Former Apple/Facebook engineer, been leading engineering and product teams at startups the last few years. Have normally found a new job within a few weeks, but this time it has been 4 months.
Submitted 150 job applications last week. Got one interview with a recruiter. Had a few interview rounds over the last few months through old coworkers, they all lasted several months with long pauses - one still going 4 months in.
How is it going for everyone else searching right now? Is it just me?
~15 YOE, FAANG experience, usually only applying to roles I feel I’m at least a halfway good fit for (i.e. not a complete scattergun approach).
I’m (financially) fine for now, which is very fortunate. I wasn’t even laid off - I quit voluntarily and took a sabbatical while the good times were rollin’. But since I started looking seriously again, it’s been hard to shake the sense of time disappearing with nothing to show for it. I’m better at Leetcode (ugh) than I’ve ever been, but so is everyone else, and with the slow drip of actual interviews, I only get to demonstrate it once or twice a month :)
ETA: A few of the recruiters I have talked with have mentioned that they’re getting hundreds of applications within hours of a posting going live. So there is likely a “lost in volume” effect as another commenter mentioned. In fact, for some of the roles where I thought I was a great fit but got a generic rejection without a recruiter call, I’ve had some eventual success simply reapplying for the same role, at least when the recruiting platform allows it (some don’t). For reasons of culture and upbringing, it took me a while to get comfortable not taking that initial, faceless “no” for an answer, but it has worked at least twice so far.
Edit: I should have explained my reasoning. They have a much smaller eligible applicant pool - US citizens who are eligible for security clearance. Because of this they’re continuously looking for good talent.
Thanks for the hint anyway - perhaps someone else will benefit.
The process itself was unlike anything I'd ever experienced before. I've always been very targeted in applications, so prior to this the largest number of jobs I applied to in a job search was 5, and the grand total of job applications to date that didn't result in a phone screen was 2 or 3.
This time around, I was looking for a management gig, and sent about 54 applications. Due to a combination of being very targeted and being a little early in the layoff cycle (early fall last year), I managed to get about 10 cases of actually talking to a recruiter, 4 speaking with the hiring manager, 2 going through the full process, and 1 offer. I did also have another 10 recruiter conversations through my own network of recruiters and inbound LinkedIn requests.
A not-so-fun fact is that all but one large-company recruiter I talked this has since been laid off. One of those companies laid off the first recruiter I was talking to, and then laid off the second a couple weeks later.
So 9 out of 10 were laid off? That's pretty shocking and dire if so...
~15 YOE (FB/Meta most recently), ramping up a search after a sabbatical, targeted job search to roles where I have non-trivial experience and domain expertise, customized cover letters, leveraging my network, open to relocation, open to hybrid or remote, etc.
I'm seeing 3-5% response rate over the past few months. It's rough out there. No response for seemingly great matches. Slow moving recruiting process, even at early-stage startups. Rejections after screenings and first round interviews where the mutual fit seemed excellent.
Hiring manager friends and talkative recruiters tell me that in contrast to the past decade where they'd routinely screen people who met most of what they're looking for, they're now dealing with a massive volume of very qualified applicants (and trudging through a massive volume of unqualified applicants). Deciding who to screen and who to do a first round of interviews with is taking a lot more time and effort. And the first round of interviews might include 6-8 unicorn (i.e. perfect) candidates, where in the past they'd be elated to find 1 unicorn.
I've been through a couple down cycles, so I'm focused on grinding away till I find something. I think every level is feeling the pain in some proportional way. Big sympathy for early career folks. Even if we reset compensation expectations, it'd be a shame if the sector ends up losing out permanently on a range of talent. There's no way tech needs are going to decrease on a medium-term horizon (though they may shift).
From a recruiter's perspective, this can be a red flag because they know how much you are worth, and the fact that you worked successfully there means you can probably return. So they might not want to hire you thinking "this guy can leave us for Meta/Google any day".
> ETA: A few of the recruiters I have talked with have mentioned that they’re getting hundreds of applications within hours of a posting going live. So there is likely a “lost in volume” effect as another commenter mentioned.
The real question is what's the signal to noise ratio?
Getting 500 resume for a job posting is not really a new thing for any in-demand, remote friendly company in the bay area. From experience, most applicants on these postings are underqualified (it's free to apply).
I think a good example of this is on LinkedIn. I see "Over 200 Applicants" and "See how you compare to 421 applicants" on their Easy Apply job postings.
Did the same. Boy do I feel dumb now.
I'm a good 3-5yr, mid-level dev, without FAANG company experience.
isn't it the opposite?. All I see is doom and gloom in the news.
Probably the reason. Most companies need people with experience in more than just one layer of a stack. Hard times for those who cant own a full stack, unfortunately.
It’s proving hard to sell generalist-ness to recruiters this round. They often lock on to the most recent specific domain I worked in. If anything, they seem to be filtering for people with very specific experience in a specific layer of a specific stacks - because they are getting so many applications, they can be very choosy.
I realise this sounds basic, but that's the point: almost all of those things are everywhere. Bury yourself in a tiny slice of one of those things and you've become un-or-over qualified for most of the market.
My self esteem and confidence is at an all time low. It is soul-crushing to have had a brilliant career and get barely 1% response rate. I can't only blame it on my CV being terrible (went through half a dozen iterations already)
I structure the hour-long phone screen to be 1/3 coding, 1/3 behavioural questions, and 1/3 career growth and questions for me.
We rarely get out of the coding question block. It's a fairly simple question that ChatGPT solves easily. The tightest solution is about 10 lines of code. It can be answered either with iterative, recursive, or functional code. There is a general case, an empty case, and an exceptional case. It's the type of code I was able to write after completing CMPT 101. I had to change the question since it was so easily solvable by ChatGPT.
Engineers with years of experience at FAANG and similar companies cannot solve this straightforward problem. It's like, what have you been doing with your life? Did everyone do nothing during ZIRPy times and have accumulated years of rust that they now need to shake off?
well I guess now we know why its all so brutal. We are being compared to a state of the art AI. Also we gotta have a compiler installed on our heads. That aside, if you are a hiring manager, ask yourself what your company really needs. Because this format of interview is so outdated, its insane.
We have a proper domain-specific programming test in the later stages of our pipeline, so my phone screen is a smoke test I expect most devs to complete in 10 minutes (we give the full 30 just in case).
We talk through a simple word problem, and at no point do I even require it to compile because I understand that not having your coding development environment choice can throw you off. At most if I spot an obvious syntax error I'll nudge to make sure they spot it and move on.
- Yet the feedback I get is extremely bi-modal: People who write code for a living love it. They had mentally prepped for inverting binary trees while some CS-guru stares them down over Zoom, so having a collaborative problem that takes the same mental process your day to day does is great for them.
But for people who have hyper-optimized for leetcode, it's like their brains shut down. Simple problems they should be able to solve with basic control flow suddenly become these insurmountable wall because they can't pattern match against something they memorized.
If it is a "toy" question, then I'm of two minds about it:
On one hand, I am used to solving higher level problems, so it might take me a few minutes just to realize you are asking a much simpler question. It also can feel just a tad insulting to be drilled on CompSci 101 questions.
Oh the other hand, I think candidates should be able to solve such questions, as long as the scope is clear. You need to filter somehow and I've met people who could not do that.
The solution is a while-loop with a couple of if-statements. I would hope an engineer would write code like this many times per day. Whenever they need to marshal a blob from A to B.
> It also can feel just a tad insulting to be drilled on CompSci 101 questions.
I wish I had this problem! In these rare cases, I just say, "Great job! This was to just double-check you could write code. You'd be surprised how often a candidate isn't able to solve this! Let's talk about your career. In what aspects would you like to grow next?"
It's one thing if we paint it as Leetcode and then ask for fizz-buzz, but when I start the interview off by saying "no algorithms involved, we're not even compiling, it's mostly a way for us to talk about <insert language>" and 15 minutes in you're still looking for a place to shoe horn in a hand rolled hash map, it might just say something about how your approach to engineering.
Many would argue filling FAANG to the brim with people who actively seek complexity is what has directly hurt their ability to innovate (and the fact OpenAI is full of ex-FAANG doesn't disagree)
Another way to approach this: can the candidate communicate? If they cannot write original code odds are they probably cannot clearly write steps of simple instructions explaining a problem or solution as they do not have experience thinking through the problem without a lot of help.
Most places I interviewed at last year claimed to be looking for senior developers but in practice were only looking for trend chasers doing things in a very limited way that appeals primarily to beginners memorizing patterns.
Dead Comment
My most memorable was this tier 3 hedge fund trying to convince me to take a junior IC role for a new team that had also hired a manager and director from outside the company for a new endeavor/initiative, and the manager had been at his last 3 jobs for roughly over a year each, get out of here lol.
I've done everything from UI to cloud to embedded stuff, but I was mostly focusing on embedded roles thinking that a) I like that sort of work and b) the competition wouldn't be as bad, though Amazon did layoff a lot of device folk in my geographic area.
Salary expectations seemed to be a big thing at companies, and I'd expect that FAANG folks looking to find that sort of compensation at smaller companies are likely to be disappointed or possibly even weeded out at the start.
That said, some companies are definitely low-balling but most seem willing to pay around 'market rate' for folks. I took a slight step-down in pay, but I like what I'm working on and the people and the companies that we offering more money we're offering enough more to overcome that.
What does this mean? What do the quotes mean?
This seems to be nearly a tautology; the market rate is what people are willing to pay.
Are they all junior IC level low balls, or is this accidentally revealing why staff level+ engineers aren't getting calls?
I'll be honest and say if tomorrow morning I get laid off, I'm not expecting my current pay to get matched.
And yet the manager would be your boss. Not sure why you think how long someone has been in a role is somehow a worthwhile signal.
If it takes 6+ months just to get "up to speed", are you really having much impact when you leave 6 months later?
Reading all the comments in this thread, I wonder if there's some correlation to specific areas of the tech industry. e.g., Are people working in the AI space (or even something like ML infra) just inundated with job offers right now?
Better than people who job hop every 1-2 years but maybe they're looking for someone with longevity?
I'm not sure how many are genuine compared to scatter-shot applications but it means that a lot of recruiters have to dig through huge piles of resumes and odds are good that you're just being missed in the volume.
There are much fewer resumes for specialized/higher level roles than for junior roles. Infra or Security roles get much fewer applications than junior SWE.
On a personal note, I've noticed that recruiter reach outs have increased since mid-February.
Context for you: I'm a mid-level Growth PM based in Europe who worked mostly in early stage B2B YC startups.
How am I doing? This is my 11th week in job search, 96 applications, 10 interviews (1 still active), and 0 offer.
My insights so far:
- there's definitively no rush from employers to close their openings, and for the first time in a job search (this is my 4th) I got 2 interviews suspended because they decided to prioritize another leadership hire before closing for the role that I was interviewing for;
- most of the mid level openings are masqueraded senior roles;
I feel so bad for people early in their career, for the first time I think I've never encountered an entry level opening... I was trying to also help my wife to get a job in tech (she is very early in her career), but currently it doesn't seem possible.
Luckily we are financially ok, which is the main thing that allowed me to stay positive, in relatively good mood, and don't feel overwhelmed with the daily rejections.
1. Every company wants to show off it's "really high bar" ... For building yet another crud service ... handling 1qps (that is still a 100k qpd so don't laugh at it).
2. So they read about what the fangs do and naturally copy all the terrible parts (impact impact impact, more artifacts just for evidence, write realms and realms of repeated documents before writing a line of code so you can show "influence", leetcode and more). Why aren't they copying the good parts - oh we are still a small company and tight on resources.
3. Naturally they couldn't demand this when the market was hot. Now they feel unleashed. So are going nuts either in the form of taking their sweet time ("evaluate and dig deep into our hiring pipeline") or with ridiculous and arbitrary hiring loops. (I had one cto ask me to demo a personal project only to back out after he felt insecure about what I had built - sure could be my opinion).
Another one I had never written a cover letter in my life before and this time I had to write 2000 word essays on why I thought company X was better than Jesus and why and when Id sacrifice my left nut for the honor of being chosen by them.
Sigh I suppose human nature had to come out. But thankfully I did get lucky and met some amazing people who were there when I needed them. My only advice (ok selection bias) is to network like hell. Good roles aren't coming by just applying on LinkedIn (I don't this was ever true but more so now). If you have to send a resume you've already lost is what I am getting reassured of. Hope ymmv.
When you apply all these filters you're left with... no one.
Not a lot of equity in the comp packages this time around (real equity anyway, plenty of funny money from startups). I accepted a salary of $200k, 20% annual cash bonus, small signing bonus. My overall comp is lower, but my cash is a touch higher and the stress is a lot less.
My background is Linux, k8s, golang, and python. I also write C/C++ occasionally. Don't really ever touch front end work or databases anymore. I don't have FAANG experience, but I have contributed to some large open source projects here and there. No degree.
Everything I've heard suggests there's a lot of decisions that are waiting on financial reporting for the quarter before the C-suites make their hiring decisions. MS is not just laying off, they have frozen internal hiring between groups and even projects inside of groups. AWS is waiting on financials, my contact over there is looking to move back to MITRE because he's worried, and he has high-side access. I know a couple of start ups in the area have had their buyouts put in a holding pattern. Nothing is dire, but the general vibe is "calm before the storm".