What a gigantic waste of time. Tons of stress for 2-3 months for nothing.
When they interviewed me the first time, the interviewer didn't show to work, so they asked another guy to interview me, he ended interviewing me in a language he didn't knew, to a position using another language entirely, the whole thing was a farce.
Some years later Amazon recruiters contacted me, asked me to go interview in person. Then during the interview in their offices, they literally forgot me for several hours in a random room of the building, the employees left at the end of shift, and left me alone in the floor with nobody in it, and I had no idea where the exit was.
I really need a job and been applying to lots of companies, but I won't apply to Amazon again.
I coded using C++ and pass by reference. He had never seen it in his life. He refused to believe modification on a reference would modify the value in the calling function! I hoping he would be willing to discuss or run the code, this was a total let down.
Note: I have 2+ decades of coding experience
Eventually you’ll get a “No” along with a message that, per policy, they don’t provide feedback. And then you’ll get several emails insisting you send your feedback, because they really want to “improve the process”. *facepalm*
Unfortunately, despite assurances to the contrary, I was generally unimpressed with the quality of the people doing the interviewing. One of them was in his kitchen, while family members moved about behind him. Another didn’t share video, because reasons, making every silence while they made their notes that much more awkward. And another would spend 2+ minutes typing in silence until finally asking the next question, ruining any opportunity for flow or conversation.
Judging by Amazon’s recent growth (prior to the recent layoffs), I’m not sure anyone has had time for any engineering. They’ve all been stuck doing interview “loops”.
I usually defend Amazon (used to work there and enjoyed it) but the last interview cycle was really unimpressive.
I had to follow up to find out they had chosen someone else.
The amount of time I put into those interviews was absurd, reading up on all their principles, coming up with stories from my career where I met their principles etc. To then get ghosted at the end was a real slap in the face.
Amazon has done nothing but earn a reputation for treating it's employees, potential or otherwise, atrociously.
Guess how many times anyone has called a recruiter and heard "Oh yes, you got the job - I've been waiting all week for you to call me about it"?
No - it just means the decision has been made, and you won't be hired.
Which is different from "you failed". It could just as easily be their failure to evaluate you properly.
Here's the thing though: you know all those horror stories you've heard about big tech companies and how they operate? Most of them are true, so if you actually care about the field then AWS is not the place for you. Especially if you're senior. Junior devs: you'll want to start here to build your rep and get a taste for awful at least.
EDIT: I should add that the ghosting of my friend was confirmed to be due to lay-off of the recruiters, so that's most likely the reason for the majority of the ghosting complaints here.
Then on the other hand, nobody ever got promoted for being nice to rejects. If their processes select for ambition (and they sure do), nothing that does not promise promotion will ever get done and that should qualify as explanation three times over.
How is this acceptable? So much wasted time, and not just for me. I basically interviewed the entire team I was supposed to be working with.
It's weird there are US states where it's not a requirement.
Thanks for sharing.
I now this is incredibly privileged. I'm not humble-bragging, just observing the change in the market.
As things usually turn out, during the last week of the 3-month search I received 3 different offers all at once.
For reference and if it matters: I've got 14 years of experience.
Almost 20 years of experience at great large & small companies in the SF Bay Area. I like to think that I'm relatively intelligent and competent, but man, some of the interviews were torture. Even interviews for what are mostly CRUD web app development positions were doing l33tcode interviews (literally, I googled them afterwards) of moderate CS algorithms.
After 2 months of interviews I did get 3 offers at the same time. I've interviewed around here since ~2005 and I have to say it's still a crap shoot of if you'll get a good interview process. Some companies were great and had well rounded modules, focused on leadership, communication, design and just a little bit of programming. Others threw multiple l33tcode puzzles at you and had no idea what they really needed. Very frustrating.
This has eliminated 90% of the stress involved in job searching, and I'm confident that I can get an offer at basically every interview I get into.
I'm not going to get a position at Amazon or a SF company, but after seeing what friends have gone through I have no interest anyway. I also make coastal money living in the Midwest, which was achieved by the exact method I outlined above.
Now if I was in a desperate situation I would probably be forced to go through with these whiteboard interviews, which would suck - you do what you have to do though. However, I wish more engineers would refuse whiteboard interviews. If more job seekers did this I feel like we could change the industry, but the whiteboard philosophy is so widespread that it's an uphill battle.
I never ended up in a good place when it felt this way...
I'm not sure why you are saying this. You're in a rough spot and you're human. You don't have to qualify your struggle, even a universal one or one you do slightly better than others. The truth is that it shouldn't take interviewing with 28 companies to find a single offer. Interviewing at a handful before an offer sounds like it should be the (historical) norm, not a privilege. I know plenty of boomers who brag about how easy it is to get a job, with many talking about how they got hired as a walk-in to a technical engineering jobs. So don't put yourself down, we don't need a race to the bottom. We empathize with you because you're human.
but, congratulations!
Your experience has been quite different from mine. Laid off 3 weeks ago, 4 offers at slightly below what I was previously making. I'm a fullstack engineer.
Probably need to repeat your journey
Hang in there, we're probably going to be hiring starting in January. Right now things are kind of on ice because of the holidays.
Even if we wanted to get started today (and it's tough with our own department's senior people taking time off), it's hard to move the HR people and get the budgets approved, it's hard to get the GM sign off on a hire if we want them (though that's kind of a formality, frankly), etc.
In January the world starts turning again and those things get easier.
Hard as it is, try to hang in there, it will get better in a month or so.
After going through 2-3 rounds of interviews with 3 different companies since mid-Nov, all of which signaled "we love you and will be moving quickly with you" during the interview process, only to have them finally follow up with "some of our internal needs have changed with the end of year approaching, but we'll be in touch", I figured for my sanity and so that I could enjoy a little bit of my funemployment, that I'd just be upfront with them and set some boundaries.
Now, I've basically just been communicating "I appreciate your interest, but this is a bad time of year for bringing on new hires when considering year's end, so let's plan on touching base in January". We will see if this works out in my benefit or not - but it quickly became clear that we were all just wasting each others time going through multiple rounds of calls and exercises during the end of Nov and Dec.
If you need a job _now_, by all means, keep going. Just know that the system isn't as friendly right now, so it's not your fault when things are hard.
If you've got the runway to take a month, ask yourself: would you benefit more from building the inertia of keeping down the job application path, or from taking a breather and starting fresh in the new year? Both are valid.
TLDR why leetcode in private when you can work in public*
(*yes yes, not everyone can work in public, but i bet a fair amount of you can but havent given it a real shot)
Most of interesting questions had to do with system design and debugging, soft skills (also system design and debugging, but of systems made out of people instead of code) and code reviews — with me reviewing their production code. Sometimes I got pretty stupid interview questions like remembering REST spec (there isn't one) by heart, but those were companies I wouldn't want to work for anyway.
I had the leet code once, interviewing for Meta. I didn't prepare because I thought that it was pointless, but I was curious about what it would be like to do it. So, I went through with it and to my shock and awe I managed to do it. The feedback was that I didn't ace it but I did more than well enough for the interviewer.
I didn't get the job though. The last step was a really strange and uncomfortable 1-1 chat with a "very senior employee". This did not go well.
I had one of these once. The chief product officer came into the room, stared at me for awhile, then asked "tell me something you've thought really hard about...". It was a classic case of a narcissist exec. Glad I didn't get the job, as they are struggggggggggglin' right now.
While I'm obviously guilty of wanting to know details about the 'car crash' I'm also curious on a professional level about the challenges and changes that are happening to the engineering teams in this extreme situation.
I’m mid senior level in Product Management but come from a big well known tech company, and I work remote from a non-tech “city”. 5 years PM experience, 6 years as a Software dev. Launched 3 products from concept. One has over 20 million MAU, one created 9 figures of revenue for my previous company, and one I have no idea because I got laid off lol
According to my LinkedIn I’ve applied to over 200 roles in the last few weeks and heard back from about 5. Of those interviews, I’ve been rejected from all of them, even smaller shops.
Hearing from recruiters has been much more fruitful, making it to middle and final rounds at surprisingly good companies, but in both final round instances, the role either got defunded due to a hiring freeze or other issues.
In one instance, the recruiter I was working with at a Big N tech company got laid off in the middle of interviews, at which point the company ghosted me, presumably with my application falling through the cracks.
My severance package is much smaller than most, since my company is framing the thousands of layoffs as “performance based” which allowed them to skip the mandatory notice period, and avoid paying out our very generous severance packages. It turns out benefits don’t matter if a company is afraid of a recession.
If anything this whole experience has wiped out my idealistic views of working in tech. I’m a cog in a machine that can be gaslit and disposed of when convenient for people levels above me who have no empathy for my existence
Can any other PMs speak to how their job hunt is going? Hoping it’s not just me
Consider talking to a lawyer, and comparing notes with other people in the same boat. Doing this is almost certainly illegal in the US. (In addition to owing you severance, they may also be open to slander/libel charges. I am not a lawyer.)
Nope. Learned real quick that end of the year nothing gets done and it's just a waste of time. Big tech company recruiters, big bank company recruiters, startup recruiters, etc would shuffle amongst their many things, deal with sicknesses, deal with internal communications and mandates, and you're just another ticket in the queue for someone to gladhand. Sent out 500 resumes, even hired VAs to do it for me, and would get 20 call backs, 5 interview requests, 2 round two/full day, 0 offers.
By Q1/Q2 of 2022 switched strategies, got into studying for certifications (Sec+, PMP, etc.), and still the same. Responses picked up because start of the year and there's more action. Have more interview requests, and finally learning how much emphasis people put into STAR or CFAS frameworks, Leetcode, full day virtual onsites, and all of it was still kind of bullshit. Went with lots of crypto startups this time around since many were looking to staff up for the year, every single one of those crypto startups had lots of audacity and arrogance and ran by kids. Looking back, out of a list of 100 resumes I sent out only 10 companies are still around after this summer.
I ended up working at a supermarket around this time.
Q3 of 2022, switched gears one more time, now going for contract roles, backfill roles, tried to go through the list of YC companies. Learned now the new batch of YC companies are run by kids and equivalent of grad students, lots of ghosting, dropped communications, unrealistic expectations. Finally found success with contracting. Figured out how to update my LinkedIn, resumes, github, personal website to be more modernized and up to date.
Q4 of 2022, learned to work with connecting to TVC agencies and agency recruiters, now getting steady contracts at Big N companies because I kept following up with recruiters that held tight to my resumes.
That said, is it you? A bit of yes, a bit of no.
Product Managers are a heavily impacted role so comp wise you have many applicants. Job searching is a skill to be learned and flexed, rebuilding your digital presence is important to be part of the mix, and mostly it's also building up a network of relationships with recruiters and referrals to get your name in front of someone at the right place and at the right time.
Right now it's end of the year, nothing gets done. Jan, Feb, and Mar will be better. There will be tons of disappointments. It's after the thousandth resume submission, and after hiring a virtual assistant to submit for me, that the pain goes away and you just see routine. It's after smiling at the same bullshit over and over again being pitched how a company is viable that you realize it's all the same, you just need something to get going then figure it out from there.
But you've done this before, you'll get to do it again.
7 YOE in web dev, full-stack.
Leaving this here if anyone has any remote work for me :)
EDIT: For anyone accessing my site, I apologize in advance for slowness or crashes, it's hosted in my residence on a puny server sitting behind me :( I've been meaning to cloud it for a while now but I kind of like the DIY of it all.
When I left a year ago, I thought that it was likely that the industry would start to slow down within those 6 months. I have been watching everything happen with mild curiosity. I am fortunate that my wife has a healthy career, so looking for any work has been low-stress.
I share that feeling of observing the industry. I think that some of the recent sentiments are a bit overblown about the tech industry. Some seem to think that it's all going to blow up because a few thousand FAANG rest-n-vesters got let go. (side-note: I know that not all who got made redundant were of that type, just adding flare!)
I think I will be soon in the same boat and happy to hear that your time was (at least partially) rewarding.
I have 13 years of non-stop work for big tech and I cannot wait for the day I resign. Hopefully, sometime in the next 3-4 months. :-D
It is better to be unemployed if you can afford it.
All the best with your future!
No credentials to speak of other than the fact that I could probably think my way out of an undergrad level abstract algebra or real analysis problem if cornered. Maybe topology, too. Native speaker of both Kazakh and Russian. Speak rudimentary Turkish, but could easily pick it up to a decent level if necessary. Currently studying CLRS to finally learn how to design algos. Also, trying to pick up Mandarin. Maybe I'll be able to immigrate to China in the coming years. Shenzhen or Hong Kong area.
I'll just leave this here in case anyone has a remote work for me :)
The acronym comes from its authors: (Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, Stein)
That seems like a rather bold claim to make. I don't think anyone could really do that without having studied those subjects deeply. Did you study mathematics at a University and just didn't complete a degree or are you completely self-taught ?
As an SWE, this sounds way more fun.
~15 years fullstack and DevOps experience, visited top local university, no degree. Mostly Python + some other languages. Have been interviewing for Lead SE/DevOps/SRE roles as well as some architecture positions.
My findings about the German job market for developers:
- Remote-work is here to stay. Almost all companies are okay with full-remote, those who are not, want ~2 days in the office per week.
- Companies are starting to do leetcode-style interviews. Sometimes some FizzBuzz level to check basic understanding, going up to harder problems unrelated to the position. Unless they are very hard, you will just get used to that.
- Remote or hybrid meetings with multiple participants are horrible for interviewing. The delay makes you come across slow and is very distracting, when you need to look sharp.
- If you want to earn money in Germany, you have to join a bigger company.
- Bigger companies do their development in Java with a minority being MS shops. Python is for data science and DevOps.
- The missing degree is mostly not a problem. Sometimes the CTO's PHD makes it one.
- Landing lead/lower management roles seems to be difficult if you have limited experience leading people. Those seem to be mostly staffed internally.
- The market value for a profile like mine in a big German city seems to be around 100k € including some small bonus.
- There are many offers under that number. I think I would get hired almost instantly if I would accept offers for 80k €.
- All-in all IT does not seem affected by the downturn yet.
While these numbers are not directly comparable to the US (lower cost of living, better social security, health-insurance included and not tied to your job etc.) my subjective feeling is, that I am getting taken advantage of here. Salaries seem to be too low. You are often getting low-balled because "it would not fit within the salaries of the other team members".
For the time being, freelancing is the way to go in Germany, even though you are fighting against regulations.
Preach it! CoL in German cities is far too high for how low skilled dev wages are. 100k at 15 years work experience is an insult when you look at Munich/Berlin house prices and that new grads can get 60k.
And DW posted a YouTube video yesterday about how Germany has a shortage of software developers and they need to actively recruit from India and Pakistan. [1]
More like a shortage of desperate people willing to be low balled and a shortage of companies paying good wages.
Companies in Germany need to start paying ICs more and stop complaining about shortage of workers. Simple.
So with a 100k€ annual salary, one working parent alone can buy the house and feed the entire family. You consider that an "insult"?
Because at most places lead/lower management is another word for yes men that have proven their blind loyalty to the CTO, usually for 2 or 3 years. They don't wanna hire a manager who may question the status quo, especially when it comes to architecture and best practices.
> The market value for a profile like mine in a big German city seems to be around 100k € including some small bonus.
That sounds low to me and attainable in Europe if you have 5+ YoE at the right places. It sounds to me like you are being lowballed. I'm getting similar offers with way less experience.
Where you at?
In the Netherlands getting anything over €70k is incredibly hard. There are very few companies offering close to that and those are often for architecture roles. Lead dev is usually €60-70k, with some €70-80k exceptions, but those usually require ~10 years focused experience.
Interestingly, over here the freelance market is much better. Those will easily get you €100-150k gross and are often quite long term. And even with €100k, combined with all the tax benefits it's very much worth it.
I’m paying around 120-130k in Amsterdam which has a similar CoL to Berlin.
But it was a huge paycut. I’m definitely happier than I was in the US but I have been considering moving a bit further south. Bumping up to 120k and getting more sunshine would be very nice.
Typical freebies in Germany include:
- 13th salary as a Christmas gift (so +8.3% salary)
- only half of your health insurance costs are included in the nominal salary
- tax refunds if you buy a PC, do courses, or drive to work with your car
- company pays for children's daycare
- government-backed retirement fund with generous payouts. If you pay in 83€ per month now you can expect to receive at least €450 per month later.
Also, with a bit of searching, you can rent a house with garden for €2000 per month even in large cities like Hamburg or Berlin. As a result, an 100k€ annual salary will be enough for you alone to comfortably bankroll a family of 5 - something that's almost impossible in the bay area due to high rents and insane costs of living.
Health insurance is expensive and low quality. One must pay for all modern treatments despite being insured. Or have another expensive additional insurance. Cancer will be treated for free, that’s right.
Tax refund is a bad joke. Spending 5000€ to get cents back. 50% taxes and mandatory insurance plus 19% value added tax (food less, fuel with additional taxes). So 2/3 earned go to the government. Nice!
No company from dozen paid for childcare. I know, that it might happen, but it’s rare. Some companies have on-site kindergartens. But well… the waitlist is long unless you are important manager.
Government retirement will be about enough to live in extreme poverty trying to save every cent.
Just got intrigued and opened immobilienscout24. No houses for 2000€ in Hamburg and Berlin for a family of 5. Rather old Reihenmittelhaus for 2500€ with current electricity and heating prices.
There is nothing comfortable about 100k€ annually. Especially for a family of five. It’s like 4500€ after taxes every month paying 2500€ rent and living from 2000€. Belarus freelancers also make this and have really comfy lifestyles.
Edit: with 3 kids it’s closer to 5000€ after taxes. Still does not provide any luxury.
About the retirement... I would be careful about big expectations. Everything is based in constant growth of the german economy. Any public retirement is basically a Ponzi scheme (not my words! but from a Nobel Economy laureate)
Also one very important thing about cost of living: Hamburg and Munich, for example, the cost of living means that doing 20k more per year, as compared with say, Stuttgart, at the end you get the same... or the way around, 100k in Stuttgart is like 120k in Munich. You really have to factor that into the equation.
Everything else is worse than what I earn as a fully remote employee, who could choose to live in any number of second or third tier American cities that are nearly as cheap as Berlin.
My 100k number is all-in.
> Also, with a bit of searching, you can rent a house with garden for €2000 per month even in large cities like Hamburg or Berlin. As a result, an 100k€ annual salary will be enough for you alone to comfortably bankroll a family of 5 - something that's almost impossible in the bay area due to high rents and insane costs of living.
That is true. But you have to say goodbye to any romantic dreams about owning any property big enough for children (within a nice area of such a city), if you and a similiarly well-doing partner do not want to work for it for the rest of your life. If you have not come across FIRE, that might be okay as well.
I’ll be moving to Berlin in January, aber ich spreche nur Englisch und ich lerne Deutsch. Ich habe die EU-Staatsbürgerschaft und meine Frau kommt aus Berlin.
I am a senior front end dev who has experience leading teams
Some advice (some of it obvious if you've dont it before and not specific for Germany but maybe it's useful):
Have a profile on Linkedin and Xing, upload to sites like freelance.de and maybe to a bunch of agencies. Be ready to send a profile, listing as many projects as possible, i.e. different roles in a company could be separate projects. Make sure all relevant search terms (languages, frameworks, tools) appear for each project even if repetitive. English-only is ok in many places, German-speaking projects can be a little better though.
It's all through intermediaries, which means you can (and should) negotiate rates hard without worrying about burning bridges. No call with a recruiter that didn't go pleasantly ever led to anything so if it feels weird just hang up. Expect to be placed 3-6 months min, 2 years max in a project. Research a little on "Scheinselbständigkeit" but it's not a huge issue these days. If you want 100% remote it should be possible.
Good luck and welcome to Germany :-)
1. Just get a tax advisor who is fine speaking English with you. Just let him do everything in the beginning. Afterwards you can do more of that yourself. Try to be classified as Freiberuflich, not Gewerbetreibender. It helps if you have an engineering degree, but he can help you with that.
2. Do at least two gigs per year (Scheinselbstständigkeit).
3. Use HAYS and others to start it of.
4. Continue to learn German. Maybe do some German interview training or something to get in. There are teams working in English, but you will have an easier time overall.
You are required to have Health Insurance if you live in Germany, and for freelancers it is quite expensive(it will probably cost more per month than apartment rent). This can be a dealbreaker for people with limited financial resources who need some time to get their business off the ground.
However, if you don't want to be tied down, something like "Elternzeitvertretung" (aka jumping in for people on paternity/maternity leave) might be interesting for you.
Yeah, seems so - 80k is on the higher end, but possible in Poland, while the CoL is laughably low compared to Germany.
The gov. has good health service, and also education. But the education system has some interesting limitations, that may surprise you.
Net would be something like 55k if you are single, but you already paid into a mandatory retirement plan and you, your kids (and laughably also your partner) are health insured.
Applied to around 25 jobs. Ghosted by 15 of them. Out of the 10 remaining, 3 of them are limited in terms of remote - to be considered you have to reside within certain countries.
From the remaining 7 I only got the interview round with 1 of them. Did not get an offer because I was not strong enough candidate despite successfully going through 5 interview rounds. Whole process was very slow and lasted for about 1.5 month, with not getting the feedback something like 2-3 weeks after the last round. All in all very weird experience and unexpected outcome with no strong arguments.
From the remaining 6 I did not even get an invite to an interview but a direct decline.
Getting the (systems programming related) remote job while located in Europe seems like an impossible task to me right now.
I was laid off last year and went to interview at an adjacent employer. They had a bunch of employees (not only engineers) hired from the company that was laying me off. One of which had previously walked out the door with a bunch of code to form their own startup; they were hired as a staff engineer. That employee frequently reached out to me for advice and guidance on writing the piece of code that they made off with.
I flunked their cargo-culting hiring process hard. I knew I should have walked out of the interview the minute they put fucking Leetcode in front of me, but didn't.
Moral of the story: your interview success has little to do with your experience and aptitude as an engineer. Here's a list of shops where you might find more success: https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards
So I spoke to 15 (remote-friendly/first) companies through my network (could've been more if I were up for onsite work), 4 started the interview process (rest had hiring freeze or wanted to prioritize folks that got laid off from FAANG) out of which:
- 1 ghosted me in the last round
- 1 rejected in the last round without any reason/feedback (although I think I did pretty well)
- 1 rejected in the first round because they wanted me to stick to a specific programming language (in their leetcode round) that I am now rusty with
- 1 rejected me in the last round on fair grounds and were decent enough to give feedback. I believe I made mistakes out of being super desperate to land a job.
One thing I noticed (although small sample set) was that the interview processes are very slow (like 1 round per week). This might mean things like companies are in no hurry to hire and they have abundance of candidates applying for the same positions at different "expected CTCs" making it a buyer's market. I am currently interviewing another company who has scheduled the next round to happen after 2 weeks.
Also no inbounds on Linkedin from recruiters. I used to be swamped till like July/August. Probably means there's decent amount of hiring freeze and most of the recruiters are fired?
Tbh, even though I got rejected in a few places, I did not feel too bad because I did not "feel" like they were doing solid engineering work (I ask lots of questions about the tech stack, challenges, culture, etc. in each round).
I've decided to spend a few months upskilling myself till the situation gets better and take the hiring process slow (rather being desperate). Although lucky to be in a position to be able to do so.
We're thick into the holiday season. I wouldn't expect anything to speed up until January, regardless of market conditions.
Yep. And almost everyone is hiring by committee now. Because if the committee hires the wrong person, nobody hires the wrong person.
And with all of these people involved, now you are subject to the calendars of the various very busy “stakeholders”. One company I engaged with had me talk to 11 people between individual interviews and panel interviews. That’s 11 calendars to coordinate, with illness and PTO and holidays and on and on to sort through.
I had one situation where I had to wait two weeks for one of the interviewers to have a spot open on their calendar. “She is so busy”, I was assured. They eventually extended an offer, but this and other warning signs made it clear it wasn’t a fit, so I respectfully declined.
At least in some cases, it's a reaction to some managers having made hiring decisions perceived by leadership as mistakes. Impersonal and bureaucratic as it might be, to the extent it keeps the bar higher I think it's a good thing.
If he really is coding 90% of the time though, more power to him.
My approach has been often to take a mixed-risk approach, and it seems to work out well. First, no debt. Second, long-cash. After working for about ten years in relatively low paying roles I have something like a runway of about 25 years - that is I would not need to take on any job for 25 years while keeping mostly my current standard of living (plus be happier, as I would have more time).
I plan to work for about 5 more years, then switch from a high-stress environment to cool projects that do not need to make lots of money.
The key has been to continue to live like a student, we have a small cheap flat, go out eating maybe once a month, no car, no expensive hobby, little distractions.
With a faang salary, I probably could have achieved that not in ten, but in two years.
That's why I'm a bit curious why people are so stressed out.
Bold statement: Tech will pick up first. And companies who are making noise based on Elon's move at Twitter will strave for good workers and die
At the seed/series A stage (one I'm most familiar with), any company that raised money this year or is cash-flow positive is still hiring opportunistically. At Series B and beyond, it's really a function of the health and resilience of their business model.
Within this bracket, there's fewer total jobs available, but the "median quality" of jobs is better than it's been in a long time: most companies that are hiring are good companies, so if you were to pick completely randomly between offers, you wouldn't be too bad off. Comp packages have not come down ($180-200kish cash basis for a "senior" engineer).
For people who know how to analyze early-stage companies as a prospective engineering hire, this is paradoxically a great time to be looking.
From my perspective, it seems like many ex-FAANG employees are seeking stable comp at late-stage growth companies (which may be a buyer beware situation...). I think the hiring there has gotten much more competitive, but I have less firsthand experience fishing those streams.
My tackle box: laid off from Meta after <1 month of Bootcamp, 5ish YoE as a backend engineer. Meta would have been my first FAANG experience.
1. Last 10 years of low interest rates and growth made Faang like companies seem much more valuable than they were. Now that tech is making it easier/cheaper to build and compete with their products (think TikTok vs Insta or AI driven frameworks for automating all kinds of workflows) expect the big/old companies to take time to realize and pivot to build more valuable products to stay alive. And it's not just Faang but any companies that are ripe to disruption where if you get hired it may be less stock comp or volatile job durability.
2. Also related to this, the FTC is tightening the screws(meta was blocked from supernatural, Nvidia could not buy arm) so they can't grow the way they did monopolistically like before and expect less of hiring bounties.
3. Seasonal and recession effects will slow down things for a bit but the former will wear off come January. Latter is a wildcard.
4. Don't get the first job you get without vetting the positiom even if it takes 3-4 months to find one(assuming you are not squeezed by issues like immigration or cost of living). Try vetting the companies and see if they value what you have to offer and the place is not toxic. Remember that only cracking the tech round is a zero sum game but mutual value in a work relationship is not and often more important. So vet it well.
5. If it's been a while since you last looked and are procrastinating on practice of leetcode or interview prep cause or you aren't clear on what to do like I am, take care of my mind first. Meditation, simplifying your life, figuring out what you really value in life and why you value it, is useful. Networking and talking to people on what's out there to change what you do is also useful.
For experienced people, things slightly better - at 1 years exp, 5-20 cv/pos; 2 years exp ~1:1; 5+ years exp, there are much more positions, than candidates.
But don't forget, we are at war, few months ago more than quarter of Ukraine considered occupied by Russians, and we still are not safe from strikes on infrastructure (about week ago we survived blackout for near 20 hours).
I've interviewed with ~20 companies this year, usually with folks that reach out to me from the 'Who Wants to be Hired' thread. I've received three pretty decent offers (200-250k base + equity) all at small, early-stage companies. From what I've observed this year, companies that are doing difficult or low-level work are still as starved as ever for senior/staff/architect-level folks that can deliver, and are happily willing to hire them. Probably irrespective of company size, but I pretty much exclusively look for teams of ~5-20 people.
One material effect I've noticed from the downturn is I've gotten a lot less emails from recruiters advertising positions that are at companies with BS products, or that have clearly nothing to do with my skillset.
My bio: I've got ~10 years professional programming experience and consider myself a generalist. Typical projects I look for include graphics programming, language runtimes, compilers, data streaming.. low-ish level stuff that's usually pretty technical.
Anyway, since someone asked, that's my 2c :)
How do you find these companies? I'm trying to find such roles since this is kinda where I excel at, but most of the roles I seem to get interviews for are pretty generic backend roles.
I do however mentor a bunch of juniors (less than 2 years of experience) and the 3 that got laid off got a bunch of offers within a month. It took more interviews but my experience from the last few weeks is that there are still a lot more jobs than applicants.
I think I had something like 3-4 offers rescinded and a couple of interviews where I reached the final stage just to be informed that the company halted hiring.
I guess what's more important for me is the type of work. I'm looking for startup work that's a bit more secure now, if that's possible, lol! Doesn't seem so easy to find.
Job search has been going pretty bad. Only a few screen out rejections and a handful of obnoxious crap recruiters have contacted me. No interviews yet.
The last time around was in 2020. It seemed like it took forever to get any response. Even when I was able to get through the interview process, it just stalled and I didn't hear back at all. I thought I was being ghosted.
I finally took an offer in late January. By March I'd had no fewer than five companies come back with written offers out of the blue, long after I'd forgotten about them.
The company offers work visas, relocation assistance and a relocation bonus, and stock RSUs.
[1] I applied for a startup, on a lark, on one of HN's who's hiring in such and such month and landed at a startup in Hamburg. I am now in Berlin. HN changed my life!
As others have said, hiring really slows down in Nov and Dec. You have quarter end, the year's budget is running low, project priorities are being shifted with anticipation of the new year, etc.,. Having been on the hiring end many times over the last several years, I know that higher ups often push you to fill a position - but just as soon as you settle on a candidate during this time of year, they almost always pump the brakes on actually hiring until new year.
Knowing this, I'd initially planned no not looking for a new gig until 2023, but once folks hear your back on the market, you basically can't avoid people trying to play matchmaker for your next job (which is a good problem to have, I suppose).
Not wanting to pass up a potential opportunity, I accepted a few interview requests that came about from my personal network in Nov. After going through 2-3 rounds of ultimately fruitless interviews with 3 different companies since mid-Nov, I've decided to just wait and enjoy the downtime. Each company I interviewed with essentially signaled "you're perfect for our needs and will be moving quickly with you" during the interview process, then would go radio silent - only to have them follow up a couple weeks later with "some of our internal needs have changed with the end of year approaching, but we'll be in touch".
So I figured for my sanity and so that I could enjoy a little bit of my funemployment, that I'd just be upfront with them and set some boundaries. Now, I've basically just been communicating "I appreciate your interest, but this is a bad time of year for bringing on new hires when considering year's end, so let's plan on touching base in January". We will see if this works out in my benefit or not - but if they can't respect that, and aren't capable of acknowledging the reality of things, I'd probably not want to work with them anyways.
Applied to about 30 positions, heard back from 3 and received 1 offer for Google. Didn't exactly give me confidence about the future when I may be looking for another job...
YOE: 3
But getting a job at Google tells you that your overall skillset was not the problem. You just didn’t match the other positions as well as some others for some reason. FAANG level jobs are always hard to get, always hyper-competitive. You’re obviously good enough to be there, so the worst case scenario is likely that you’d have to leave the prestige of FAANG and similar. You’ll be employable for as long as you want to be, I’m sure.
I'll be starting in mid January since am legally still employed with the old company until 31 December. Still employed since that's how we get our severance, so am enjoying the time off.
The thing that bothered me the most was that I had to update my CV, interview again and all the things related to that. I landed that job in March so I really didn't feel like finding a new one, I also liked the place.
I have a nice resume so was pretty confident I'd find something before the end of the year, so I didn't feel much anxious about it.
I have a some life events coming up next year so I have started to turn the gears on my network and contacts but I am pretty much only interested in consulting and contract jobs that can be worked remotely. Right now, I primarily see it as a means to raise some cash, so I can make the occasional splurge purchase. I have honestly thought of doing DoorDash.
Someone in the thread talked about the importance of a runway and I totally agree. I spent 6 years doing a STEM PhD and about 6 years working in industry on okay but not great salaries and even at that rate I have a runway of about 10+ years of savings before I run out of money (living frugal).
After my last job I think I promised myself to never just take a job because I am offered or out of prestige - I am turning mid-30's and I feel like I can't waste anymore time just doing time - i.e. waging for a paycheck without a higher purpose.
This causes tension with my partner and probably my future father-inlaw doesn't like me but long term I intend to be my own boss and run my own company. Especially since the pandemic I feel increasingly the urge and need to be the master of my own destiny - especially with regards to income.
Very hard but also very forgiving, which is what allowed me to get in - I've learned TIG welding, too, may even get certified just for job safety. Welds get x-rayed and warranty is in the double digits so you can't half ass the important parts.
Plenty of work from big and small companies alike. Some US middleman has contracted most firms around this city to build ion exchange components to be used in lithium battery production. A lot of orders for big ion exchange containers from DE and CZ, afaik also for lithium battery plants (Production? Recycling?).
I'm also Berry Alien, the fastest replacer of ion exchange material alive in September 2022 in bf middle of nowhere, Germany :D
Next step, building robots at some company. Always wanted to try that. I seem to fall ass first into opportunities I always just abandon, but this time I have medicine and crypto on my side.
Thanks Chris for the unique (for me) opportunity.
- 38 applications
- 8 rejections with no interview
- 1 rejection after 1st round
- 1 first round with no response
- 1 2nd round interview (no response yet)
- 1 3rd round interview scheduled for this week
- 1 1st round scheduled for this week
The others I've gotten no response.
Senior Product Designer with 8 years of experience, well versed in UI/UX Design, Design Systems, Accessibility, Prototyping, Documentation. Sole designer at my last startup on a brand new product that got acquired.
I've got 10+ years as a design who is also a full stack engineer (node stack). If you're hiring for a role that is well-rounded product, please message me, I'd love to talk.
Portfolio link in my profile.
In my experience applying for jobs feels like a waste of time. Maybe 1/20 will acknowledge you. And you have no idea if the job really exists. But if you're contacted first by the recruiter the hit rate seems to be much higher.
Hope this helps, if you want me to share more tips please let me know and I can add a few more things.
I’ve wrapped up the Fast.ai deep learning course and switched to studying the language of my country of residence. The rest of my time is calls with random people via my office/mentoring hours (https://sonnet.io/posts/hi) and learning how to live with a dog!
I try to code a bit and have some side projects I want to monetise or share, but tbh I’m struggling with getting them out because for some reason I’ve started to be overly critical of my work. I know it’ll pass.
I’m also exploring different ways of working, such as co-ops.
I’m a founder/SWE with 20 years of experience.
I think openings and interviews are very slow right now due to the holidays
Demographics is the killer force, basically with a MINT background, you can find a job almost instantly. You may not earn a top salary, but you'll earn enough to get by well.
Given Europe is in the worst crisis since WW2, I'd say job market is fine.
Here is a site that aggregates jobs from major Space companies https://rocketcrew.space/
Already have another part-time deal starting next quarter. Some initial billable hours in Dec. So not bad.
- Recruiters being very open about the salary range. This is a change from even a few years back, where there would be endless back and forth of "who calls the number" first. Now out of maybe 30 early conversations only 1 recruiter absolutely refused to state the range. The top end is extremely consistent, the bottom end (as typical for Canada) can be laughably low.
- US companies and remote work coming in in a big way. Some of them position themselves at the high end of the local market (which I define to be around C$200k base for non-MANGA companies). Others decide to offer the US range (US$180-200k), which is of course better but in some cases has the drawback of being a contractor.
- Demand in my field (DevOps/SRE/cloud infra) hasn't changed much. Still multiple pings a week from recruiters, down from multiple a day. Not a problem getting interviews, at all. Had multiple offers already but looking for a better fit.
- Few attempts at take-home exercises. I generally refuse these outright unless they are paid; some companies react to that by simply waiving the take-home.
Some things that did change...
- the remarkable extent to which US salaries are outliers worldwide is beginning to have an effect. Every single company I worked at for the last decade had non-NA dev teams, usually at the periphery (support, integrations, follow-the-sun ops). Now core teams are distributed and dev work is shifting away from high-cost centers. One example I saw is in Gergely's "which companies are still hiring" spreadsheet -- how many of these companies are not looking in US at all, or are Europe-/Asia-centric?
- startup non-base comp is becoming a really bad deal, even for Series A. I was offered some shares, even with the founder's own rosy projections an exit for me would be a nice bonus at most. Why deal with the stress if there's no meaningful payback at the end?
- some smaller companies asking LC Hards all of a sudden. To me that just feels like someone out of Google founding a startup and having no idea how to hire non-developers.
- people having less filter in general. One of the best things I really started doing in my interviews is shutting up and listening instead of working to sell myself / ask questions. People will admit amazing things about the company or about the level of fit / misfit for a role when they try to fill in the silence.
- as a corollary, how do interviewers behave if they sense it's likely not a fit? Do they start trash talking your experience / chances of success / achievable salary, or just let it go? I've had a recruiter try to convince me there aren't offers at 175 base + in Canada. I've had a founder tell me no one will offer me a manager role (after a 30 minute interview wherein they talked most of the time and barely asked me anything). Just take a bit of time to listen and the trash will sort itself out.
#ATXJobs #jobs
Engineering: Principal C++ Engineer - Remote https://hire.lever.co/jobs/internal/480a3819-a573-47b6-9e83-...
Engineering: Senior C++ Software Engineer - Remote https://hire.lever.co/jobs/internal/8975c3da-5bbb-40c6-8813-...
Engineering: Senior Cloud Engineer - Remote https://hire.lever.co/jobs/internal/e0573a22-ea25-48f3-80b8-...
Engineering: Senior UX Designer - US Remote https://hire.lever.co/jobs/internal/979e375f-d87f-49bd-ac27-...
Engineering: Sr. Software Development Engineer - US Remote https://hire.lever.co/jobs/internal/3a74b305-c866-4341-abc3-...
IT/Dev Ops: Lead Dev Ops Sys Admin - US Remote https://hire.lever.co/jobs/internal/0138eb4e-a717-438f-9aa9-...
IT/Network & IT Systems: Business Application Developer - US Remote https://hire.lever.co/jobs/internal/56211e7c-82d1-4038-91ac-...
IT/Network & IT Systems: Senior Directory of Customer Information Security - Remote https://hire.lever.co/jobs/internal/1a6c54b1-8f70-47bd-bdd9-...
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Marketing/Digital & Demand Generation: Data Marketing Analyst - Remote https://hire.lever.co/jobs/internal/f01ecfef-bfe3-491f-85c0-...
Marketing/Product Marketing: Product Marketing Manager - Remote https://hire.lever.co/jobs/internal/8c0b7a5c-43aa-40b1-8b5b-...
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But anyway - we're always hiring if you're into small consulting companies. We mostly do AWS, Azure, and not a lot of GCP (sad because I like GCP), and it's almost 100% K8s. You will have to be able to get a CKA, CKAD, or CKS at some point. Need to be in the US.
Send resumes to Josh@BoxBoat.Com
Perhaps now one may say, it is time to 'learn to adapt', since with the recent release of ChatGPT now gives the excuse for managers to be more motivated to hire less engineers and programmers as the cheap money has essentially evaporated.
So this time it is indeed different and I would expect less engineers to be hired and more programming jobs to become very competitive. No-one is safe; and that includes 'seniors'.
I don't understand the relevance of ChatGPT to this.
So everyone who knows how to do a for loop is safe.
Or the extreme, we finally have to move to post-money society, because automation is no longer creating any jobs.
