For context -
I’ve made 4 personal projects that currently have over 1000+ daily active users (numbers are ~1500, ~6000, ~14,000, and ~430,000) all created within the span of the last year. I’ve also sold software.
On top of all that, I have an Engineering degree, 4 years experience, no breaks in employment, study on my afternoons and weekends (C, Go, C#) and take extra university courses, and have some other high level achievements/recognition.
I apply for Intermediate and Senior positions.
So far I have 3 interviews lined up out of ~30-40 applications. About 10 rejections so far. 1 of those jobs is actually decent, the other 2 are desperation applications.
It’s brutal. I’m trying my absolute best, I don’t see how people that have been coasting have any chance.
You should be able to coast a bit in life.
I’m sad at the state of things, and sad for people trying to stay in the industry or break into the industry.
Very impressive resume. Why only 30-40 applications? Are you looking for a relatively niche role? As someone who graduated into the great recession, "normal" to me still feels like 1000 applications is the bare minimum.
FYI, the personal projects might be a detriment rather than a help as it may come across as "this person will have split priorities or might leave to pursue individual interests"
For better or worse, I might not showcase those that much.
IMO a well rounded individual won't have much time for personal projects while working a full time job. They might be really good at writing code though.
Those projects can be demonstrating your skill/ability in all areas - testing, docs, UI/UX/DX, support, project management, sales/marketing and more. But now you're possibly (likely?) coming across as more accomplished than the rest of the team, and somehow you think you know more than others who've been at the company for years.
This is why I’ve given up on software. I loved it, made side projects in college, got my computer science degree, worked for a couple years and then got laid off early in 2023. It’s been a year and a half and I still can not find a new job. I have not coded in god knows how long, I don’t find it enjoyable anymore. In fact I almost despise it. I’ve decided to join the military instead.
Merely for your consideration: if you are able to pass the security clearance then you can "join the military" by applying to CISA or the NSA, as I am certain they'll be glad to get all the computer science help they can
The bad news is that I'm mostly talking second-hand since I only know people who have gone that path, without having tried it myself
Yeah so - I would hire you if it was for a relevant role.
But for the sake of another perspective, here's how your description reads:
"I’ve made 4 personal projects that currently have over 1000+ daily active users (numbers are ~1500, ~6000, ~14,000, and ~430,000) all created within the span of the last year. I’ve also sold software."
-->
"I have made personal projects - in fact so many I'm always at it, with a bit too many to make you comfortable. These are so successful and so quickly created that I can clearly do these once I'm with you - and I have the skills to sell software, so I could monetize them. If and when I want to. This says nothing about my ability to follow requirements or work with others"
(my advice: focus on the most successful project, say it's non-profit, and try saying "listened to customer feedback" instead)
"On top of all that, I have an Engineering degree, 4 years experience, no breaks in employment, study on my afternoons and weekends (C, Go, C#) and take extra university courses, and have some other high level achievements/recognition."
That all sounds fine.
"You should be able to coast a bit in life."
--> Honestly if you lead to employers with saying that you've sold software personally and have 4 side-projects, you haven't been searching for a job long enough to realize that's unwise in this market - you've potentially been coasting on your job search. Have you been studying C/Go/C# instead of applying to jobs because you prefer studying?
Just trying to play devils advocate here but have you considered that your lack of “coasting” could be part of the problem? If your resume looks anything like this post then that is something to consider.
Your side projects could give the impression that you are more dedicated to those than to your primary employer.
For the roles I review resumes for and interview I want a well rounded individual who seems like they would stay in the position for many years. Someone who is studying on weekends and taking extra university courses on coding does not necessarily give me that impression. Again, just a devil’s advocate position.
Idk, this sounds suspiciously like the sort of rube goldberg chain of logic that software developers tell themselves when they're overthinking everything. "I probably didn't get the job because I have too many successful side projects, so employers are scared I won't get any work done."
Just coming off this comment. I think I’m done with this industry.
Had an interview with the rudest motherfucker I’ve ever met. Utter disdain for their existing employees (complaining that they can’t just fire them on the spot like in Ukraine or some other Eastern bloc country). Asked “why should we waste Engineers time interviewing someone who doesn’t have C# experience?” I should have ended the interview right then.
This is why people hate immigration. I should have told him to go back to his country if he wants that experience.
I’m so far tipped over the fucking edge I’m going to start a violent revolution.
Likely because it is not a good time to be a gardener (professionally) right now either. The tech job market and agriculture prosperity seem to track each other.
This is the toughest market I've ever seen. I easily made it to on-sites at FAANG a few years ago and now I'm getting resume rejected by no-name startups (and FAANG).
The bar has also been raised significantly. I had an interview recently where I solved the algorithm question very quickly, but didn't refactor/clean up my code perfectly and was rejected.
I can’t solve everyone’s problems but I can say that I have 1-2 (depending if an outstanding offer is accepted) open principal engineering roles directly working for me. The process will be talking to the recruiter, then two tech interviews, then an interview with me. This will take you a couple weeks to go through because of our team is tiny and we’re fairly busy. Team is 100% remote and async. All the stuff in the JD applies, the one update that we haven’t gotten out yet is that you must know terraform really well. Comp is scaled for engineers outside the USA.
My observation as well. Going remote makes it harder to switch jobs because of loosing the personal connections and networks that get developed working on site. Going through the front door when applying for opportunities is usually more difficult than the back door. Back door as in getting introduced via your network. As a result, I've learned that a good recruiter is now a necessity because they have those relationships with hiring managers which can put you to the front of the line and also prep you better for the process.
I don't mean to sound harsh, but it does sound like front/ backdoor metaphor is code for filtering people by the social biases that form much of the personal connections and networks you mention.
The effect of remote work, seems to be leveling the entry point for everyone; an advantage for people who got discriminated against before and a disadvantage for people who enjoyed their privilege for far too long.
Aye. Of my 5 jobs, 4 were via personal connections; 2 were basically bumping into strangers and chatting them up, one at a wedding, the other at a Linux User Group.
My current job is the only one I applied for. Even then, dudes from previous jobs have hit me up in the past for gigs in the last 6 months.
Who you know matters, even w/r/t code, so know people.
my experience must be an outlier. I’ve applied and gotten the job via the “front door” 3 times in my 10 year career so far. This is in the US at large companies, 2 of them with competitive salaries, 2 fully remote. The last one was at the end of 2022, right as the market was turning to shit.
I probably _could_ get a job more easily today because i’ve made connections over 10 yrs. But i’d probably still try the front door first because i’m stubborn lol. But the resume needs to be PERFECT when there’s so much competition, especially for remote roles. Everything on 1 page, needs to be very easy for a hiring manager to visually scan in 10 seconds, to make a quick decision. And obviously add necessary keywords for the stupid “resume filters”. It’s a real chore…
I will say though, there’s something really rewarding about getting the job you want without asking for favors.
It’s tough out there today. Many experienced engineers were laid off, i bet it’s brutal.
Essentially post-school every job I’ve been hired for was through strong personal connections. And I certainly feel I don’t develop the same kinds of connections remotely. Maybe some folks who grew up in that of remote environment are better adapted.
> The bar has also been raised significantly. I had an interview recently where I solved the algorithm question very quickly, but didn't refactor/clean up my code perfectly and was rejected.
Bearing in mind the implicit comparison to "a few years ago", a few years ago I interviewed with Google, at which point the recruiter told me I'd passed the interview, wished me congratulations (!), told me to expect a job offer, and finally, ~6 weeks later, informed me that while I'd "passed" the interviews, my scores were too low for them to make an offer.
It remains a mystery what it might mean to "pass" without actually advancing beyond the threshold you passed.
There will be a pool of candidates who "passed", and hiring managers can search through that pool to decide who to take for their team. If there are fewer openings than candidates who "passed" or hiring managers aren't interested in taking someone, then these folks won't get an offer.
As someone with a couple of open (not engineering) recs, I can agree this is the toughest market I’ve ever seen. For both recs, we received many highly qualified candidates with relevant skills,
often in a relevant domain.
I’ve never seen this before. It’s always been very hard to find a single highly-qualified candidate.
The media seems to think the great resignation has ended, but really it’s just that jobs have dried up. Professionals, especially good ones, are eager to leave their current jobs, but the pool is so small, there’s just nowhere to go.
And with so many people looking for new positions, if you’re not highly keyword targeted, you won’t go anywhere.
I think a lot of this comes down to AI. In a recent hiring round we experienced multiple candidates using AI tooling to assist them in the technical interviews (remote only company). I expect relationship hires to become more common over the next few years as even more open-discussion focused interview rounds like architecture become lower signal.
If you're giving remote interviews, your loop should assume candidates can use AI. it's like giving a take home math test that assumes people won't use calculators at this point
The bar has been lowered in many respects. 14 years experience, 5 of them at a FAANG. Successful startup exit for a small company I founded, and and endless array of India-based recruiters that, for example, want me to mention “Ruby 3.2” in my resume when the resume says I have 14 years of Ruby experience including using it daily in my present job. I could literally say “I invented Ruby and have worked with it daily for 20 years,” and they’d say, “but you don’t have 3.2 listed.”
I play the game then they pass me off to another Indian who is less understandable than the first guy and then they offer $45/hour. I say yeah sure, submit me to the potential client. Then I never hear anything back.
The Indian 3rd party recruiting industry is absolutely horrible. Another anecdote was spending 10 minutes explaining how Java and JavaScript aren’t the same thing. I am convinced there is rampant discrimination happening as well against non-Indians, and especially those who aren’t H1Bs. (H1B is a trap that makes it easy to hire people at lower wages and then also makes it harder for them to switch employers.)
I’m not well articulating the problem, but anyone who has done this dance knows exactly what I’m talking about.
By the way, I used to contract at $95/hour and now I can’t get calls back for $45/hour.
The outsourcing offshoring business needs to be significantly reformed. I had a gig at Best Buy ($70/hour) and I got to spend 3 months training some Accenture H1Bs to replace me. I thought H1B was to fill “critical shortages of highly skilled workers?” Best Buy didn’t have a shortage — they fired my entire team and replaced it with Accenture. Best Buy should be heavily taxed for that and Accenture et al should have their offshore labor tariffed into oblivion. (They typically have onshore H1Bs directing offshore teams.) The Best Buy CEO talks all sorts of DEI crap, while firing people to cut costs. Not very inclusive if you ask me.
Weirded how, if you don't mind elaborating slightly?
For example, does it mean: the actual skill level (e.g., smartness) people actually look for and hire hasn't changed, but the activities that hiring teams require candidates to have experience with are (seemingly weirdly) not a great thing to need anyway and therefore lots of great candidates end up twiddling their thumbs?
In that way, the "height" of the bar is the same, but it's a "weird" bar, in that one could have to accept it for what it is, or even stoop to it, or perhaps shift over to it, in order to pass it?
Or more that the overall interview experiences are weird caricatures in and of themselves?
Weird is a great word, but it can be a little non-specific, so I'm left curious about the intended usage/meaning.
For what it's worth, it is definitely thawing (at least if what we're seeing in our client base is anything to go by), it's just going to take some time for that to work its way through everyone looking for work.
Is that the reason you were rejected, or was that just an attribute of what you did && you were rejected? What stage of the interview, what level?
I truly don't doubt that's what happened, I've had it happen, but when it did their feedback was (insultingly) not up to their professional standard. I say insultingly because it was an amateurish evaluation of what I did, specifically because it was like the 5th god damn interview by that point and really they should have been looking for more than trivialities like the coding style I chose to use in HackerRank with a visible ticking clock.
The reason I ask is just for context; if people are interviewing for Senior roles and being rejected for code formatting problems, something is even more deeply wrong than it seems, since they probably shouldn't be concerning themselves with that _at_all_. If it's possible though that you were rejected for some other reason, but that your code style was the strongest negative apparent signal, that's also worth exploring. In my case, that's a possibility, that they were looking for just one more reason to narrow the funnel, but it can be hard to accept.
Anecdotal but I felt it was worst during the mass layoffs in late 2022/early 2023. It has been very slowly recovering since then.
The late 2020 period was the absolute best time though. I got multiple offers almost instantly, and after I signed on it felt like the org was bloated with engineers just fiddling away on meaningless projects.
This is not surprising. The companies received grants during covid lockdowns, so they started listing a lot of fake jobs. When the money dried up the layoffs followed, which was an expected outcome. Media does not let people know about the grants and presents everything in such light that it seems like the market is getting absolutely destroyed, while in reality it only slightly declined.
The bigger problem are HRs employed by big companies who autoreject every application and take no responsibility for doing this.
Though FAANG offers are usually more attractive than startups (considering pay level and stability), some startups could be more selective since they couldn't afford to hire the wrong candidate.
It’s more about calibration. If you interview 100 people at a FAANG, you get an idea of where the bar is. This idea gets calibrated with a panel of interviewers, along with shadow interviewers.
At a startup… who knows? I had an interviewer burn up 25 minutes on a 45 minute coding question trying to “hint me” towards the solution I mentioned in the first 2 minutes.
> I had an interview recently where I solved the algorithm question very quickly, but didn't refactor/clean up my code perfectly and was rejected.
It sounds like they intentionally present a simple problem because they are not filtering by who can solve it, but by who writes clean maintainable code.
I wish I had thought of that when I was interviewing candidates, because it is a good criterium for a well established organization.
Or 1930s Great Depression no work for almost five years tough?
I expect most people here won't have a good sense for 2009. While it wasn't great for many industries, for tech it was the "app" boom. You couldn't hardly go outside without someone throwing money at you.
There are just piles and piles of companies out there trying to hire but are absolutely obsessed with having people work in their terrible SF offices.
I don't get it. If these companies really believed that working in an office was so beneficial they would invest in them. But they all come across like "I need an office to appear like a real company but I don't want to spend a lot of money". They're these millennial gray warehouses rocking the sad-bachelor aesthetic.
One piece of advice I usually give is to avoid applying to jobs through company’s career websites or LinkedIn. Instead, tap your social network: see if there is someone you know/have worked with who either works at the company you’re interested in or is connected to it someone (as an advisor, investor, personal friend of someone in a leadership position) and ask them for a warm intro. Social proof gives you an advantage over the legion of anonymous online applicants.
Internal referrals won’t necessarily give you an edge, but they definitely nearly guarantee at least getting into the door.
At our company the (unwritten) policy is anyone who is referred internally will always get at least 1 shot at an interview even if the resume would been have otherwise been rejected. The bar isn’t lowered on merit, though.
Yep. Several months ago I leaned on a friend for a referral. This person is relatively well known in his industry. He’s written books and has spoke at a lot of conferences, and been interviewed by a lot of outlets. I got a personal referral from him, and I didn’t even get a phone call with a recruiter. Crazy.
People have been saying that since I was in school in the 90's. I've never found it to be helpful. In fact, even back in the days when there were still jobs to be had, by far the worst jobs I ever held were the ones I was referred into. The reason was pretty obvious at the time - the person who referred me in had to "talk me up" so I was starting in a position where I could only disappoint. The "cold applications" didn't have huge expectations, so when I turned out to be good at what I was doing, they were happy to see it.
not sure i agree, i went to school in the 90's as well, and out of 9 jobs I have held since, 4 came through cold-applications and 5 through referrals. referrals imo have a better chance of success particularly if you are a senior engineer, and you could have a bigger eco-system of referrers. I would also like to add that with more experience, you need to build bigger referrer networks which help in this whole process.
i try to help anyone i know (with referrals) as i have personally seen the anxiety, stress, and emotional roller-coaster that accompany the job hunt.
My previous job search in 2019 yielded 2 FAANG offers, 1 exec role at a $2B public company, and an "almost" from another Seattle-based big tech company.
This September, I finished up a 10 month job search (had a job that was going nowhere, so looked for another) In that time, I started with careful analysis of each role, custom resume building, and applying to one or two jobs a week. When that yielded no results after a few months, I crafted a few resumes to match the broad categories of roles that I saw that were good matches and started applying in bulk. That yielded much better result in terms of actual human contact.
I did also leverage my LinkedIn network, and that yielded lots of nice reconnections with past coworkers, but zero job opportunities. The one reach out that led to anything was to the manager for the FAANG job I rejected in 2019 (always say no very nicely!). That manager made it to VP in that timeframe, and a VP recommendation to the recruiting team WILL get you in the door to talk to someone. Of course, a multi-month process resulted in a kafka-esque situation where the team that wanted me got laid off and that killed the entire process. Oh well.
In the end, I'd sent out over 300 applications, had a few dozen recruiter calls, and 7 full loops (4 offers, one of which was a lowball and 3 that all happened at the same time). Ironically, the job I ended up taking came as an inbound opportunity via LinkedIn from a recruiter at the company.
The good news seemed to be that by the August timeframe, activity had really picked up. The same resumes started getting a lot more traction.
Do you have experience with doing this in a way that doesn't come across as desperate or too forward? How close do you need to be with this network? Is Linkedin connection enough, or would you only do this approach with people you've worked with?
I like to think of it more as being intentional, and less as desperate/too forward. You want to know what you're looking for and, just as important, what you're not looking for.
In terms of reaching out, here are some things I did when I was job hunting:
1. The classic referral
Find the job post and work backwards from there (e.g., is there somebody I know (1st connection) or somebody who knows somebody I know (2nd connection) on LinkedIn who works at the company?).
If I knew the 1st connection, I'd reach out and ask if they were comfortable referring me.
I made time to catch up with good friends. It felt energizing to get the moral support, with the added bonus that sometimes they knew people working at companies looking to hire. For example I would eventually get a job offer from Figma and that was because a good friend's partner worked there and was glad to refer me. I hadn't even heard of the opportunity before we talked.
4. The weak ties
I also made time to catch up with people I didn't know that well. There's some research on "weak ties" that suggest that people who you don't know well probably are exposed to a very different network to you, and will come across very different opportunities. The convo would be an opportunity for us to catch up and I'd talk about being open to job opportunities.
If I get such a request from someone I don't know, I will direct them to the public job board.
I'm very happy to refer and vouch for someone that I've actually worked with (and look forward to working with again), but I'm not vouching for some random stranger...
I'll review resumes of any referrals from my network. Usually provide tips or areas they need to show more substance in. I won't submit any network referral to my company's internal recruiter unless they stand out and fit a need.
The proximity to my network doesn't need to be strong, but your resume does.
Ideally people you've worked with or at least know of you and your work so they can give a positive internal recommendation. "He follows me on X" isn't much of an endorsement if that's all the person can say about you.
Ah yes, in the grand tradition of meritocracy, competition, and capitalism: “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”.
To be clear, I’m not saying you’re wrong: in a distorted market it’s absolutely about who you know and get on with. So it’s nothing personal that your (astute) observation irks me.
I just can’t see advice like this without feeling a little tick: I’ve been in this business for more than twenty years, and there have been downturns certainly in that time, but I’ve never seen it so firmly in the iron grip of monopoly and nepotism with such predictably grim results for the software outcomes.
And don’t get me started on the party line that “the economy is doing great”.
Yeah, that’s a good point. I often ask my network for help, and it gets results. But still, I think I get more feedback when applying through the careers page.
It's going to get tougher and tougher in this job market.
1. Layoffs happening regularly.
2. Less Senior positions and virtually no junior jobs.
2. AI accelerating and reducing the number of software engineers.
3. Job postings being reposted with less salary and equity in US, EU and especially the UK.
You might as well take yourself off the job market / stay in current job, build a paying SMB company or side project on the side and make that your third income.
If it gets better and reaches sustainability you can choose to leave your job and live off it, or choose to get funding if need be.
After applying for over 60+ jobs after graduation and getting rejected over and over, I took myself off the market and started a pest control SaaS 4 years ago now it's bringing in over $2.2M+ ARR.
While the jobs I was applying for have now either shut down or not even bringing in anything over $100K ARR.
Congrats on the business, I hope this inspires others to pursue their dreams.
Since you mentioned a specific number of applications (60+), I just wanted to share my job hunt story. When I was last looking for a role (8 months ago), I started out thinking 5 applications a day was good, but then I spoke with an industry mentor, and he laughed me off saying that wasn't close to enough. Turns out he was right.
On his recommendation I started aiming for 50 a day. At first it's very slow, but you build up a corpus of cover letters and other material to submit applications.
This would have been easier if I was employed at the time, since so many places auto-reject if you aren't currently employed. This was also looking for fully-remote in APAC, which has far fewer opportunities than other regions/timezones.
And you might say "but I don't want to work for all these companies" and I would agree. But provided you are applying for a role that you are at least curious about, those ones that are not great fits can provide good interview practice.
On the other side of this you have people like me who've tried and failed, and now 15 years later I have 30 days to pay my mortgage or my life starts unfolding. Hoping to make some portfolio pieces in that time to impress some hiring managers, building fun tools for myself again without profit in mind. Not everyone can build a hyper successful SaaS.
Congratulations! This is my dream. But the SaaS thing is so challenging. Couple of questions if you don't mind. Any tips for someone starting out? Did you have any experience in the pest control business? How did you decide pest control industry? How did you market the product?
There are SaaS products for managing sales/compliance/billing for just about every licensed profession that deals directly with customers. I regularly get emails that are "from" my HVAC contractor or optometrist, but are obviously sent by a SaaS.
Sometimes I feel like you guys live in alternative universe. Nothing about the "bad" interview sounded too atypical. Sure it's annoying, but not uncommon enough to be exceptional.
I don't mean to discount anyone's unpleasantness but you'd be surprised how much worse the rest of the world is.
Software engineers are used to companies fighting over them. Now we're in a market where it's normal to have lots of experience yet be unemployed for months. So it's a shock for many (though not atypical when compared to plenty of other fields of knowledge work, as you note).
Yeah, months between professional jobs has historically been completely normal if you couldn't interleave continue working and job searching. The meme (even if exaggerated) of rage-quitting a software job on Monday, sending out some emails, and having a few higher-paying offers by the end of the week is a complete aberration.
(Oh, and historically in many cases, it might also have involved moving across the country.)
I was talking to multiple people at an event fairly recently and there was general consensus that tech was in a "weird" place right now relative to the past decade or so.
Applying to and taking a new job requires bidirectional approval and sense of fit. The way a company conducts its interview process is a reflection of the corporate culture and sometimes is enough to erode the sense of fit on the applicant's side. If the interview process is a disorganized mess, why should the applicant believe the rest of the company is any different?
Try to get a job in finance, accounting, marketing, law, or other kinds of engineering. 7+ rounds of interviews, weird pop-psych questions, even getting a reply/meeting is a problem ...
I was talking to someone who is applying in another industry and they were bemoaning having to list a bunch of references on their resume, and having to call all their references to talk about the businesses that might contact them, what to say, etc.
Leetcode stuff sucks, but it is kind of nice being an industry where I can have no college degree and no references, but over the course of a few 1 hour interviews demonstrate competence.
In tech, I've tended to provide references. Don't know if they were ever called but I had them lined up. And pretty much all my jobs have been through my network in any case.
At this point, I view the job search process as stochastic rather than deterministic. I model my job search using the binomial distribution. All that you need to know is what how frequently you get interviews and offers to then explore the probabilities involved.
To me at least, that removes a lot of the uncertainty, since I now know that if I apply to X jobs, I will have a Y percent chance of getting at least one offer, etc. Or maybe all of this is just an indictment of current hiring practices that I no longer think in terms of individual positions but in terms of aggregates of them.
Admissions to selective colleges are the same way. For most students it's rather foolish and wasteful to target any one specific college because luck plays a huge factor (or the actual selection criteria are unknown and unknowable, which from the applicant's perspective is indistinguishable from luck).
People cannot discriminate. They must spray and pray because the algorithm demands it of them. Thus, both sides (employer and employee) lose, because every applicant and every institution becomes flattened, generalized.
It used to be, applying to places took time and effort. So students (and job applicants likewise) would discriminate. This allowed employers and institutions to actually build culture. An institution could be different from another institution in large ways, all cultural, all "soft" -- unpronounceable by the machine.
This enriched us all, because it allowed pockets of brilliance to form. Actual, real, human variation.
Now, every job has 2,000 applicants. Every HR person is trained at a school whose curriculum is undifferentiated from Harvard or Yale, because every school has the incentive to emulate Harvard or Yale. Every HR person's classmates all, similarly, could not afford to care which institution they applied to, because their application process was -- again, spray and pray. And thus, every HR person at every company creates the exact same institution.
This flattening, this algorithmization, is like an invasive species which has choked out all of the variable, beautiful, at times brilliant flora and fauna which existed, protected, in its isolated institutional ecology. All of that cultural diversity has been destroyed so that we could click "easy apply."
What's the result? Every job application looks the same. Every interview looks the same. Every internal culture looks the same. Every job is the same, so much so that you could switch jobs every 2 years and nobody would even notice or care. Every 2 years! How much does a 2 year old know!? Every company apes Google in their interview process because Google is the Kudzu that choked out their local flora and fauna.
We're all poorer for it, this mass extinction event. Like you say, it's happening all over, not just in companies and schools.
I got laid off thrice during my 25+ year career during which i have worked at 9 different companies. twice from startups in each of the previous busts and once from a large company. job hunts are not easy and i dont interview well.
however, there are tech transitions and it appears we are in the midst of one - after which a new set of tech careers seem to emerge. internet/web/mobile/cloud/saas and whatnot. i fully expect the same to happen here.
Readit News
For context - I’ve made 4 personal projects that currently have over 1000+ daily active users (numbers are ~1500, ~6000, ~14,000, and ~430,000) all created within the span of the last year. I’ve also sold software.
On top of all that, I have an Engineering degree, 4 years experience, no breaks in employment, study on my afternoons and weekends (C, Go, C#) and take extra university courses, and have some other high level achievements/recognition.
I apply for Intermediate and Senior positions.
So far I have 3 interviews lined up out of ~30-40 applications. About 10 rejections so far. 1 of those jobs is actually decent, the other 2 are desperation applications.
It’s brutal. I’m trying my absolute best, I don’t see how people that have been coasting have any chance.
You should be able to coast a bit in life.
I’m sad at the state of things, and sad for people trying to stay in the industry or break into the industry.
Makes me want to become a gardener
Looking for any intermediate /senior role in any stack.
I’m based in NZ so there’s barely any jobs
For better or worse, I might not showcase those that much.
The bad news is that I'm mostly talking second-hand since I only know people who have gone that path, without having tried it myself
But for the sake of another perspective, here's how your description reads:
"I’ve made 4 personal projects that currently have over 1000+ daily active users (numbers are ~1500, ~6000, ~14,000, and ~430,000) all created within the span of the last year. I’ve also sold software." --> "I have made personal projects - in fact so many I'm always at it, with a bit too many to make you comfortable. These are so successful and so quickly created that I can clearly do these once I'm with you - and I have the skills to sell software, so I could monetize them. If and when I want to. This says nothing about my ability to follow requirements or work with others"
(my advice: focus on the most successful project, say it's non-profit, and try saying "listened to customer feedback" instead)
"On top of all that, I have an Engineering degree, 4 years experience, no breaks in employment, study on my afternoons and weekends (C, Go, C#) and take extra university courses, and have some other high level achievements/recognition."
That all sounds fine.
"You should be able to coast a bit in life." --> Honestly if you lead to employers with saying that you've sold software personally and have 4 side-projects, you haven't been searching for a job long enough to realize that's unwise in this market - you've potentially been coasting on your job search. Have you been studying C/Go/C# instead of applying to jobs because you prefer studying?
Your side projects could give the impression that you are more dedicated to those than to your primary employer.
For the roles I review resumes for and interview I want a well rounded individual who seems like they would stay in the position for many years. Someone who is studying on weekends and taking extra university courses on coding does not necessarily give me that impression. Again, just a devil’s advocate position.
Had an interview with the rudest motherfucker I’ve ever met. Utter disdain for their existing employees (complaining that they can’t just fire them on the spot like in Ukraine or some other Eastern bloc country). Asked “why should we waste Engineers time interviewing someone who doesn’t have C# experience?” I should have ended the interview right then.
This is why people hate immigration. I should have told him to go back to his country if he wants that experience.
I’m so far tipped over the fucking edge I’m going to start a violent revolution.
Why not?
(Although, apparently it’s not likely you can you do it as a dev in today’s market so)
The bar has also been raised significantly. I had an interview recently where I solved the algorithm question very quickly, but didn't refactor/clean up my code perfectly and was rejected.
Apply at https://moduscreate.com/careers/5984037003/?gh_jid=598403700... and feel free to mention that you saw Boris (me) post this on HN.
The effect of remote work, seems to be leveling the entry point for everyone; an advantage for people who got discriminated against before and a disadvantage for people who enjoyed their privilege for far too long.
My current job is the only one I applied for. Even then, dudes from previous jobs have hit me up in the past for gigs in the last 6 months.
Who you know matters, even w/r/t code, so know people.
I probably _could_ get a job more easily today because i’ve made connections over 10 yrs. But i’d probably still try the front door first because i’m stubborn lol. But the resume needs to be PERFECT when there’s so much competition, especially for remote roles. Everything on 1 page, needs to be very easy for a hiring manager to visually scan in 10 seconds, to make a quick decision. And obviously add necessary keywords for the stupid “resume filters”. It’s a real chore…
I will say though, there’s something really rewarding about getting the job you want without asking for favors.
It’s tough out there today. Many experienced engineers were laid off, i bet it’s brutal.
Bearing in mind the implicit comparison to "a few years ago", a few years ago I interviewed with Google, at which point the recruiter told me I'd passed the interview, wished me congratulations (!), told me to expect a job offer, and finally, ~6 weeks later, informed me that while I'd "passed" the interviews, my scores were too low for them to make an offer.
It remains a mystery what it might mean to "pass" without actually advancing beyond the threshold you passed.
I’ve never seen this before. It’s always been very hard to find a single highly-qualified candidate.
And with so many people looking for new positions, if you’re not highly keyword targeted, you won’t go anywhere.
So with that in mind I'll see you all at ReInvent
I play the game then they pass me off to another Indian who is less understandable than the first guy and then they offer $45/hour. I say yeah sure, submit me to the potential client. Then I never hear anything back.
The Indian 3rd party recruiting industry is absolutely horrible. Another anecdote was spending 10 minutes explaining how Java and JavaScript aren’t the same thing. I am convinced there is rampant discrimination happening as well against non-Indians, and especially those who aren’t H1Bs. (H1B is a trap that makes it easy to hire people at lower wages and then also makes it harder for them to switch employers.)
I’m not well articulating the problem, but anyone who has done this dance knows exactly what I’m talking about.
By the way, I used to contract at $95/hour and now I can’t get calls back for $45/hour.
The outsourcing offshoring business needs to be significantly reformed. I had a gig at Best Buy ($70/hour) and I got to spend 3 months training some Accenture H1Bs to replace me. I thought H1B was to fill “critical shortages of highly skilled workers?” Best Buy didn’t have a shortage — they fired my entire team and replaced it with Accenture. Best Buy should be heavily taxed for that and Accenture et al should have their offshore labor tariffed into oblivion. (They typically have onshore H1Bs directing offshore teams.) The Best Buy CEO talks all sorts of DEI crap, while firing people to cut costs. Not very inclusive if you ask me.
For example, does it mean: the actual skill level (e.g., smartness) people actually look for and hire hasn't changed, but the activities that hiring teams require candidates to have experience with are (seemingly weirdly) not a great thing to need anyway and therefore lots of great candidates end up twiddling their thumbs?
In that way, the "height" of the bar is the same, but it's a "weird" bar, in that one could have to accept it for what it is, or even stoop to it, or perhaps shift over to it, in order to pass it?
Or more that the overall interview experiences are weird caricatures in and of themselves?
Weird is a great word, but it can be a little non-specific, so I'm left curious about the intended usage/meaning.
I truly don't doubt that's what happened, I've had it happen, but when it did their feedback was (insultingly) not up to their professional standard. I say insultingly because it was an amateurish evaluation of what I did, specifically because it was like the 5th god damn interview by that point and really they should have been looking for more than trivialities like the coding style I chose to use in HackerRank with a visible ticking clock.
The reason I ask is just for context; if people are interviewing for Senior roles and being rejected for code formatting problems, something is even more deeply wrong than it seems, since they probably shouldn't be concerning themselves with that _at_all_. If it's possible though that you were rejected for some other reason, but that your code style was the strongest negative apparent signal, that's also worth exploring. In my case, that's a possibility, that they were looking for just one more reason to narrow the funnel, but it can be hard to accept.
The late 2020 period was the absolute best time though. I got multiple offers almost instantly, and after I signed on it felt like the org was bloated with engineers just fiddling away on meaningless projects.
The bigger problem are HRs employed by big companies who autoreject every application and take no responsibility for doing this.
At a startup… who knows? I had an interviewer burn up 25 minutes on a 45 minute coding question trying to “hint me” towards the solution I mentioned in the first 2 minutes.
It sounds like they intentionally present a simple problem because they are not filtering by who can solve it, but by who writes clean maintainable code.
I wish I had thought of that when I was interviewing candidates, because it is a good criterium for a well established organization.
I expect most people here won't have a good sense for 2009. While it wasn't great for many industries, for tech it was the "app" boom. You couldn't hardly go outside without someone throwing money at you.
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I don't get it. If these companies really believed that working in an office was so beneficial they would invest in them. But they all come across like "I need an office to appear like a real company but I don't want to spend a lot of money". They're these millennial gray warehouses rocking the sad-bachelor aesthetic.
Those roles are going to get squeezed pretty fast as the market heats up.
I don’t want to move someone with obscene housing costs and rampant crime. Most people don’t, especially ones that have families, houses, etc.
Of course things can change rapidly; perhaps the influx of ai-produced applications may bring this practice back.
At our company the (unwritten) policy is anyone who is referred internally will always get at least 1 shot at an interview even if the resume would been have otherwise been rejected. The bar isn’t lowered on merit, though.
People have been saying that since I was in school in the 90's. I've never found it to be helpful. In fact, even back in the days when there were still jobs to be had, by far the worst jobs I ever held were the ones I was referred into. The reason was pretty obvious at the time - the person who referred me in had to "talk me up" so I was starting in a position where I could only disappoint. The "cold applications" didn't have huge expectations, so when I turned out to be good at what I was doing, they were happy to see it.
i try to help anyone i know (with referrals) as i have personally seen the anxiety, stress, and emotional roller-coaster that accompany the job hunt.
This September, I finished up a 10 month job search (had a job that was going nowhere, so looked for another) In that time, I started with careful analysis of each role, custom resume building, and applying to one or two jobs a week. When that yielded no results after a few months, I crafted a few resumes to match the broad categories of roles that I saw that were good matches and started applying in bulk. That yielded much better result in terms of actual human contact.
I did also leverage my LinkedIn network, and that yielded lots of nice reconnections with past coworkers, but zero job opportunities. The one reach out that led to anything was to the manager for the FAANG job I rejected in 2019 (always say no very nicely!). That manager made it to VP in that timeframe, and a VP recommendation to the recruiting team WILL get you in the door to talk to someone. Of course, a multi-month process resulted in a kafka-esque situation where the team that wanted me got laid off and that killed the entire process. Oh well.
In the end, I'd sent out over 300 applications, had a few dozen recruiter calls, and 7 full loops (4 offers, one of which was a lowball and 3 that all happened at the same time). Ironically, the job I ended up taking came as an inbound opportunity via LinkedIn from a recruiter at the company.
The good news seemed to be that by the August timeframe, activity had really picked up. The same resumes started getting a lot more traction.
social network might not be great for someone who just broke out of their underclass social network to try make it big.
This advice assumes you have such a network anyway.
Do you have experience with doing this in a way that doesn't come across as desperate or too forward? How close do you need to be with this network? Is Linkedin connection enough, or would you only do this approach with people you've worked with?
In terms of reaching out, here are some things I did when I was job hunting:
1. The classic referral
Find the job post and work backwards from there (e.g., is there somebody I know (1st connection) or somebody who knows somebody I know (2nd connection) on LinkedIn who works at the company?).
If I knew the 1st connection, I'd reach out and ask if they were comfortable referring me.
2. The forwardable email
If it was a 2nd connection, I'd reach out with a forwardable email (https://also.roybahat.com/introductions-and-the-forward-intr...) and ask if they'd be able to forward an email and make an intro if they received a positive response.
3. Job hunting as an occasion
I made time to catch up with good friends. It felt energizing to get the moral support, with the added bonus that sometimes they knew people working at companies looking to hire. For example I would eventually get a job offer from Figma and that was because a good friend's partner worked there and was glad to refer me. I hadn't even heard of the opportunity before we talked.
4. The weak ties
I also made time to catch up with people I didn't know that well. There's some research on "weak ties" that suggest that people who you don't know well probably are exposed to a very different network to you, and will come across very different opportunities. The convo would be an opportunity for us to catch up and I'd talk about being open to job opportunities.
I hope this helps!
I'm very happy to refer and vouch for someone that I've actually worked with (and look forward to working with again), but I'm not vouching for some random stranger...
The proximity to my network doesn't need to be strong, but your resume does.
is how I've done it.
Worst case, you get ghosted. Best case, you get an interview.
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To be clear, I’m not saying you’re wrong: in a distorted market it’s absolutely about who you know and get on with. So it’s nothing personal that your (astute) observation irks me.
I just can’t see advice like this without feeling a little tick: I’ve been in this business for more than twenty years, and there have been downturns certainly in that time, but I’ve never seen it so firmly in the iron grip of monopoly and nepotism with such predictably grim results for the software outcomes.
And don’t get me started on the party line that “the economy is doing great”.
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1. Layoffs happening regularly.
2. Less Senior positions and virtually no junior jobs.
2. AI accelerating and reducing the number of software engineers.
3. Job postings being reposted with less salary and equity in US, EU and especially the UK.
You might as well take yourself off the job market / stay in current job, build a paying SMB company or side project on the side and make that your third income.
If it gets better and reaches sustainability you can choose to leave your job and live off it, or choose to get funding if need be.
After applying for over 60+ jobs after graduation and getting rejected over and over, I took myself off the market and started a pest control SaaS 4 years ago now it's bringing in over $2.2M+ ARR.
While the jobs I was applying for have now either shut down or not even bringing in anything over $100K ARR.
Since you mentioned a specific number of applications (60+), I just wanted to share my job hunt story. When I was last looking for a role (8 months ago), I started out thinking 5 applications a day was good, but then I spoke with an industry mentor, and he laughed me off saying that wasn't close to enough. Turns out he was right.
On his recommendation I started aiming for 50 a day. At first it's very slow, but you build up a corpus of cover letters and other material to submit applications.
This would have been easier if I was employed at the time, since so many places auto-reject if you aren't currently employed. This was also looking for fully-remote in APAC, which has far fewer opportunities than other regions/timezones.
And you might say "but I don't want to work for all these companies" and I would agree. But provided you are applying for a role that you are at least curious about, those ones that are not great fits can provide good interview practice.
That really happens? How do you know they do that? I'm not doubting you, but I've never heard of that before.
How does this work? Are we talking computer bugs?
I don't mean to discount anyone's unpleasantness but you'd be surprised how much worse the rest of the world is.
(Oh, and historically in many cases, it might also have involved moving across the country.)
I was talking to multiple people at an event fairly recently and there was general consensus that tech was in a "weird" place right now relative to the past decade or so.
Leetcode stuff sucks, but it is kind of nice being an industry where I can have no college degree and no references, but over the course of a few 1 hour interviews demonstrate competence.
To me at least, that removes a lot of the uncertainty, since I now know that if I apply to X jobs, I will have a Y percent chance of getting at least one offer, etc. Or maybe all of this is just an indictment of current hiring practices that I no longer think in terms of individual positions but in terms of aggregates of them.
Yes, it is sales. You are doing sales. Leads -> chats -> due dilligence -> offers -> negotiation -> conversions.
This is also how the hiring side looks at it. “How many leads do we need to get a conversion to this role?”. It helps when both sides understand this.
It used to be, applying to places took time and effort. So students (and job applicants likewise) would discriminate. This allowed employers and institutions to actually build culture. An institution could be different from another institution in large ways, all cultural, all "soft" -- unpronounceable by the machine.
This enriched us all, because it allowed pockets of brilliance to form. Actual, real, human variation.
Now, every job has 2,000 applicants. Every HR person is trained at a school whose curriculum is undifferentiated from Harvard or Yale, because every school has the incentive to emulate Harvard or Yale. Every HR person's classmates all, similarly, could not afford to care which institution they applied to, because their application process was -- again, spray and pray. And thus, every HR person at every company creates the exact same institution.
This flattening, this algorithmization, is like an invasive species which has choked out all of the variable, beautiful, at times brilliant flora and fauna which existed, protected, in its isolated institutional ecology. All of that cultural diversity has been destroyed so that we could click "easy apply."
What's the result? Every job application looks the same. Every interview looks the same. Every internal culture looks the same. Every job is the same, so much so that you could switch jobs every 2 years and nobody would even notice or care. Every 2 years! How much does a 2 year old know!? Every company apes Google in their interview process because Google is the Kudzu that choked out their local flora and fauna.
We're all poorer for it, this mass extinction event. Like you say, it's happening all over, not just in companies and schools.
however, there are tech transitions and it appears we are in the midst of one - after which a new set of tech careers seem to emerge. internet/web/mobile/cloud/saas and whatnot. i fully expect the same to happen here.
so, hang in there, and keep your sword sharp.