Even if there was not, once a company has eliminated 99% of the candidates and put their mind to hiring you there is a good chance you have a little leverage at negotiating your salary.
I don't think the author work the same jobs than I do.
In any case, the article is foolish, because really good candidates can always negotiate. This isn't fast food, where it barely matter which body you stick in which role.
"But these days that doesn’t work because the market is oversaturated." - Literally all companies I know of struggle with finding candidates.
"When they’ve rejected 99% of applicants, they’ll offer a job to the last remaining candidate." - If the role is for one person, then they will reject all others except the one they deem suitable, obviously.
But hey, if it's posted on the internets it must be true.
I'm flagging this post as it is an utter waste of time and highly inaccurate.
Edit: After reading the author's other posts, I see there is some frustration related to job seeking. Perhaps there is some advice we can give or experience to share to help? The tech job market is as good as it gets, but it can vary depending on languages, tooling, industry and so on. A bit more context might help for this article to be relevant. I un-flagged the post hoping there is something positive that can come out of this.
Just because there are a large number of candidates does not mean that a large number of them are at all qualified. There is a huge variance of quality across the development market from that I have experienced. No real proof of any of these claims here.
The proof is my own personal experience. If programmers were truly scarce, then every time a programmer passes a programming puzzle interview, then they'd be offered a job. I can't tell you how many interviews I've aced over the years only to be ghosted afterwards. If ghosting existed (which is very much does, and is quite common), then that means the market is oversaturated.
The experience for the candidate is that they make it through all the gates and then get ghosted while the hiring manager is stalled by their bosses to approve the hire. That has happened to me often enough in the past three years that I now just think of interviews as an opportunity to meet other nerds.
That doesn't mean the job market is not getting more competitive - it might well be, but that does not mean it's oversaturated yet, not even saturated.
I really don't think being able to pass these "programming puzzle" type interviews is a good measure of a good engineer. Just finishing them is often not what a company is looking for.
If your skills also include valuable knowledge in the domain that you work in, or expertise in getting things done in that particular environment (or even in that company) you're well on your way to being priceless. And that pricelessness is what puts things back in your favour.
IDK about the Bay Area, but in plenty of other places there just aren't enough developers to fill all the roles available.
Sounds like "leverage" to me
Similarly, perhaps its oversaturated in London, but other UK cities don't have this problem.
Them, and that streaking Greek dude. Archimedes.
lol but no. In London, anyway, the market has a tiny number of devs, and mid-level NodeJS devs are asking for £100,000, which is definitely a sign of the apocalypse.
At first I was going to harp on whether the market was oversaturated or not, but there's an even bigger mistake -- as far as I can tell this situation can increase leverage for prospective employees who make it through the process. If you know that the company just spent 10/100s of hours reviewing, interviewing, and culling lots of applicants, but you made it through their obstacle course and they want to hire you, this means it's very likely a good fit -- that's rare. This would only be bad if the market happened to be saturated with high quality devs, but prices would drop.
This article seems like well-intentioned bad advice -- always negotiate. Analysis of perceived leverage is great, but in the end, if you get an offer you don't think is what your time is worth, then counter it. Politely but firmly ask for compensation in line with what you value your time at like "thanks so much for giving me a chance to join the team -- I'd love to accept the offer but I was really expecting
> The only programmers that have leverage these days are celebrity developers like Linus Torvalds and Guido Van Rossum.
???? This is just plain wrong -- if you are good at your job, you are going to produce a lot of value for a company depending on how they use you -- you don't have to be a celebrity developer to bring value to a company -- you could lack 100% of the technical or leadership skills of either of those people and simply by suggesting "why don't we just use google sheets" and save the company possibly 100s of thousands of dollars (in pricey subscription fees to data platform du jour).
IMO the real problem is information asymmetry -- companies have (obviously) way more information on what they're willing to pay, and not having any data points on what they're willing to pay makes it hard to search for the right companies (to begin with), and negotiate with advantage (at the end).
Sites like levels.fyi and early glassdoor did the most to help engineers reduce their disadvantage when negotiating -- if you want to get better at negotiating, get more information.
It's not rare. It's very common for people to pass the interview process only to get ghosted after spending hours solving puzzles and answering screening questions. If you're the only person to pass, then that does give you leverage, but you're not likely the only person to pass. I pass interviews all the damn time, and get rejected all the time too.
> if you are good at your job, you are going to produce a lot of value for a company depending on how they use you -- you don't have to be a celebrity developer to bring value to a company
Being able to provide value to a company doesn't necessarily give you leverage, especially if there are many other people who are also able to provide value to the company.
> Politely but firmly ask for compensation in line with what you value your time at like "thanks so much for giving me a chance to join the team -- I'd love to accept the offer but I was really expecting
Just because you want to make lots of money doesn't mean you will make lots of money. If someone else will work for less, then the company is not obliged to pay you more just because you politely ask for it.
Not if the market is oversaturated. They may get multiple people to reach that 1% stage. Then none of them have much leverage.
