I’m steadily looking for new opportunities, but am increasingly annoyed by the LinkedIn / Indeed grind. I feel like half the jobs are recruiting firms or very bloated positions with >500 applicants.
I love the monthly “Who is hiring?” thread — these positions almost always yield more responses and suffer less from false advertising.
Are there other sites I’m not considering? Methods I’m not using? How do you find good (defined as not bloated and optimized for LI) job opportunities in the current market?
My conclusion, so far, is unless you've got strong connections it's hard right now to find a job. Most job posting, as OP mentions get hundreds if not thousands of applications. Other times, I've personally also notice, candidates with perfect skill/experience matches get the same generic rejection ("we respect your experience but we're going to go with another candidate") or worse getting no response at all. There have been mentions of pseudo job posts (ie companies are just falsely advertising positions they are not actually look to fill). Ultimately, a really crappy situation for those looking for a job. Even experienced people, think 7,8,10+ years of experience, are seeing similar things unless they have a strong connection that get them to the final stage(s) of the internet process.
Happy to provide a links to relevant online discussions and articles about this situation if anyone is interested. Let me know.
I think I've made it to a recruiter screen around ~10 times, and I've had less than 5 actual interviews follow.
I have 6+ years in industry, 4 and some change of which were FAANG (which everyone believes is a golden ticket into any company). And I can't even get an interview.
I'm with OP. The grind is straight up depressing, demoralizing, soul crushing. I'm close to moving in with family just to preserve my money at this point.
In a past job, I saw a LOT of former FAANG candidates as a hiring manager (SRE @ hedge fund) at a past job.
In my experience, FAANG folks have a somewhat barbell distribution where it's either:
A. "This person is incredibly talented, well spoken and will probably find a job anywhere"
B. "This person spent 5 years at a FAANG and worked on basically two projects that would have taken <6 months at a hedge fund"
There doesn't really seem to be an in between.
I also distinctly remember learning that Google had 100K+ employees. To me, that is moving into "big bank" size territory and it's clearly impossible for EVERYONE who is former Google to be amazing.
Find some former Google colleagues who have managed to get new jobs and ask to review their resumes. Google is noteworthy on a resume: it won’t guarantee you a job but it’ll mean someone reviews your resume. If you’re struggling so much with a 4 year Google stint under your belt, there’s something wrong with your resume.
A quick tip:
When interviewing engineers I noticed that ex FANGs tend to fail the soft sides of the interview.
The type of interviews we do are relatively easy coding exercise (implement a frontend in react to do X, implement an API, fix an existing codebase). It's way easier than any fang exercise.
The core is not really getting the exercise 100% right (bugs may creep in, especially in a stressful situation), as long as you can prove you know how to work with some (=any) frontend or backend technology and reason about your code.
Something else we evaluate is how well they work with the interviewer to solve the problem.
From my experience FANGs people tend to be great problem solvers, but poor coworkers. Try to fine-tune that in your next interview!
Best of luck!
A few other things I've noticed:
1. Yes, I've had the "candidates with perfect skill/experience matches get the same generic rejection" but I've also had times when I'd apply for something that I had only a little bit of a match for, and still get pretty far through the interview process.
2. Related to #1, I can't get a good feeling of how qualified I am for these listings. Sometimes I'll apply to something that is in the low 100ks with a customized resume that echos all of their reqs and get rejected, but other times I'll just blind fire out my standard resume to something with a base in the mid 200s and get selected for a full interview loop.
3. It feels like some places still have the same "standards" for each part of the interview process, leading to a lot of candidates getting to the end, which then leads to some weird "you did well but we chose someone else" responses.
4. Sometimes I'd have an interview lined up, but then right before it I get a "due to shifting requirements, we have to postpone this by a bit" email. This has happened several times now (and they never have actually un-postponed it.) Same thing with spending a day or two interviewing at a place, not hearing back, and then reading of a large layoff at that company a few days later.
I’m done. Not even trying anymore. After a year of bullshit I’m convinced the only reason I ever made it into this field is because that stupid guilder age in the 2010s driven by cheap money, cargo culting, and naive idiocy. Even the non tech companies aren’t hiring much anymore.
Seriously I had an easier time finding a job when I was 18, had no formal education, and no real work experience.
I used to console myself with that fact that if I didn’t have anything else, I at least had a decent career and now I don’t even have that.
Recruiters disappeared over night. I occasionally get a few every once in a blue moon, but they always end up with nothing. I did my last interview a couple weeks ago, only for the recruiter to call me back as confused as I was whether the answer was yes or no. Cold applications are worse. I did managed a couple interviews out of those, but was rejected within a few days. Not sure why, those were some of the best interviews I’ve had recently. And the worst are the companies who send me an email months after I’ve applied just to say “we cancelled this position, lol”. I’ve also had family friends and others reach out and ask me if I’d like to consult for them, only for them to ghost me as well.
Now to be fair, some of this was my fault as well. I didn’t recognize how fucked the market was quick enough. I was desperately focusing on remote jobs, primarily because I really didn’t want to incur that costs and work that come with a move. I did a few interviews that were for in site positions, mostly for practice, and usually progressed further in those than for the remote roles, but ultimately didn’t seriously pursue them for the reason I just stated.
Meanwhile I’m in one of the worst real estate markets in the country, with my savings having been battered by all sorts of unexpected emergency expenses. I’m honestly half convinced that 2023 is trying to kill me. At the very least, I suppose I won’t have much left to lose sooner rather than later.
I was going to link my other comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37112093, but you already read and commented on that. Just try to hold out, it's just absolutely terrible right now, perhaps dotcom/2008 bad, but those were both before my mind so I can't necessarily give a good account for the experience during those two periods.
Ageism can get fucked.
But ... there is a lot of ageism out there. Which I've never understood.
I didn’t realize you could do that.
My take is there are lots of open roles, but companies are being slow to hire because they know they have the upper hand and want to wait out the market and get a great hire at a lower price. And right now with interest rates companies have lower opportunity cost (ie they're not incentivized to deploy capital as fast as possible) .
Every part is horrible:
recruiters that don't know the industry beyond buzzwords. this is frustrating, they cant think outside their box "oh you havent done exactly this for 10 years, so i guess youll never do it." I dont think people know how bad of a filter these hr people are. I wrote code that handled tens of millions of requests a second, then you get "oh but were really looking for a sr backend api engineer, this doesnt seem like a good match" like what do you think I was doing?
random interviews with no clear goals. "system design" wtf is this, i have no idea what anyone is looking in these within an hour. you want me to design facebook in 45min on a clunky ui? it takes 20 minutes just to talk about some of this stuff. you have to hope to hit their random keywords, but you have no idea what it is. leetcode has been beat to death, that to is horrible. we need you to optimize this exponential algorithm on the fly. basically if you haven't seen the exact problem before, you are not passing these interviews. or you run into the sr engineer, been with the company for years, that seems stuck in their local maximum that's interviewing you, your subjected their random questioning and expectations.
the slow pace of everything. schedule an intro call a week ahead with a useless recruiter, schedule your tech screen another week out, now 2 weeks to get 3 engineers to screen you, talk with a hiring manager another week out.
> worse getting no response at all.
yeah, some company sent me an offline question, one question was write a k8s yaml file, right now, along with 2 other algorithm questions. like wtf was that looking for. no, i havent heard anything back. cant believe i wasted 1.5 hours on that. i dont think ill do any take home assements anymore, there is no guarantee anyone will look or respond.
the low balls, "were looking for a staff/team lead, pay is 140k" you are out of your mind with these.
I can keep going, the whole thing is horrible. thanks for reading my mini rant
I am not even in the Tech Industry (Plastics Manufacturing Engineering), and this is the case. There are maybe... MAYBE... a handful of recruiters that have been in the business, working with my industry long enough to actually know what the heck they are talking about. They are ones that have actually gone to plants, gone on tours, asked questions, and tried to understand the difference between a dryer, a hopper, and a barrel on an injection molding machine. Modern recruiting is as much a numbers game as modern job hunting (for the most part) and it is completely idiotic.
I don't have really any advice, just wanted people to know that it's not just Tech that is seeing what you're seeing. The rest of us career professionals (16 years here) feel your pain and empathize.
The public perceptions don't seem to reflect this side of reality either -- the job reports and unemployment rates at all time lows, yet the frustrations you're expressing seems more common that you'd think just looking at the headlines and reports of the job market.
For what it's worth, I think it's best to try and ride it out, until the tides turn for the better. I don't know the root cause, but the economic situation (high interest rates) would seem to be the likely root cause, but that's just a guess.
I suspect that my biggest hurdle is that my resume isn't tailored enough to get through whatever criteria their applicant tracking system is using. Really annoying that I have to try and game the system just to get my foot in the door.
Right now, 70 applications over 2 months, I had a ~4% interview rate. Slightly lower than normal. July and August were absolutely dead. June I had some interviews. Fall it may pick up from what I've read.
I don't know how well tailoring works. If it's a special job, maybe it's worth it, otherwise, it may me more efficient to submit a comprehensive but otherwise non-tailored application. Maybe run an A/B test to see what gives you better results. You could also have a few pre-tailored resumes you can use for the typical positions you apply for (for eg Frontend, Backend, Fullstack, DevOps) instead of recreating one each time.
and yet the very first job I interviewed at in person hired me, matching my experience pre-pandemic. No compromise on my compensation bands, as I was really questioning my world by then
But turns out the humans didnt change, the mode of interaction did and it has less inputs with different biases
I'd say I've had ~10-15% recruiter screen response rate. I think a lot of my rejections have been companies filling the position before I get a chance to interview.
the only reason I applied was because it was uncanny how much the position matched my skillset.
this position was 1:1 what I've been doing in my career, pretty much an open req tailored to my experience.
dude on blind told me that it got fast tracked to the mgmt team from hr screening. I waited two weeks, and got a boilerplate rejection email. there were probably thousands of people who applied to that position.
My degree is in political science and I worked at a DC think tank as a research fellow focused on technology policy before leaving to co-found a VC-backed tech startup. After five years it failed.
Now it seems difficult to find a place which needs my mix of skills, a combination of communication and technical. I don't know if it's my unusual career path or something I'm doing wrong, but it's been tough so far.
Most are not willing to struggle, sacrifice, survive, and grind for a decade or more. Be the exception and build sustainable value. Money follows; perhaps trite but true. Sadly, this is excellent advice that many ignore (this may not actually apply to your specific circumstances, of course).
Your career path makes you top talent in the eyes of many. Honestly, your journey sounds like a leader’s narrative in the making. No excuses, get in there and get it done. I look in the mirror every morning and say nearly that exact thing to myself: “get in there and fight, today like all the other days before and all the days to come”. This is not figurative, I do this literally every single day as part of my daily routine and I don’t let up, even in my darkest hours of which there have been many over the years. I attribute my success to this mentality, perhaps it can work for you.
Be well!
I didn't do any direct applications to companies, as far as I recall - not until they had already reached out to me, either directly or through the recruiter.
Oh, and I was looking for a job where I wanted to move to - over a thousand miles away from where I had contacts. Also, I have nearly four decades of experience (you can look at that as a plus or a minus, depending on how much age discrimination you think is out there).
Result: Found a position where I wanted. It took a few months. I forget which way paid off. It was either Indeed or one of my headhunters.
Sorry that my memory is kind of vague. Between switching jobs and moving cross-country, selling a house and buying another, I had kind of a lot going on, and I've dropped some of the details.
Back in May and June, things were really bad. Layoffs everywhere, basically no open engineering positions. Late July and early August were / are much better, some recruiters even reaching me, instead of me reaching them.
Still pretty hard; about a hundred companies rejected me, of them a couple dozen after several rounds of interviews, and several after apparently successful final rounds.
2. Eventually, some of those people will get new jobs, and they can refer you to their new employer (and vice versa).
3. Repeat for a few cycles and you have a network full of potential job opportunities without ever going through a job board.
1. Make friends with _everybody_ at work.
That includes the guy who brags about himself all the time. That includes the person who you only give the easiest tasks because you don't trust them with anything complicated. That includes the person who doesn't suffer fools gladly.
You never know. I had a constant braggart coworker who everyone else avoided. I smiled and listened politely. He was the one who got me my next job.
Exceptions, obviously, for coworkers that are actively corrosive or abusive. I'm not cozying up to the guy that the female interns refuse to share an elevator with.
I never liked the dude much but I was trying to get his jokes though his thick British accent and trying to be polite.
Turns out he hated me for some reason and actively stopped a referral I tried to bring into the company. Years later I even offered him a referral out of courtesy which he didn't pick up on. Even more years later I found out he vetoed me from some company I applied years ago with no specific reason.
Hopefully not, hopefully you're leaving for greener pastures, or because of something systemic that you can critique on exit without throwing anyone under the bus.
But sometimes not. Sometimes you have a responsibility to your peers to honestly describe the problem that prompted you to leave, even if it means burning a bridge.
The alternative is to squander the organizational growth opportunity that your resignation represents, and subsequently burn all bridges except the one with the problematic person.
1. Go on LinkedIn and find past co-workers and friends. Make a list of those people.
2. Prioritize based on companies you want to work for and people who had a good experience with you
3. Reach out to them with a generic opening like "How are things going?"
4. After some back and forth, you can ask "Hey, are you guys hiring by any chance?"
I also wrote a recap of mistakes and lessons learned from trying to find work at a hedge fund here: https://twitter.com/alexpotato/status/1663668616233885699
It has some more general recommendations as well.
According to PG, this is the exact time for them to be hitting it out of the ballpark doing a startup.
Swing harder, people!
I haven't bothered with non-word-of-mouth jobs for over ten years. If the job's not recommended to me by someone I already know, I'm not interested. It saves sooo much time.
Later I had a couple short zoom culture interviews and a take-home project which I sunk 10 hours into and outshined 30 other applicants. Offer in my inbox in less than 7 days. Mind you, this was after a grand total of like 20+ hours of interviews at other companies, with on the spot algo tests and all.
Here’s what I’ve learned: I will not subject myself to algo interviews. I just don’t think that’s what I want the companies I work for to value most in their devs. I want take-home projects with clear instructions. I want culture interviews where they are truly trying to see if I’d be a good fit.
Since I got hired I’ve actually helped hire a couple devs. Even as someone who went the traditional route of majoring in CS at a university I’ll say this: I don’t care how you got your knowledge. I just want to see real projects you’ve worked on. The sheer amount of people who apply even from prestigious schools like Stanford who have a mostly empty GitHub is staggering to me. I don’t care how much money you spent on education, show me the code!
I have two kids, couple family friends, one hobby and I like to watch basketball and old movies. Outside of work I spend some time here and couple subreddits. I do not have time for the side projects on GitHub or to prepare for silly LC tests. I do not have time to create LinkedIn account and keep it updated.
I have CV with average EU Uni and uninterrupted 16 years across many different domains and with different tech stacks.
I refuse to do following:
- LC tests
- take home.
On another hand we can have interview for 6 hours about your business domain or system design.
There’s another aspect in your comment too, and that’s seniority. I was born a year after you started programming, so GitHub and online portfolios were just a natural thing for me to take on. If you have people that will vouch for you and you have decades under your belt, you can more easily get away with no leetcode and no take home.
People apply for dozens of jobs, if they had to spend 10 hours on a take home project each, it would add up to hundreds of total hours working on pointless toy projects just for the chance to get a job. That's like working full time for a month or two. Not counting the time spent to get up to that point (finding open job listings, editing resume, submitting application, doing screening interviews, etc.)
But I totally agree with your point. I think that if a take-home project goes over a couple hours it should be paid. Some companies do this, but not enough.
This gave me a business idea (AI business perhaps): anonymize your employer's codebase, enough so you can post it on GitHub without violating your terms of employment.
10 (ten) hours? youre gonna outshine other applicants cuz most of them (and a lot of HN) isn't going to do that.
don't put more time into the app then they'll put into you.
Sent out upwards of 500 applications, 10, 20, maybe 30 interviews even fewer that have gone to the 'final rounds' and even some very close calls. No offers yet.
I'm also spending this time learning new tech that interests me and working on a portfolio site that is true to those interests. This is slow going but I don't let it get me down (if I can help it) because I help my partner garden, raise our dog, and work on my other hobbies as well.
I'm a marketing guy, and have started to regret my career path. I've made it to several final rounds in the past year, but only wound up with rejection at the end—at the final stages, it can be real subtle things that lead them to make that final choice of one candidate vs. another.
On top of that, I'm taking care of a toddler full time, since we can't afford a nanny since I got laid off, so I have even less time to dedicate to the job hunt / skill advancement, and honestly I'm so exhausted by the end of the day that I'm too drained to work on projects that require real brainpower. It's been a slog, but I'm hanging in there and not giving up.
Otta.com has been a great, easy resource for job hunting.
1. Slow down and ask for a few minutes to collect myself. "I'm not in this context, do you mind if I have a minute to organize my thoughts". And then do a little "whiteboard" in my notebook or something. Some people might say to verbalize your thinking process and I agree but there shouldn't be anything wrong with taking a few minutes. (I mean, this doesn't even necessarily test for how I'd do on the job because I'm at least competent at coding)
2. Practice more situations. Any time I struggle with a problem after the interview I make sure I understand that tech. Right now I'm studying up on class components and websockets. (Two technologies I either don't really see anymore: we use functional components on my latest projects or stuff you set and forget)
I think #2 is part of what people mean when they say that interviewing prepares you for the next one.
- Some places that I get far with I've literally reached out afterward and asked for pointers. One piece of feedback I've gotten is, "We didn't get a good sense of what drives you." which, that's fair. I think of software engineering as more of a technician => "I have the skills to solve your problems" and not so much, "My passion is building the front-end for X,Y,Z business" I mean, I'd obviously like to find work with meaning but I'm not driven by that meaning. I don't think we'd ask our plumber to show their passion for the work (Not that they can't have that) but instead we're more concerned with, "Are you competent?" - That's something I need to work on for sure.
- Lastly, I've learned that an interview is for both parties. The person interviewing me is also representative of the company. The last two interviews I had a bad feeling about the fit post interview and I think I should have reached out and rescinded my interest because our values didn't align.
Most of the time though, I check all the boxes and don't even make it to interview stage so its hard to really glean anything useful most of the time. Could it be a bad market? Is it because the only box I don't check is having a CS degree? (I have a bachelors but not in CS) Is it my experience is too varied? Who knows. Best I can do is to keep at it.
I hired two developers in the last few weeks via LinkedIn job ads and I can tell you out of 200 applicants there were less than 10 who fits the requirements.
I would also say make sure your resume fits the job, add your phone number and email address. Start with what's important, your experience and things that you're really good at.
Changing the resume to fit each JD would hard, but apply for jobs that your experience fit well.
I truly believe that the real opportunities out there are those which are mostly divorced away from the typical LinkedIn posting where it's just some company trying to push more consumerism on the world.
Similar story applying to work at a bakery down the street, and same for working for animal control.
I agree doing work in your local community is rewarding, but it amounts to full time volunteerism. Our economy is truly horrific for the middle class and below.
For example, a friend of mine was complaining that he had to work hard to afford a house. However, he was dead-set on a set of ideals and a location he wanted to settle at. Maybe part of that was preference, but it was clear that part of that was some sort of preconceived notion hammered into him by society and peer examples.
Instead, he could have aimed to buy a cheaper house in a smaller town while working/renting in the current town and just moved out. In my home town, even smaller houses cost at least 400K but there are plenty of nice places where the houses are 60K. So, buy one of those instead and move away once you've saved up enough...
By taking a month and seriously going through what's important to have a happy, "basic" life, most people will find things that they can give up, but that will make them happier in the long run. Like living in a certain neighbourhood, buying this or that, taking a certain number of vacations, having an extra child, a dog, etc.
Most people end up saving TOO much for retirement...and while caution is good, our society hammers this idea of an extremely consumptive lifestyle that these endless 9-5 jobs support.
Become a regular contributor to specific open-source projects (esp if it's a growing and/or funded startup).
This approach might work better for those that are already comfortable w/ OSS and don't yet have connections. When applying to that company a bit later, obviously mention all the merged PRs.
For example, here's Posthog [0] showing you what you could help with thru a job post. You can find more companies like this one at Fossfox [1], shameless plug: I maintain that index rn.
[0] https://posthog.com/careers/full-stack-engineer-growth#typic...
[1] https://fossfox.com/
It is a great suggestion imho.