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.
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.
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”.
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.
do not do any other drastic changes (selling houses, divorcing, whatever).
Decide what to do then.
after the dot-com bust, i took a job that involved a 70 mile commute (each way) which was about 100 minutes on the road on average each way. At the time, i thought that was the only option for me. turns out it was one the worst career choices i made.
- The end of 0% interest rates
- The 5 year amortization of the R&D tax credit as part of the 2017 Tax Act (versus same year since 1981)
If you still went for a job that had dropped by that much, but it was still a meaningful amount of money and an interesting sounding job, well ... Good luck and all, but I kind of wish I had your problems.
Seems like it.
But what if that wasn't the case at all and they desperately needed an income and were willing to take an unfairly small salary?
Times are tough
I also see it everywhere I look. I have never had this many unemployed friends. People spend a lot longer trying to find a job and don’t seem very successful at it.
An interviewer last week was straight out of a Silicon Valley storyline, asking a “if you were on an elevator with Marc Andreessen” question and explaining his devotion to Malcolm Gladwell’s 10000 hour “rule”. The week before I got ghosted twice by a company who’s leadership team apparently pays no attention to the Calendly invites they forced me to set up “for my convenience”.
I know I’m capable and do good work, so I’m not having any sort of crisis of confidence. At least not yet. But the process is definitely frustrating.
Were they looking for a nice local newspaper story about a misdemeanor assault?
In my case, the process became so awful, humiliating, and hostile, I just gave up, and retired, ten years before I had planned. I’m very fortunate, that I could afford it. I now develop software for free, for outfits that can’t afford people like me.
It’s tough, but looking for work after 50, especially when pivoting from management, back to IC, is unbearable. My heart goes out to those without the means to walk away. I think some companies missed out, but I am under no illusion that I’m missed. I doubt they had any regrets in passing me up.
In my case, it was probably the best thing that ever happened to me. I left a lot of money on the table, but I have been happier than I ever dreamed, while working twice as hard as I ever did, when I was getting paid for it.
I suspect we will see startup founders trending older if it isn't already happening. Companies stuck in the old way of thinking that older is slower will probably be disrupted in the next recession.
Over 50 seeker here (25+ years experience, first IC then mgmt). All of hiring managers I've dealt with this time around are at least 10 years my junior, and they disagree with you. They view me as a risk (higher compensation, less "hungry", higher "flight risk") and prefer people their age or younger. Don't call it ageism though, that's just how the world works :(
Anecdotally, I think it already is. Part of it is simply because the younger you are, the less risk you can take with the cost of housing the way that it is. Older people/Millenials often have housing security and can take more risks this way, plus the other factors you raised.
Can't speak to whether that's universally true, but it's something I've been seeing: including people in their late 30s to mid 40s leaving cushy well paying corporate jobs to try founder life: they have big nest eggs from said previous jobs, so why not!
The fact is that there's nothing unique about any age group, and the only difference between them is their birth dates. Intragenerational differences are always larger than intergenerational differences. In any age group, there are varying degrees of competence, varying degrees of attitude, varying degrees of personal circumstances (e.g., home, family).
Ageism is treating a person solely as member of a group rather than as an individual. You simply can't accurately generalize based on a job candidate's age. Anyone who claims, "In my experience [members of age group] are mostly like this..." is putting forth weak anecdotal data that is practically useless and totally unscientific.
What kind of outfits? Might be interested myself.
I would be happy to chat about it, offline, but I don’t usually discuss it in detail, hereabouts, as I deliberately avoid putting my work in the limelight.
I have been looking for a job since the middle of the July with not much to show off. I have decreased my salary expectations but that is not the main problem, there are just no jobs to apply to.
For the last 7 years I have been working remotely for various companies inside the EU but it looks to me remote jobs are almost dead now. Everyone wants people back in the office.
My, probably controversial, opinion is that before Covid remote jobs were jobs for the more skilled people, so companies offered them knowing what they will get in return. But during Covid, when everyone worked remotely, some people not doing that that well, the companies just started considering remote jobs not worth it.
Local jobs are almost not existent too here, sometimes there is an opening at a bank but immediately fills in with tens of applications.
Last time I was looking for a new job, in 2022, after 1 month of the search I had 3 offers to choose from; 1 remote EU job and 2 remote local jobs.
Now, after 4 months, the furthest I got was remote EU job where after 5 rounds I was told I made it into top 3 candidates but was not chosen.
I started brushing up on C#/.NET I did over a decade ago as something to switch to, I am definitely not an Apple fanboy to stick to iOS at all costs, but the situation with those kinds of jobs does not look that much better either.
Or is it a lot better when you're physically in the Bay Area?
I had posted something about jobs and looking for jobs some time before here, but the best advice I can give is that all of this "What color is your rainbow" and "Cracking the coding interview" and so on isn't really applicable or it never seemed applicable to me and my experience.
To expand on my previous comment, I'm now on my 9th job in 10 years. Over the last year or so I've had another 30-40 interviews give or take. It was probably more, but this is as close as I can get. I would have liked to spend more time on some of these jobs, but circumstances didn't work in my favor so I had to make changes. What I've learned throughout the process is that all of this is a numbers game. It also helped me spot red flags and cut the process short.
For anyone else looking for a job and for the OP, here are some things:
1. Someone who is motivated to hire someone for a job will be quick/good to communicate
2. They need to set a clear timeline and steps in the process (and if they don't, ask for one and any deviation will be a red flag)
3. They might also tell you how many others are applying for the role (not mandatory, but it's good so you have a rough idea of what your statistical chances are)
4. Be clear about salary expectations early on and if someone pushes to find your current salary, feel free to say it's higher than it actually is. Any deviation from this or if someone doesn't want to say, it's a red(ish) flag and I'd be careful. It doesn't matter and if a recruiter will comment on this - I don't care what your theory about this is, you will aim to pay the lowest amount you can humanly get away with. It's also the reason we have minimum wage laws, not because companies were showering employees with money, but because they would have kept slavery going if that made sense to their bottom line (and they still do).
5. Ask why they are hiring - did they fire a bunch of people previously, are people leaving every few months or is the team/company growing; these can help you save time later on and at least have an idea of what culture you might be joining
6. Ask how widespread the technology you're going to be using is within the company. If a company has 99% Go roles and you applied to the 1% of the roles that are in Java, why is there such a discrepancy? Is it some old code carcass left over with no documentation, testing and with no desire to further develop it but they just want a body in the chair in case something goes wrong... not sure, but that's not something I'd want to do.
7. Be CLEAR about remote work/hybrid working policies - unless it is clearly stated in the contract, it CAN be changed with no notice. A change in contract would at least generally give you some time, but without this being in the contract, you can't really back out of it (case and point, Atos had remote-ish contracts for some of their teams, then they said they updated the terms and conditions, issued a new contract and forced employees to sign or resign). At a previous role I left I was told that the team is highly flexible and remote working is normal, but it's not in the contract, but it's ok, because everyone likes it. On a Thursday we were told that from Monday its 5 days in the office.
8. Anything outside of your salary or contract is NOT guaranteed, so don't pick a job based on perks. Those tend to vanish at the first sight of trouble and also, don't be one of those people that drinks the free coffee at the office just because its free. Stuff costs to make, grow, ship, build - pay for it.
9. Don't be pressured into accepting. This is a bit weirder, but it can happen. Let's say you are interviewing at 2 companies at the same time, one is more motivated to hire, but you don't like it as much, the other has a longer process but you like their domain more. Be upfront about this - "I am interviewing with another company and would like to see both outcomes to make a decision". Being forced at this stage to drop out, being bullied into saying the company name or anything of the sort is a red flag to me. If you have an offer but you need to wait a few days or a week - say so. "I am waiting for a reply from the other company too and I can provide an answer at the end of the next week".
10. Just because you accepted a job doesn't generally mean you need to take it. This is not legal advice, so take it with a grain of salt, as it depends greatly on what you sign, how enforceable it is and where you reside. But the general idea is that, if you accepted a job, but a week or two after you get a better offer, just tell the company you accepted the offer "No". "No" is a complete sentence. You do not need to give justifications, you don't need to take abuse or anything else. You have to think about yourself. They won't. If there is some legal rationale through which you NEED to start that role, just start it and hand in your notice on the first day. Most of these contracts will have some sort of "1 week notice by either party during probation". So you can join, give your notice, work the week, get paid for it and start at the other job.
Also, it will suck. Searching for a job will suck. More and more companies (especially recruitment companies - Noir, Tietalent, Aristo Group, RM Group and Hays to name a few) are really just mining for data with little to no interest in pushing you to any of their clients. They will also tend to try and say that just because you had read about COBOL during Uni, you are now 100% COBOL dev and set you up with a rather terrible interview with some client. There are more, but I'll stop here. On a side note, if you do end up working or answering to a question from a recruitment company check their reviews, look up the person that contacted you, look up the client and apply the same rigor to them as to the company you would end up working with. This entire industry is focused on selling out people to whomever, so don't end up pushed into stuff you don't want to do by one of these enthusiastic second hand car sales people.
How does this work for you? I feel like by the time you would "ramp up" and actually start to have a good idea of the job you'd be moving on
As for ramp up, I always jump in with both feet and ask for tasks and its really domain that you need to figure out. I've worked in a lot of different fields (I think no 2 jobs were in the same field) so I've gotten accustomed to quickly figure out those few processes that keep the lights on in most roles.
Writing software is the easy part. Figuring out the domain is the longer task.
On red flags or that this is a red flag - I don't really care. I've had it mentioned maybe in... 3 jobs and got offers from 2 and rejected both. I'm not here to be questioned around that aspect as I make the decisions that make the most sense for me. Companies do the same for themselves. I'll reconsider once I see C-level pay not be 50 times minimum wage in a company and when executive members give up their salaries/bonuses during downturn to keep people on-board or retrain/redirect the company. In the meantime, I probably care about your company as much as you do about me.
Hope this helps!
also:
> I'm now on my 9th job in 10 years
like, i'm all about job hopping every 2-5 to get that $$$ but 9 for 10 is a red flag.
