It's getting harder to pierce through the BS layers with all that new meat on the market, and to make the matter worse, recruiters are even less skilled than they ever were and are often offshored now. It's insane today.
When I'm on the hiring side, we can't find candidates, and on the other side I can't get through to the right people.
My advice is put out feelers with anyone you've had a good relationship with in the past, often via your old networks and ex-colleague, you'll jump in front of the queue and avoid the pre-screening nonsense. They know what to expect from you and they would prefer to have a familiar face they can rely on in their internal struggles.
That's how I've landed my last 2 jobs without an interview.
The flip-side is always to be helpful to other colleagues. At some point, everyone needs a hand - be that guy - that lends it freely. They'll always look out for you in the future if you look out for them in the present. Become a knowledge source in the company and industry. Soak in as much as you can, become a reference, expose yourself to everyone's job to some degree, providing it isn't a dead zone of silos and the people feel right (not cagey). HTH.
Very often that's where I screw up. I code computers, not goddamn CoderPads. I run my shit to know if it works, not pretend I'm an interpreter and go through line by line. I cut and paste boilerplate and edit it, not write the boilerplate.
Some dude in an interview at a very well known AI company was staring at me on a video call and grilling me about the max value of a loss function whose formula was written in an image, and I didn't have a whiteboard to do the math on. TF do I care? I usually minimize losses, not maximize them.
At big companies, there's more of a formal process but the key is get the attention of the hiring manager and make sure that hiring manager has enough juice to quietly backchannel to whatever process to treat this as a default-yes conversation. A good sign of how effective your manager is at a Bigcorp is how well they know how to work their internal system to get the right people onto their team.
i had the perception that people's standards and expectations are too high.
like it's not enough to just be able to do the job, you have to demonstrate something extra to stand out.
when i read the job ads HR posts for my own team, it doesn't sound anything like what we actually do.
Maybe it'd be a bit faster now with 9YOE, but In some ways I also feel like I'm "3 YOE 3 times over".
I think also in my case, my libertarian views on social media and cryptocurrency background have hindered me.
My last employer was basically mainstream establishment finance but they still hired me anyway because of my skills and also maybe because the founder was a Christian... But I could feel my crypto libertarian background made them tense.
One time (before that job), I interviewed for a position for a major tech company and I cheekily marked my race as 'Ethnic Caribbean' which is partly true since my ancestors have been in the Caribbean for over 500 years... You'd think 500 years is native enough? Apparently not if you look white. First interview, they dangled a MASSIVE offer. They gave me tech tests, I passed them all with flying colours. They set up a meeting with the head of engineering... A formality, they said... Guess what? The fucker never showed up. He sent his sidekick to pretend to be giving me a fair shot. I could see that the guy I spoke with was used to the switcheroo.
I can read the mainland whiteboi like a book... With his shifty, guilty, wandering eyes. Always taking advantage from afar. Hands soft as cotton but fanged as a snake.
He spoke down to me as if I was a typical whiteboi like him who never got his hands dirty. Oh my friend, I plough the dirt with my bare hands.
I don't change jobs often.
Thirty-five is not when age discrimination kicks in. Age-wise it is the sweet spot. People have had enough time to master their craft, and enough experience to hit the ground running without requiring too much management.
I'd suggest asking people who know you and who have worked with you for their honest assessment of working with you.
I already know that I wouldn’t want to work with you - not due to your characteristics. I suspect that I share them - but because you come across as such a whiny ass.
> I think also in my case, my libertarian views on social media and cryptocurrency background have hindered me.
Confirmed.
Maybe work on your attitude.
Firstly, it's unlikely that your definition of 'best" and my definition of "best" co-incide. Being a developer encompasses a wide range of skills, technical skills like writing code, writing helpful documentation, interacting with colleagues, architecting for the future, fixing other peoples bugs and more. Unless your priority order is the same as mine, knowing you're good at one thing can get a hindrance.
But leaving that aside, being very good at something (and more importantly knowing it) seldom makes for a good team mate. It comes with an attitude that is less likely to conform with what we do here, less likely to admit when you're wrong, less likely to adapt when we have priorities other than yours.
I'll also point out that your additude to non-developer topics should be one of privacy. I don't really want to know your political views, or your views on crypto, or your brushes with race, ethnicity and so on. If you vered into any of those topics in an interview I'd be alarmed. Even if asked your answers in those areas should be non-committal. And if I did ask about something like crypto (I dont) I'd be looking for a measured answer that showed you can understand both sides of an argument, that you can admit when a position is controversial, that while there are positives there are also negatives and so on.
I say this not to negate you, but perhaps to help you grow in your interviewing skills. It's just fine to be white, libertarian, into crypto, 35 years old, whatever. But interviewing is about getting to know someone, and TMI can be, well, too much.
I get where you're coming from, I really do, and you may be a great developer, but unfortunately you may not be a great employee just yet. And ultimately they're hiring an employee first, a developer second.
Have you considered instead applying to the kind of organisations that are in the habit of hiring people at your skill level?
You should - there will be far more people to learn from, and they're probably in the habit of paying higher wages.
That's not really the typical age where age discrimination sets in. In fact 35 is very much a sweet spot where people would respect your experience but you still look young enough to be hanging out with people in their mid 20s.
If you really think it's an issue don't state your graduation year on your resume.
> my libertarian views on social media and cryptocurrency background have hindered me
Most big tech recruiters don't go around searching your social media, it's a liability and they don't have the time for that. Startup founders might, that's another story.
If you're really worried about it, just delete it, temporarily hide it, or make that stuff private so only your friends can see it.
Stop whining and find solutions.
I'm quite selective about the jobs I apply to. I read job descriptions carefully to try and get a sense of the place. I know the kinds of environments I prefer to work in at this point.
I've been doing the same approach for a month and have not been getting good results.
You'll also have at the ready your "copy paste" document for those fields the application portals tend to screw up at scraping from your resume after upload. You will undoubtedly run across postings mentioning products or technology that you have not personally used. I take those opportunities to watch a quick YT video in my second monitor on the topic to gain a nugget of understanding while I continue my search.
I often walk away each morning having learned a little something new, and it doesn't feel like such a grind.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36494126
And I would say I am pretty successful.
Some are just "ghost jobs", some are on a hiring freeze but want to look like they are growing. Some may simply be apathetic. I had recruiters contact me, schedule a call, and then ghost the call and any follow ups. That's unheard of for me in 2023 or before.
I usually just wait for recruiters to contact me, which is easy, but I've got to admit it doesn't give me a lot of control.
I was mostly applying for companies with a strong product and solid revenue, ranging from ~50 to a few hundreds employees, with a few bigger outliers. No startup or faang.
It was much higher success rate than I was expecting given all I heard about the job market these days. All humility aside, could be that I just have an appealing resume.
Resume was generic, cover letter mostly generic, slightly tuned per company.
I’d say network is still the best way, just didn’t work for me for the sort of company I was looking for.
My strategy is quite simple - when I need a job I search for and apply for jobs I like the look of.
I might apply to a handful of companies. I tailor my CV for each one. Then I treat the interviews seriously, researching intensively and preparing as best I can, doing the problems they're known to give, practicing answers to questions etc.
It's pretty straightforward but requires a lot of work and means I have a high rate of passing through and getting offers.
My last interviewing experience was a few months back and I applied for 4 jobs, and got 2 offers. I didn't get past CV stage with the other 2 companies. I've moved around a lot with at most 2 years at a company so that probably hurts my success rate. It's always me quitting, I've never been fired or layed off.
I've gotten work via a friend before (side job), as well as through recruiters. I still get emails every now and then from recruiters that have me on their list. I even got a job via hackernews - Posting in an "Open for work" thread.
Don't you risk burning yourself out?
The way that I see it is that it's a financial investment. Not only can you increase your chances of multiple offers (which can lead to increased salary), but performing well could be the difference of $10k+ salary per year.
If you think of raises as a percentage of salary and compound that over the years you might spend at a company, then potentially we're talking multiple 10's of thousands over the lifespan of working at a company - all for a bit of extra effort up front.
It is extra strain for sure - the smart thing to do is to start your prep a month or more before applying. Also, don't keep your prep code in the IDE. I did this (had an 'archive' folder), and Intellisense was picking up the name of an existing class I'd used during my practice (not sure if the interviewer noticed that...)!
Beyond that, I would recommend you scan your personal network for people that could refer you to companies you'd like to work for and have relevant job listings - being that most companies have referral fees there is not reason for your contacts not to refer you for a relevant position.
This might all be stuff you know, but I really want to emphasize that the networking is key in today's hiring market, which is flooded by talent.
I hope I helped. Stick in there, something will come around sooner than later.
In 2019, I submitted 400+ applications and had only 4 or 5 responses which eventually converted into 1 job. I hear the market was hot then.
In 2021, I submitted around 40 applications with 3 responses where I had 2 interviews, and 1 job offer (through HN whoishiring!) that I accepted; stopping the process with the 3rd company at that point.
Now I've been looking for 2 months, and have so far sent around 15 or so applications with 1 interview that I did not pass.
I understand that networking and referrals are basically key nowadays, but I won't do that based on my values - I think it's unfair to be prioritized based on who you know over skills - this is a hill I will die on (or at least leave my profession over).
Furthermore, I do have a solid work profile (open source, personal site, blog with mostly technical posts, etc.) but am not willing to associate my real life identity. Not because it's inappropriate, but because I value privacy.
So her approach was to basically search through every job board available online (following my advice since I found my last job outside of linkedin). But keeping up with tens of open tabs in chrome is exhausting and very time consuming.
That actually got me an idea to basically automate the search part and webscrape every tab she had open and send a notification when new jobs get posted, this way you only get to see a clean feed with jobs from all sources.
That's how https://first2apply.com/ was born and now she's only using that. Haven't found that fully remote junior role yet tho :/
You don't know what you're talking about. Companies don't want to pay 3rd party recruiters if they can help it. They will if the position is difficult to fill, but that doesn't mean the job is a bad one.
>i guess it's just old fashioned git gud scrub mentality which is very toxic but what can i do about it?
Nothing. To some extent you do have to try, but you also have to recognize when the problem is outside your control. If the economy implodes, programmers and everyone else will be unemployed regardless of ability, and it may not be possible for them to get hired no matter how much they try to impress employers.
>i wouldn't trust a single person on linkedin if i was in a hiring position so it's really a losing game for everyone.
If you were hiring, you'd just have to interview people from LinkedIn to get "trust"... It's not like anyone expects you to not do that.
Personally, I got most of my jobs from strangers. The people I know have tried to help me get jobs before, but I only got one out of several due to help from a friend. And in that case, I was also a great fit for the job, so it wasn't like nepotism or anything. Maybe this lack of help is because I don't know enough people. I can't help but be suspicious of people who got their jobs due to extraneous considerations.
In previous years it was nearly as bleak, and eventually just lucked out, either posting on HN or maybe applying on LinkedIn. But.. that was in the before times, now it's fair for me to ignore the overwhelming majority of recruiters, especially if they're based out of India. They're all just copy/pasting the same shit job and working as a tertiary resume hocker, might not even know he name of the company or anything about it.
I read a bunch and apply to three at a time, based on how the adverts sound, or what I know of the companies. The last time round I found many posts and made a ranking of the options based on the fact that people I knew said "Company XXX is awesome". Luckily I got an offer at the company at the head of my list.
Linked in I treat more as a meta/comedy site, and I've never seriously used it. I have past working experience, but I never react to things and I've made three-four posts in the past ten years. So "networking" isn't really something I handle explicitly, but I talk to people in local tech companies randomly in the pub, or via friends of friends, so I feel like I know the major companies, and the ones with good/bad reputations for staff-treatment, and technologies.
TLDR; "Networking via friends has lead to random comments over the years about companies, and using that I make a list of 10ish companies. I haven't the concentration to deal with many overlapping applications so I apply to max three jobs at time. If one rejects me I apply to the next on my list and proceed until employed".
Thank you very much!
Sounds like you work in Web? Pretty much impossible to do that in games while looking for a senior role. They all want shipped professional games, but shipped games by their nature are NDA'd (and larger studios don't care about generalists who can ship their own indie). Sometimes you can't even talk about specific parts of a game you worked in.
In my junior years personal projects were invaluable, though. Nothing better to show you can code your way out of a paper bag than making a few game jam games.
Using this improved my experience tenfold compared to: researching the recruiter, sending an email + cover letter, waiting for a response, having 2-3 email exchanges, etc... I don't think I ever got a job/internship by applying for a job opening. I did get lucky with linkedin maybe once, when a tech lead sent me a message directly.
What I think helps a bit is: I'm very personal in my emails and brutally honest, like I'll tell them all the bad things explicitly in the first 5 sentences (bad education, dropout). No formal greeting "Hey, my name is X and I...". I also do have some work public (code + vuln diclosures) which has helped.
Most of them contacted me and asked me to update pricing or had other clarifications about their product
But 3 of them actually said they were impressed and asked me to join their team. I chose Codefresh and this is the company I still work today.
tried finding vacancies on several job boards, and directly on companies' career sites. while (public) employment agencies are promoting using llm for writing cover letters and cv, i have been personalizing them the old-fashioned way. several a/b tests later, i got nothing but automated rejection letters.
the only way i found success was from my personal connections. i suppose referrals do work out for people, but even that is not a silver bullet. maybe it is a skill issue to not find success the normal way, but in retrospect i found not much to do different the next time i need to find a job.
I only follow friends and coworkers I like, I don’t use it as a social media, and I reject bad offers. That’s all and it’s good enough for me.
Recruiters are a mixed bag. I've had wonderful and horrible experiences(and almost nothing in between). My current job - 10/10. The one before - same - the guy was awesome and was the reason I took the offer(against my better judgment) and ultimately was the only person I liked in the company and the only one I miss. The job before that - uugh... I joined the company before the HR did and had it been the other way around, I would have turned the job down - she was absolutely unbearable. In the grand scheme of things I agree: HRs are atrociously insufferable.
just set to looking for work and respond tor recruiters
sign up to recruitment firms and let them send you roles
seek referrals from greedy employees looking for referral bonuses
Might do some advertising this year. But mostly word of mouth goes harder than advertising or tendering for work. Legit have gotten consult for gov work bypassing tender just by word of mouth. Do your job well and the work will come. Also get out of conglomo megacorps. Doesnt matter how bright you shine you will still get lost in the sea of shit that they are. Making future work harder to find.
Remember, do a good enough job and other people will sell your services better than you can. Also register a company. Plenty of work where folks don't want you for the whole season just a game or two. It's easier to get thrown small bits and pieces as a contractor than having a company sign up to your services for a year. Get multiple companies throwing small bits and pieces.
Google keyword alerts/searches and/or word of mouth, although the latter is less trustworthy. Search, goshdarnit!
Have also randomly contacted a few people in my LinkedIn network for advice at 2 times in my career, in order to get more knowledge about skills, industries, company landscapes, etc.
TL;DR: Dreadful for me. Games was never stable, but these days it's imploding in real time and my calls slowed to a trickle. Crazy how much changed in 2 years. The worst part isn't the rejections but the disrespect.
For reference, I had 7 YOE when I was laid off in 2022, and it took maybe 40-50 apps leading into 6-7 interviews and I accepted my first choice while I was 5+ interviews deep into 2 others. 3 months or so of seaching.
Studio shuttered in 2023, took a break, started looking in September of 2023. Boy, it felt like finding my first job all over again. Hell, it's worse than that; I at least lucked out into my first FTE after 3-4 months. It's been over 9 months and I felt like I experienced every bad glassdoor review in the book short of outright scams:
- See an interesting role and it's closed after an hour.
- Try to contact recruiters or old colleagues to express interest. Sometimes I get a response from the recruiter for my resume, send it, then never heard from again. Not even a "sorry we're looking for someone with more experience/more experience in X".
- Interview one or two stages in and then a hiring freeze occurs. Or better yet, layoff announcements. Especially wary now when interviewing towards the end of a fiscal quarter.
- given some project that "only takes 2-3 hours". ends up taking more like 8-10 hours (even when I optimistically estimated the project scope to be 4-5 hours), turn it in.... and no response. This is how I got my first job back in the day but I will absolutely never do a project without talking to a human anymore. (fwiw, no. I highly doubt this was anything worthy of spec work to use professionally. Some were basically college math + comp sci quizzes. Some were basically filling in a template).
- Get referrals. Higher rates, but I'm shocked how many lead to no responses. my referrals almost always lead to at least an exploratory call. Here it's gone from 95% response rate to 40%. still better than cold applying but crazy how even people vouching for you on the inside may lead to nothing (not even a generic rejection. Some referrals had to prod the manager and get some response).
- Get an invitation to a recruiter call who reached out for me. I setup a call and confirm on email. No Show. Never responds back again. This has happened twice now. One of them delayed a call a week, then another week, and 10 minutes after the 2nd delay just deleted the call. Never heard back from them again.
- get a recruiter call, express interest, then say the role is filled... all within 24 hours.
- Go through 5 rounds of interviews, get good vibes from the team, expect good news (or at least "we went with the other candidate") and then... nothing. Ghosted after 6-8 weeks of interview. This happened Twice. What the heck? When did I enter the Ghost Zone? This is crazy.
I lost count long ago, but I must be well past 400 applications at this point. My current part time role came from a complete blind message on LinkedIn, so I'm not exactly going to say LinkedIn is useless or obsolete. I've tried half a dozen other websites and LinkedIn is only second to applying directly on the company website.
It's just weird times. My rates were never as stellar as many stories you read here (the 2022 experience was still ~16-20% response rate) so I'm used to that. But the real kicker is just how little respect there is these days. I'm more than burned out from trying to curate my resume and make a homely cover letter talking about their projects, what I liked, and what I can help with. I lose hairs every time I am lead to a workday application knowing I need to re-enter 99% the same stuff but under a "new account".
The only solace is knowing I'm not alone. Most of my close friends got hit or barely dodged layoffs. I think at this point almost all of them bounced back (except one that was laid off 2 months ago or so during the Activision layoffs), but I am treading water.
funny side note: got one more rejection (this one actually came from a HN Hiring post) as I wrote this comment. Fine enough (it's 2AM right now, so I'm guessing this wasn't a US company). I just can't believe I'm in a situation where a personal feeling rejection is one of my better experiences this year.
