Hi all,
I am getting ready to start searching for a new position and am wanting to move from a hybrid position to fully remote to offer some flexibility with familial obligations but but I'm not entirely sure whether or not that's a realistic goal in this job environment.
Recently I've seeing some sentiment that suggests the job hunt process for us in tech has been improving, and that recruiters are starting to reach out more often than in the last year. If you've recently switched positions, what was your experience like and do you have any advice for those who are currently looking to change positions? For those that have gone remote, any specific insights?
So it's both impossible and very very easy.
I think tech hiring is going to be a knife fight for a long time, because we're long past the point where only the thoroughly interested are looking for jobs in this industry, and there's so much money in the field that competition is high enough for people to take "towers of hanoi in optimized big o" interview tests seriously (probably because they cut the candidate field down to a manageable number)
>For those that have gone remote, any specific insights?
Be ready to manage your time, it's very easy to let 15 minutes off for chores turn into blowing off a whole day.
Alternatively (and in my opinion, more importantly), manage your 'at work' time. It's very, very easy to let working become your whole self.
Get out of the working space and SEPARATE your working space from your living and thriving space from your working space is absolutely vital to avoid burnout.
nice, self discipline like a 12 year old :P
I started looking casually for a new position last July, then in earnest last October, and then my previous contract ended in middle of February and I "lucked" into a new contract in middle of March. ("Lucked" because I was contacted out of the blue by a good recruiter for a good firm, but also that contact was somewhat the result of a lot of prep work I had done.)
I'm a generalist developer with small-firm management experience, 45, still picking up new stuff all the time despite working in tech for over 20 years, and with some decent extracurriculars.
I sent out many, many applications. A percentage of them required homework of varying kinds -- tests or generating and filling out a profile that contained all the same data as my resume. Most of those never resulted in an interview, so it was all wasted effort.
I had several promising leads evaporate at some point during the interview process because the company changed their mind about the position. Other interviews never provided any feedback whatsoever.
My current contract is for a firm that needed someone with extensive PHP experience, which I have, but they were a Ruby-only shop and needed to do a technical evaluation on me. So, I spent a week preparing for that interview until I was reasonably comfortable with basic Ruby, only for it never to come up during the interview after all. And, like, these seem to be pretty good people overall -- it's just emblematic of the state of things.
I very, very nearly quit tech to start working towards becoming a personal trainer, and may still do so at the end of this contract. In my view, getting hired right now is in some ways even harder than it was during the dotcom bust of the early 2000s. If you are a specific kind of person -- 20s, maybe some college, and experience at a FAANG, and "senior" or "lead" after just a couple of years in the industry -- then you might have some options.
Hiring processes are fractally broken though. People are getting hired, there are jobs available, but there are also hundreds of applicants for any position within a few hours of the position opening, and because hiring processes are so broken, it's quite hard to stand out as an applicant.
I have a similar experience to the previous comment, applied to about 50 jobs and got 2 interviews. Removed all dates from my resume and now I'm getting interviews left and right because they can't tell how "senior" I am.
Recently a friend hooked me up with a friend of his who is working on an AI accelerator chip startup on a shoestring. So I guess I'm about to start working on that. No pay, just equity, but there's a huge amount of money sloshing around in this space right now and who knows, maybe he can get some funding? Interesting stuff to work on, anyway, even if it doesn't pan out.
I guess the takeaway here is that it's surprisingly easy to find a gig that only pays in equity.
Economic realities mean there’s quite a bit of downward pressure on CAD right now, so this is likely to continue to be a good deal on both sides for quite a while.
I’m still getting approached by recruiters for Canadian-based remote roles like it’s 2021.
In the last six months I’ve been hired once after applying (on the website of the company itself) to s job posting I first saw on LinkedIn. I was poached shortly after via inbound from recruiter on LinkedIn
Make sure that your contract specifically mentions that you'll work remotely. Otherwise your boss can always change their mind down the line.
I’m looking for a front end position - it’s never taken me more than four or five months in the past, and I have more experience and sharper skills now than ever before… and it’s been almost eight months currently. Maybe only 50% of applications out of hundreds even prompt a “thank you but no” form email. It’s almost never personal either, since everyone proxies their hiring process through big job board sites.
It’s insane how little personal engagement with actual humans is happening, I’ve never experienced a job hunt like this before, it’s really making me wonder what I’m doing wrong. Usually I do a few interviews, find a spot that seems promising, and jump right into another contract. I don’t know why it should be different this round.
So yes, we have quantity over quality with those job boards, LinkedIn and so on, and we had to hire someone to deal with the flow.
Is that "hundreds of thousands" per month, as in salaries >$1.2 million per year? or do you pay some developers less than $1000/month?
Or are you paying "hundreds or thousands per month" to applicant filtering services?
Or do you have "hundreds or thousands" of different employees receiving a salary every month?