).
If you have a chance you may try to find some meetup for startup entrepreneurs, even if you are not interested in startups. I find people there to be really hyped and full of positive energy. Usually there is also a motivational speaker there. YMMV but in my city there are some free and open meetings like this.
Isn't this the crux of the issue? If OP was getting real human contact, they wouldn’t feel lonely.
This pandemic has really thrown us for a loop. New habits have been formed that are hard to break.
One of the first times I dipped my toe in the social pool in early 2022 was at a tech meetup. A bunch of us who went got COVID. I recovered but was the sickest I’d been in about 20 years. It doesn’t take much to withdraw more.
Loneliness is a killer[0]. And we're doing ourselves no favours with the way increasingly we meet people through apps and not face to face.
I'd be lost without the friends I made in education settings. This might sound silly but any chance you could swap a meetup group with some sort of class? Art, writing especially something that involves discussion?
Hey, author here. I get it, trust me. This post meant to encapsulate my feelings during the one year I spent unemployed. During that entire time, I was alone. I had a falling out with my parents. I moved to a foreign country where I knew no one in order to stretch my savings. I totally get it.
If you need to chat with someone, I'm happy to lend an ear. Contact info is in my profile.
> I moved to a foreign country where I knew no one in order to stretch my savings
I have found NomadList (nomadlist.com) and NomadSphere (nomadsphere.io) invaluable for meeting up with people when abroad, although usually people who are there to work remotely.
Another option for meeting people is volunteering.
And almost any sport, appreciate you may not play any, but a group of the same people go to the same thing week in week out. You can even pick something where you can get lessons first then join a club.
Sometimes there are more social sports clubs that aren't really competitive. Here in the UK for example there are social badminton clubs and competitive badminton clubs. You will get a real mix of skill levels at the social clubs, and these might have regular meetups outside of the badminton. The one I'm part of do meals, theatre, outdoor events, etc. together. It depends on the people running it.
Meetup.com seems to be sort of back where I'm at (Chicago area). Some of the groups are now toast (including the one I used to admin), but several are back to regular events again, and there have been some new groups since.
I've tried to be a little careful still (still haven't gotten Covid as far as I know, I don't know if I'll be asymptomatic or end up in the hospital or something in between), and yet I've gone to several picnics, hikes, board game nights, outdoor hangouts, karaoke, movie nights, trivia, dinners, etc. via Meetup.com this past year.
Also supplemented that with Facebook events and the local forest preserve and local library's posted events.
I still have a core friend group (who I met thanks to Meetup.com many years ago), but several of my other friends have drifted off since the pandemic started (married and started having children), so I started doing meetup more again to compensate.
My circle of friends shrunk some during the pandemic and after the vaccines came out I put a lot of effort into building it up (larger than before). Some data in case helpful:
Friends made over 1 year, 3 months:
Meetup - 1 friend. Had a poor time-to-friend ratio for what I put in, but that's an n=1 and I mostly frequented just one meetup, although I tried like 3. Negative experience overall (for me, ymmv). Friend is great.
Local discord group around a hobby of interest - 2 friends. Many friendly acquaintances. Had to find the right group as a few I tried didn't feel like as-good fits. Positive experience, the friend making process was enjoyable and the friends are great.
Meeting at an intro class for another hobby (a semi social one - need at least one partner) - 2 friends. We were all new at the intro class and it was hard to find people, so we swapped numbers. Got to know each other through the hobby then became friends. Probably would be difficult to replicate intentionally.
Friends of Friends - 1 large group. 5 that I'd call friends and several more that I'd call group-friends or friendly acquaintances.
Friends of Friends are exponential. There's an excellent time to friend ratio, and the people you meet come pre-vetted. But note that some friends may be hesitant to make inter-friend connections even after they know you well, depending on how closed-off their other groups are. It's, of course, also not generally accessible until you have enough of a circle that like/trust you enough that you're getting invites to their other group things.
We may revert the hard truths to get soft precautions:
- Always have savings that will cover at least 6 months of expenses, now probably a year (if indeed it takes so much time to find a new job).
- Socialize outside work, ideally have a network of people that work at other companies that you are in touch with. Sports, charities, churches etc. If this is hard, ask yourself if you are overworking yourselves/spend too much time at work.
- Be careful what you are posting on social networks. Employers are more and more concerned about the image that you have on the internet. I propose to have 2 profiles, the first a professional one with portfolio of projects, blog, articles and what's not and the second for your private views (nobody should track that profile to your person using publicly available information).
Also I wonder what the author is doing professionally. I don't see any hard tech articles on his blog. Maybe he is into niche tech or doing some no longer hyped stuff like data science? That would explain why it took the author so long to find a new job. Maybe if this is the case the author should reflect on his skills and maybe change his niche to something more marketable?
> I propose to have 2 profiles, [...] the second for your private views
Or just don't post about your views on anything (controversial or otherwise) on social media. Just opt out. There's no inherent reason why you need to post about anything on social media. If you must, perhaps because you use it to keep in touch with family and friends, just post about things that are going on in your life. There's no reason you need to use social media to air your grievances about society.
The issue I take with this is that employment becomes a form of restriction of free speech. Unfortunately, the reality is most of us can't afford to truly speak our minds because we need a job to put food on the table and a roof over our heads. Still, even with that in mind, I think the best compromise is to provide strong support of your opinions and not just shout whatever political slogan happens to be in vogue.
> I propose to have 2 profiles, the first a professional one with portfolio of projects, blog, articles and what's not and the second for your private views (nobody should track that profile to your person using publicly available information).
As someone involved with online privacy&security for a long time... I think almost no one on HN (including myself) can keep multiple online personae unlinked by commercial data brokers for as long as the threat model would seem to require.
If you have alt accounts, consider them low-security that eventually will be revealed, and figured into many employers' data science ranking&filtering, and their AI-model-summarized profiles they can pull up on you. Ideally, it won't be revealed before there's a more enlightened US culture of social tolerance, and more comprehensive and serious US data protection laws, but you can't bet on that.
You might also want to simplify by minimizing use of alts, and instead trying to self-moderate how you put yourself out there. For example, if you voted for a political candidate who rubs a lot of people the wrong way, either own it, or don't rant about it with alts in online public forums. For another example, dating -- without data brokers spying on some of your most intimate private interactions -- is nigh-impossible, but with an awareness of this, you can still try to save some things for offline pillow talk only.
When I created an HN account, I knew I'm more liberal/progressive than a lot of tech people, and that there's some currently popular practices in the field that I'm inevitably going to be outspokenly critical of, and that's going to alienate some techbros and employers. Having my name on the account is partly a reminder to me to try to only say things that I'd be willing to stand behind. (I'm certainly not perfect, but it's an attempt, and always learning from it.)
The number one thing I've learned from being laid off was never to trust your employer. Trust people, if they've shown to be trustworthy, but never, ever trust a company.
A company is not family, they're not your friend, and the perceived loyalty you think you've "earned" doesn't mean a thing if layoffs are coming.
Treat your employment as a business arrangement. You get a paycheck in exchange for labor. Nothing less, nothing more.
Ahh yes. I think most people end up going through this bitter disillusionment at some point in their careers.
Humans are tribal by nature and companies are setup like a big tribe. We even call the guy (and it’s mostly a guy) at the top the chief! Feelings of “family” and “loyalty” are built into humans operating in tribes, and a real tribe looks out for its members.
So when the sudden wholesale internally orchestrated slaughter of a chunk of the tribe happens (metaphorically), it comes as quite a shock (the first time). Both for the people that go and the people that stay. The lesson is that a company is not a tribe.
That said, a company is also a collection of people and the relationships you develop as you work are just as meaningful as the ones you develop in other aspects of life. Loyalty to people is a perfectly good and reasonable thing.
So my take is, you should focus on fostering good relationships with your coworkers and hold loosely to the concept of the “company”. The company may screw you over, but good people will always try to do what is right.
the weird part for me is why I keep falling into that trap again and again. I like the work, I like the employer and I do good work and so I think that there is some kind of safety in that. I guess maybe it's a natural human impulse to think that you're somehow settling into a tribe. But the reality is that you're not in a tribe, you don't have safety and the business has a very calculated view of your value: You already got paid for your time, years mean nothing. There is no sense of "past achievements" (which could be construed as loyalty). There is only: Can you keep working right now for price X, yes or no? If no you go.
I keep forgetting that everytime I settle into a job. Perhaps because I do too much compared to others, that somebody must surely see my massive value. But eh, your extra 20-50% is nothing in the grand scheme of a company, they won't mind paying 1.5 people to replace you. They just take it and say "thx buddy". I'm always far happier in the beginning of a job than at the end, I am starting to think that it's because I don't have any delusions that I have safety or loyalty from the people around me.
I second this. Institutions come and go but the people and connections you make throughout your working life is what counts and transcend your workplace. This is especially true for technical people, if you are middle management/executive your skills are far less transferable.
If feels very very very wrong to compare a search during April 2020 and now.
Why? The year after April 2020 was a booming job market for SWEs. Hiring managers were competing for talent, 2021 was a boom year of low interest rates, euphoria in private and public markets.
This blog post _should not_ be considered a response to the WSJ article.
And sorry, grinding away at leetcode should only take about 2 months tops if you don’t have to worry having to balance leetcode and your job, and not a tall ask for a 250k+ job in tech. if you don’t need that high a salary, smaller companies generally are more lax about leetcode
grinding leetcode is some dumbshit waste of time that I'm not going to bother with -- I've got code to put in production and this simply is never a good use of my time. When you have an obnoxious hiring process that will take multiple hours for your special company, why would I even waste my time? I can click a few more buttons and have offers elsewhere anyways...
Author also mentions that he didn't have any savings at the time he got laid off. So maybe not the normal person that's worked at Apple for 10 years and cashing out RSUs but someone who did short stints at each.
> The year after April 2020 was a booming job market for SWEs.
Did we know that at the time, though? From what I remember, it was all doom and gloom: public markets were trending downward, people were talking about recession and corporate belt-tightening, and the assumption was that we'd see a lot of layoffs, and the labor market would get tight.
True, that's not what happened (at least in the case of knowledge workers) -- in most cases it was the opposite -- but I don't think we had that foresight back in April 2020.
Anecdotal but over the past 20 years I've held about eight different positions in various companies as a software engineer, and I've never even so much as glanced at leetcode. I've been able to live comfortably and put plenty away for the future with 150 to 200K salary.
I feel like companies that emphasize interviews prioritizing rote memorization aren't going to be a good culture fit for me anyway.
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I have hired (interviewing team member, or hiring manager) hundreds of engineers.
If you are hearing "let me know if I can help" (number 5) you might be doing something wrong. You should be hearing some version of " I will talk to my boss" or "I will call for you" or "XXX person I know is looking".
I have a list of about 30 people who if they call me I'm going to go out of my way to get them a job. That means make a spot for them on my team. Or I will reach into the non overlapping parts of our networks to see if someone is hiring.
Im going to do this because they are good, because they don't suck, because they will get the job done. They will make me look good as the person who brought them in/onboard.
Those of us who survived the bubble did so on hard work and a network. We brought along the people we thought were the best, who we got along with, who would get the job done.
Its the new year, it is the perfect excuse to figure out who your network is, and what they can do for you. Make a list of folks you know, call them up, tell them your thinking of changing jobs. If you don't hear a lot of "send me your resume"/"is your linked/site in up to date" then you need to make some changes.
I really appreciate the sentiment. In my experience such networks have been self-serving and mostly exclusionary, rewarding loyalty more than competence.
"You need to make some changes" is not particularly helpful when you're outside the fold. What's typically unstated is something about loyalty, esp. not disclosing the mistakes of others.
The best advice someone could give?
1. Achieve impressive things
2. Never give anyone a reason to dislike you
I think that's all true except for the "more than competence" part and it's a good thing. Competence is directly related to loyalty. When you recommend someone for a job and they excel, it makes you look good. It makes you loyal to them and giving the opportunity makes them more loyal to you. If someone isn't recommended you for job openings they know about, it's because they think you might make them look bad, either through experience with you or the lack thereof. Unfortunately, it takes time to prove you're competent and gain that loyalty.
Sometimes nepotism can creep in and someone can use their influence to get someone under qualified into a position they shouldn't but that influence was, generally, built through competence, including a history of recommended qualified and competent people.
> The best advice someone could give? > 1. Achieve impressive things > 2. Never give anyone a reason to dislike you
I think the real advice is be reliable and don't be abrasive. A recommendation for a position goes a long way because it alleviates the risk of hiring an unknown person that may be unreliable or not be able to work with other people.
I'm someone who tends to get along and work well with others. That part definitely has its advantages for employability (and life in general), and is recommended. However, taking it to this extreme is just dangerous advice. Constantly being a people pleaser can carry enormous risks, especially (but not limited to) to yourself. It's important to learn to be ok with people disliking you sometimes.
The damage of a bad hire is 10x as bad as the positive impact of a good hire. A network of competent, easy to get along with people allows one to avoid the truly bad hires that we've all experienced.
Sure you may view it as exclusionary, but if you're hiring for seniors, and been in your niche a decade or more.. the likelihood of someone no one in your network has ever heard of being a great hire vs a terrible hire weighs heavily on a managers brain. Many of these niches are small and are the same few dozen people recirculating over and over. If you are going to spend more time with these people than your spouse or kids, you would like it be be minimally painful.
It’s true that a network referral will inherently be of someone that I worked with (or have other [rare] reason to vouch for). That’s the value of it: if you know me enough to trust my judgment, that vouch has information value for you.
I don’t see any other way it could work more effectively.
If competent people are valued, recognized and promoted that leads to more interesting projects and compensation. That's how you build loyalty.
We all know software shops that are always whining about the "tech talent shortage" and whose technical employees don't stay more than two years. And we know why nobody is loyal to those!
And frankly looking for a job is probably one of the most self-serving efforts in one's life, by definition. That is a good thing.
The point being? That is how human social network and constructs work. The ultimate point is to help yourself and not based on some ephemeral grand concept. No matter how competent someone is why would I want to work with them if they will stab me in the back one day? Incompetent people will indirectly stab you in the back eventually so you really want an adequate level of competence and loyalty.
Dislike and loyalty are also very different things so not sure why you're equating them. There's people who do things I dislike that will support others that support them. There are people I like greatly who have a record of stabbing others in the back even if they were helped by that person. Guess which ones I'd recommend for a job?
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This maybe makes sense from a hiring manager's perspective, but I think a lot of the people who say "let me know if I can help" are non-management peers. At most companies, the best they can do is enter their recently-laid-off colleagues information and resume into the internal referral system. Yes, that's usually better than going in through the "random applicant from the internet" funnel, but it's still limited. Even if they have a good relationship with the hiring manager, often the applicant still has to go through the funnel, and it's easy to get lost there. This usually isn't an issue with smaller companies that have less process, though.
Regardless, on the few occasions where I (as a non-manager) have referred someone and they've been hired, I don't think it gave me much of a reputation boost as someone who brought someone good onboard. Regardless, there are certainly some people for whom I'd go above and beyond to try to help them get an interview, but I'd do that because they are close friends whom I want to help, not because I of any professional perks of successfully referring someone, which I absolutely don't care about.
> This maybe makes sense from a hiring manager's perspective, but I think a lot of the people who say "let me know if I can help" are non-management peers.
A good number of my management gigs were PEERS hiring me in as a fellow engineer, and me getting promoted to be their boss. Much of the hiring I have done is peers of the good engineers on my team. If your peers think your great, that your going to make them look good by doing well then your name will come up.
Every manager is different, "hire this person" with some sort of resume is going to get my attention! Your peer can do that for you!
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/22/technology/the-web-withou...
I thrived by staying put. I got retention bonuses while my friends got tons of equity in companies that became 0. When they lowered their salaries to conserve money, they gave them more equity to compensate. Again, all the equity became 0.
Everything you said about networking is spot on. I would add to it - don't waste time. Don't think, "I'm going to ride on my severance and unemployment for six months and start on x date." Start literally today. If it's the holidays and nobody is hiring, get a certification. Learn a new technology. Work on networking. Exercise. Do 8 hours of productive something every day.
I have a friend who has been unemployed the last 2.5 years. He now wishes he didn't take a year off without improving himself / looking for a job.
In the dotcom crash, when I was laid off I think the first email I sent the next day was to someone who we were a client of at a previous employer. And we had stayed in touch because I had moved onto a competitor of his (until I was laid off). Just a "Hey. I was laid off. Love to pick your brain." sort of thing. Took me out to lunch with his COO the next week. Discussed some contracting but they ended up making me an offer in about of month.
Things got rocky for the company later. And it was touch and go for a bit. Not the greatest period for me financially but I was never really unemployed and it was a pretty great job in a lot of ways which set me up for my current one. Had I decided to take the autumn off, I could easily see myself being unemployed for 2 or 3 years. Other people I knew never really recovered from the dotcom bubble bursting.
I don't think people who haven't reached that bar are necessarily doing something "wrong". It takes hard work to reach it and some people prioritize other things in life over hustling. Others simply don't have the talent to reach it.
Competency is only ever recognized over time.
I, too, survived the dot com crash, and, too, benefited from and serve as part of the kind of network described above. When it comes to job hunting, my two favorite career stats are having helped a friend get a job I was interviewing for and working at least a second time for four different former managers. I actually just talked to one yesterday, we hadn't worked together in 20 years.
"30" sounds low to me, having worked in large companies for many years. Sure, the number of people you worked super-closely with for years is maybe in double digits but you probably know a lot of other people by reputation (which is still good signal) and there may be low effort things you can do for them. I try to, anyway.
But then after a while you've only worked in a few different places and with a few different people at each one. Your professional network is much smaller than someone who worked for a variety of big name tech giants in that time doing no-one-really-cares-what and climbing the career ladder by job hopping.
I'm really not bitter. If I could go back and tell my newly graduated self how their career would have gone a few decades later they'd probably still have made very similar decisions even with that knowledge. I've enjoyed many of my roles at small companies immensely and I can't think of many less attractive jobs in this industry than being a cog in the machine at some tech giant whose primary contribution to humanity is turning us all into spyware targets and then ad targets.
But it's undeniably true that sometimes in a tough market - even many years into a career and having reached the equivalent of staff/principal level or followed the independent/entrepreneur route - you can still end up knocking on the front door of an interesting employer or doing the recruiter thing to make a move when habitual networkers with similar YOE would not need to stoop so low because they'd find something via someone some other way.
What did non-survival look like? I assume you’re speaking metaphorically.
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I think the author has come away with the wrong lesson here.
Many engineers, particularly those that don't pay too much heed to social mores, think they have some God-given right to share details of all their private interactions publicly. Every tech test they do is pushed to GitHub with an accompanying blog post. Every interview has a transcript (somewhat one-sided) published and shared to Twitter. This is typical oafish behaviour displayed by mamy engineers and frankly, it annoys people. It's often considered a red flag when hiring. Understanding when to be discreet is an important skill for any employee.
Lying about why you're looking for work is a bad idea. That small lie will escalate, you'll have to start stringing together more lies, and when you get found out it won't reflect well.
This has nothing to do with radical honesty. I'm not suggesting you air all your dirty laundry during an interview. But don't lie. And don't publish all private interactions because you're a fan of free software. It's not the same thing.
If a company asks where else you are interviewing an honest but not transparent answer would be something like "I'm exploring other opportunities at various places but don't feel comfortable providing more details." If you were to ask a company who else they are interviewing for the same role, you would expect the same answer. It would probably cause alarm if they actually told you the names of other people they were interviewing!
on the desk was the laptop they wanted me to use, some pens and paper, and a stack of resumes from other people
the interviewer made no mention of the stack as they were leaving or when they came back, and when I asked about it at the end of the interview, they chuckled and changed the subject... to this day I'm wondering if it was some test to see if I threw the other resumes out (didn't get an offer btw)
I don't buy the "you don't want to work for a company that would ask you XYZ anyway" line. Sure, in some cases that may be true, but sometimes someone (that is, a random person on the interview loop, not a "professional interviewer" like a recruiter) will ask or say something they shouldn't, and that doesn't need to reflect poorly on the company (or even on the person; who hasn't said something dumb on occasion?).
If you think a question is inappropriate, politely decline to answer, using whatever verbal finesse you have available to yourself. It takes practice and confidence to do so, but it's the right thing to do.
Lying is one of the worst things you can do, it usually speaks to an issue with integrity, a concern that comes before almost all of them even intelligence, education, aptitude, skills.
Learn the skill of polite deferral, of saying things without saying them, diverting or embellishing a bit - and then only if it's an issue not relevant to the job.
If someone in an interview asks you your 'political orientation' (which obviously they shouldn't do and it would raise a big red flag anyhow - but just as an example) you do not have to be candid, but don't lie. You can say "I have a variety of opinions, I try to keep an open mind" - so long as you are comfortable with it and it's true. You have not lied, but not fully answered the question because it's none of their business.
I also think the OP here has misinterpreted 'transparency and candor'.
Engineers who 'over share' are a bit annoying but then again, you don't have to read their posts - but this is not the issue.
The 'issue' here is the absolutely truthful information that is 'just too much' for an interview setting.
Everyone needs to be honest and candid but not transparent like you're talking to the IRS or your accountant.
Suppose they ask you why you might want to work at the company, and you don't really feel hugely inspired, well, instead of saying literally that, you can find at least something interesting about the situation and allude to it. There's something interesting about every situation. And of course, if it's truly a bad situation just say that politely and assume you won't be working there.
It's ok to ask 'Elephant in the Room' questions especially if they are asked politely, if they can't handle that you don't want to work there.
It's ok to be turned away for something arbitrary or mundane (or any other reason) there will be other opportunities.
Getting turned down can make you very cynical and brings out our worst, even conspiratorial tendencies so try to stay grounded and keep your head on straight, don't be sucked into the vortex of weirdness and 'ultra competitive civility' of getting job shenanigans, it's not real, it's a big of a game, recognise it a such.
Kind of like telling people to 'don't be nervous' on a date, what I'm about to write is super glib but I think it's true: stay true to your basic values and identity and I think it will be easier to be more relaxed and authentic in interviews. The 'game' will pull you towards negative behaviours I have found it's a lot easier not to do them if you literally just decide that you are not going to do so for reasons of morality or values or whatever.
I get that this is marketing, and that's the game in an employer market. But sh*t, no-one is calling out the fact that maybe the responsibility is not only on the incoming recession, but also how dumb a large portion of the industry has been in trying to ignore as best as possible a freaking war, a pandemic, and flying oil prices, and carried on over-hiring at high wages. I'm grateful mine didn't go in that game and froze hiring very early on.
Maybe it's an emphasis, the way I read it is that you should keep your unpalatable opinions to yourself, because being critical of the system is cause to be rejected by it.
No. You have missed the point.
Nobody wants you to e grateful when you're not. But you do not have to say what you think just because you think it
Edit: I think it's the difference between "honesty" and "oversharing". It's being honest to say "I've interviewed with multiple companies and we haven't been able to come to a mutually beneficial agreement." It's oversharing to give a pile of details about each of those interviews.
Just got back into the job market, and every potential employer has expressed gratitude for my level of honesty and transparency.
I'm "weaker" at negotiations since I've laid out my cards on the table upfront. The other side of the coin is companies are less likely to waste my time unnecessarily, or play hardball too much when you appear to roll over so easily.
My take on Hard Truth 6 is to be careful and strategic with your honesty. It may not always be interpreted the way you intended, so be honest but be wise about what you're disclosing.
I was mortified at the simple description of that twitter post.
To lump that with honesty is probably unhelpful long term for OP, certainly unhelpful as advice.
Why scrub social media early only to taint it later!?
Being laid off was not a relief -- it was terrifying. All indications were that a severe recession was coming. Frankly, it was quite surprising to me that companies were hiring at all given the uncertainty. It was not obvious at the time that broad sectors of the economy could seamlessly move to 100% WFH. It was also my first experience in fully remote interviewing.
I am a software engineer over fifty. I also have three children two of whom were in college, and my wife works in a travel related industry which was very much affected by the pandemic.
Given those things I approached my job search aggressively and with a sense of urgency, and I made it out OK. I was out of work for about two months and accepted a role at flat comp.
Being laid off is profoundly lonely. I was part of a mass layoff (approximately 2/3 of my company was laid off.) So while I was not alone in that sense, we were all very much alone together. Where you had been a team, you were now five people looking for jobs, each with their own problems and constraints. My wife could not have been more supportive, and yet the process of interviewing and landing a job is one you have to do by yourself. One of the hardest things is to maintain an upbeat outlook, and yet it is so necessary because no one is going to hire a miserable sad sack.
On the other hand, I had no stigma whatsoever attached to the fact that I had been laid off. Part of that might have been that the size of the layoff was such that anyone with any glancing familiarity with the place I was at would know that 2/3 of the company were laid off.
One thing that I would emphasize would be maintain your professional network in good times and in bad. I got a number of good leads that way.
This point in the article was weird to me, that you should creatively avoid saying that you were laid off. Sure, some layoffs are just an excuse to get rid of people who the company believe are low performers, so if you were laid off from a prominent company where recruiters know why the layoff happened, this could be a problem for you when looking for a new job.
But if you were caught in the string of layoffs happening this year (or at the beginning of the pandemic), I can't see how there'd be stigma attached to that. And I'd worry that being evasive about why you're no longer at your previous company could be a red flag to recruiters; just doesn't seem worth it.
Whether or not saying you got laid off would hurt your chances is a separate question. My guess is most of the time it wont. But as a flip, would saying you got laid off improve your chances of getting the job? If the answer is no, then its not worth saying - focus instead on the things that for sure portray you positively.
The same goes for jobs with short tenures - if you stayed at some place for a few months and left just leave it off your resume. It doesn't do anything to sell you, so why waste time on it?
Just remember, an interview is a short period of time to sell the best parts of yourself that are most applicable to the job. It is not a 100% confession of all the good and bad things that happened to you.
But, y'know, regardless of the environment, what does it say about your abilities that your employer didn't consider you essential?
This is a very pessimistic way to view things that I don't fully believe, and of course any reasonable person knows that being part of a layoff is very rarely just the employee's fault. But to perhaps state the obvious, being laid off is never gonna look good, or even neutral. There will always be stigma.
Being able to reframe your layoff in as positive of a light as you can is important.
What has your experience been with this issue?
On the other hand if you are a subject matter expert in a particular domain, then your twenty years of experience are indeed very useful, and while no one wants to replicate the risk reporting system you built in Motif/X in the 90's, they may well want build it in React.
I’m GenX and grew up with the internet but I know life before the internet. I know technology more than most and keep up with it. I play video games (finished elden ring earlier this year) and watch TikTok 2 hours a day. I’m not young but the gap between me and someone younger isn’t a vast canyon like it used to be.
My last job hunt a year ago I got over 5 job offers. I wouldn’t be too worried.
Thanks for taking the time to read this post. I decided to spend Christmas break in CDMX[0] by myself in order to reflect not only on the past year, but just how far I've come since I got laid off. This is the result.
Thanks for making all those hours at the café (instead of at a museum or bar or whatever) worthwhile.
[0] I'll be here for a few more days if you'd like to meet up!
Of course I had my friends looking for opportunities and making referrals. One of them had a kind of clunky opportunity for me as an independent contractor for their company. It was a lengthy process to get it done, in part because they didn't really have their own contractor infrastructure so I organized an LLC, got my proper insurance, etc. Of course, I didn't tell me other friends about this opportunity because it wasn't a done deal yet, and I kind of knew the contracting thing was going to be short-lived anyway. Well, it turned out to fall through completely, which wasn't a huge surprise; but I found out that the hiring manager had told all my other friends to stop looking for jobs for me, because I was coming to work for him! So I was back to square one.
So, you wanna share with us what the connotations were? Is it just that the recruiter read "oh, you're failing a lot, you must suck"? Or is there something else more interesting to this?
I'm disappointed that this post is somewhat vague on specifics. But on the one situation that is set up very specifically, we don't get the punchline.
Posting "here's a list of companies that haven't got back to me" (which is possibly implicit in an open spreadsheet sort of post) is likely perceived as a troublemaker.
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Corporate jobs disappeared due to the financial crisis one time and a hostile takeover another time (both of those I was personally happy about). And a couple startups were acquired sooner than expected. There can be upsides, yes, but it can still leave you with months of trying to figure out what to pursue next, and that can be a weight on your mind even when you're making the most of your time off. When you are committed to a full-time job, something you have to do every day, you may dread going to work sometimes or just wish you could hike up a mountain or something, but it helps frame your day and reduce the number of decisions you have to make, so when you don't have that there can be a significant cognitive load trying to decide how to spend your time in a way that others may not understand. "Oh, that's nice, you're consulting, how flexible, lucky you!"
Early in my career I learned about how to come out of the gate blazing fast since when I graduated from college a couple decades ago half of the tech jobs were gone, and I had to work hard for months after graduation just to find a specific kind of application development work I wanted at the time. I was fortunate to find that but many others were not and had to take whatever came their way. But it wasn't easy, and like you said, I found out early that lots of interviews on your calendar isn't necessarily promising, so over the years I've tried to find alternate routes to work by meeting with people inside the company first to find out what it's really like, and how much they want to fill a specific position, etc.
And more important than all the above, I recommend finding a listening ear to share your journey with, someone who will try to understand where you're at! I have some friends who have had the same job for a couple decades and even though they may not relate well, we can still try to share our different lives with each other and it's more helpful than you might think!
Given that you now know what it will be like if you get laid off again, have you changed anything about how you approach your non-work life? Things like non-work friends you hang out with, non-work activities that you do for fun, Etc. Sort of "if I'm laid off again, then I'll fill my days with interviewing and ..."
Glad you're back up and running and have processed the layoff!
I found the pandemic lonely. I saw less than 1 person a month for the first 14 months of the pandemic. And i find WFH incredibly lonely. I haven't recovered. I'm utterly alone most weeks. I see no one. Even if I go to work, no one is there. I moved cities a year ago and have only 1 friend and 2 acquaintances in the new city. 2 of those 3 are married and I see them maybe once a month, if I'm lucky. The 3rd I haven't seen since August. The pandemic as killed meetup.com. It used to be full of activities. I don't think there is 1/20th of the activities there used to be.
I met them, I got their numbers and I started asking them to lunch at least once a week (sometimes more). That small, very determined activity just leads to more. You have to do it very consistently.
Hosting a poker night is very similar. It will start small and sometimes not happen, but you have to be relentlessly consistent to get it established.
- Not going outside every day
- Not keeping yourself fit
- Eating junk food
In my region there is a lot of office only/mostly hybrid (3+ days in the office) jobs, probably for the reason that you mention. Of course when I ask why I need to be in the office people tell me about culture and stuff... But the true reason is probably more along the lines: loneliness, small baby crying at home, apartment not appropriate for remote work, annoying roommates/spouse/during divorce.
Maybe changing jobs right now is not the best idea - so I will not suggest it. I will only suggest to get real human contact, as being on-line and talking on forums/social media does not work (at least in my case).
If you have a chance you may try to find some meetup for startup entrepreneurs, even if you are not interested in startups. I find people there to be really hyped and full of positive energy. Usually there is also a motivational speaker there. YMMV but in my city there are some free and open meetings like this.
Isn't this the crux of the issue? If OP was getting real human contact, they wouldn’t feel lonely.
This pandemic has really thrown us for a loop. New habits have been formed that are hard to break.
One of the first times I dipped my toe in the social pool in early 2022 was at a tech meetup. A bunch of us who went got COVID. I recovered but was the sickest I’d been in about 20 years. It doesn’t take much to withdraw more.
- Not exercising
I'd be lost without the friends I made in education settings. This might sound silly but any chance you could swap a meetup group with some sort of class? Art, writing especially something that involves discussion?
[0] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/loneliness...
If you need to chat with someone, I'm happy to lend an ear. Contact info is in my profile.
I have found NomadList (nomadlist.com) and NomadSphere (nomadsphere.io) invaluable for meeting up with people when abroad, although usually people who are there to work remotely.
And almost any sport, appreciate you may not play any, but a group of the same people go to the same thing week in week out. You can even pick something where you can get lessons first then join a club.
Sometimes there are more social sports clubs that aren't really competitive. Here in the UK for example there are social badminton clubs and competitive badminton clubs. You will get a real mix of skill levels at the social clubs, and these might have regular meetups outside of the badminton. The one I'm part of do meals, theatre, outdoor events, etc. together. It depends on the people running it.
I've tried to be a little careful still (still haven't gotten Covid as far as I know, I don't know if I'll be asymptomatic or end up in the hospital or something in between), and yet I've gone to several picnics, hikes, board game nights, outdoor hangouts, karaoke, movie nights, trivia, dinners, etc. via Meetup.com this past year.
Also supplemented that with Facebook events and the local forest preserve and local library's posted events.
I still have a core friend group (who I met thanks to Meetup.com many years ago), but several of my other friends have drifted off since the pandemic started (married and started having children), so I started doing meetup more again to compensate.
Friends made over 1 year, 3 months:
Meetup - 1 friend. Had a poor time-to-friend ratio for what I put in, but that's an n=1 and I mostly frequented just one meetup, although I tried like 3. Negative experience overall (for me, ymmv). Friend is great.
Local discord group around a hobby of interest - 2 friends. Many friendly acquaintances. Had to find the right group as a few I tried didn't feel like as-good fits. Positive experience, the friend making process was enjoyable and the friends are great.
Meeting at an intro class for another hobby (a semi social one - need at least one partner) - 2 friends. We were all new at the intro class and it was hard to find people, so we swapped numbers. Got to know each other through the hobby then became friends. Probably would be difficult to replicate intentionally.
Friends of Friends - 1 large group. 5 that I'd call friends and several more that I'd call group-friends or friendly acquaintances.
Friends of Friends are exponential. There's an excellent time to friend ratio, and the people you meet come pre-vetted. But note that some friends may be hesitant to make inter-friend connections even after they know you well, depending on how closed-off their other groups are. It's, of course, also not generally accessible until you have enough of a circle that like/trust you enough that you're getting invites to their other group things.
- Always have savings that will cover at least 6 months of expenses, now probably a year (if indeed it takes so much time to find a new job).
- Socialize outside work, ideally have a network of people that work at other companies that you are in touch with. Sports, charities, churches etc. If this is hard, ask yourself if you are overworking yourselves/spend too much time at work.
- Be careful what you are posting on social networks. Employers are more and more concerned about the image that you have on the internet. I propose to have 2 profiles, the first a professional one with portfolio of projects, blog, articles and what's not and the second for your private views (nobody should track that profile to your person using publicly available information).
Also I wonder what the author is doing professionally. I don't see any hard tech articles on his blog. Maybe he is into niche tech or doing some no longer hyped stuff like data science? That would explain why it took the author so long to find a new job. Maybe if this is the case the author should reflect on his skills and maybe change his niche to something more marketable?
Or just don't post about your views on anything (controversial or otherwise) on social media. Just opt out. There's no inherent reason why you need to post about anything on social media. If you must, perhaps because you use it to keep in touch with family and friends, just post about things that are going on in your life. There's no reason you need to use social media to air your grievances about society.
As someone involved with online privacy&security for a long time... I think almost no one on HN (including myself) can keep multiple online personae unlinked by commercial data brokers for as long as the threat model would seem to require.
If you have alt accounts, consider them low-security that eventually will be revealed, and figured into many employers' data science ranking&filtering, and their AI-model-summarized profiles they can pull up on you. Ideally, it won't be revealed before there's a more enlightened US culture of social tolerance, and more comprehensive and serious US data protection laws, but you can't bet on that.
You might also want to simplify by minimizing use of alts, and instead trying to self-moderate how you put yourself out there. For example, if you voted for a political candidate who rubs a lot of people the wrong way, either own it, or don't rant about it with alts in online public forums. For another example, dating -- without data brokers spying on some of your most intimate private interactions -- is nigh-impossible, but with an awareness of this, you can still try to save some things for offline pillow talk only.
When I created an HN account, I knew I'm more liberal/progressive than a lot of tech people, and that there's some currently popular practices in the field that I'm inevitably going to be outspokenly critical of, and that's going to alienate some techbros and employers. Having my name on the account is partly a reminder to me to try to only say things that I'd be willing to stand behind. (I'm certainly not perfect, but it's an attempt, and always learning from it.)
A company is not family, they're not your friend, and the perceived loyalty you think you've "earned" doesn't mean a thing if layoffs are coming.
Treat your employment as a business arrangement. You get a paycheck in exchange for labor. Nothing less, nothing more.
Humans are tribal by nature and companies are setup like a big tribe. We even call the guy (and it’s mostly a guy) at the top the chief! Feelings of “family” and “loyalty” are built into humans operating in tribes, and a real tribe looks out for its members.
So when the sudden wholesale internally orchestrated slaughter of a chunk of the tribe happens (metaphorically), it comes as quite a shock (the first time). Both for the people that go and the people that stay. The lesson is that a company is not a tribe.
That said, a company is also a collection of people and the relationships you develop as you work are just as meaningful as the ones you develop in other aspects of life. Loyalty to people is a perfectly good and reasonable thing.
So my take is, you should focus on fostering good relationships with your coworkers and hold loosely to the concept of the “company”. The company may screw you over, but good people will always try to do what is right.
If feels very very very wrong to compare a search during April 2020 and now.
Why? The year after April 2020 was a booming job market for SWEs. Hiring managers were competing for talent, 2021 was a boom year of low interest rates, euphoria in private and public markets.
This blog post _should not_ be considered a response to the WSJ article.
And sorry, grinding away at leetcode should only take about 2 months tops if you don’t have to worry having to balance leetcode and your job, and not a tall ask for a 250k+ job in tech. if you don’t need that high a salary, smaller companies generally are more lax about leetcode
- Studied at Berkeley
- worked at Apple and Uber
And I’m supposed to feel bad for you not wanting to spend a few weeks grinding at leetcode?
This reeks of someone who is very well off, and not an “Everyman” engineer.
grinding leetcode is some dumbshit waste of time that I'm not going to bother with -- I've got code to put in production and this simply is never a good use of my time. When you have an obnoxious hiring process that will take multiple hours for your special company, why would I even waste my time? I can click a few more buttons and have offers elsewhere anyways...
Did we know that at the time, though? From what I remember, it was all doom and gloom: public markets were trending downward, people were talking about recession and corporate belt-tightening, and the assumption was that we'd see a lot of layoffs, and the labor market would get tight.
True, that's not what happened (at least in the case of knowledge workers) -- in most cases it was the opposite -- but I don't think we had that foresight back in April 2020.
I feel like companies that emphasize interviews prioritizing rote memorization aren't going to be a good culture fit for me anyway.