> If you don't know your value, you're not worth the value they'd be willing to pay if you did.

I disagree with this. Knowing your value requires access to information. For many people, this information is obtained informally, through connections. But this puts people without connections, who were at a disadvantage anyway, at a further disadvantage.

Also, because corporate culture dictates the rules, sharing salary information is a fire-able offense sometimes subject to legal fines and breach of contract and/or NDA lawsuits in many (most?) US states. That information is intentionally only ever whispered among "connections", because that is what companies want for "better", more merciless control of the labor market.

This is awful. Do not work for companies that do that. They are looking for ways to take advantage of their employees and underpay them. Choose an honest employer that respects their employees instead.

I can't really disagree with this, but am left in conflict:

Information should be free, but shouldn't companies be free to

a) negotiate in their own best interested

b) use NDAs?

Almost every company that hires software developers are corporations or another limited-liability structure, such as an LLC. These entities exist at the sufferance of the society that grants that charter. They have no natural rights of any kind and they are granted the opportunity to exist so long as they provide benefits to the society granting that charter.

So you're asking what is, to me, the wrong question. To me, a more valuable question to community, society, and humanity is "why are we not putting them in a hammerlock and demanding decency?". Like--is there economic benefit to hiding this stuff from workers? Or is there greater economic benefit to at least some significant level of transparency with applicants and with workers after they're hired?

My guess is that that transparency is of significant social, as well as economic, value.

> b) use NDAs?

Not for information that shouldn't be secret. You use NDAs for trade secrets, not for mere salary information.

why should they?

it all depends on the world you want to live in and who gets to be empowered.

I too wanted to comment on some of the points, as this just isn't a well written article and reads more like the rants of someone who isn't ready emotionally, letting the frustrations boil over into not evaluating the scenarios properly.

Emotional is the right word, yeah. At first I thought "ah, guess you gotta write a medium-article when you get a job these days, good for the resume eh", but this lad really got me

more sugar:

>#8) Last one — always trust your intuition and get in there and really talk to people. [...] The job I took — on paper not nec a match for me and glassdoor reviews were also not encouraging to me. But every time I talked to the engineering manager I was like hmmm, I kinda feel like this is a good fit for me. I’m not sure why yet, but my spidey senses say lots of green flags.

"Ok, so I have no numbers on applications, but its 20+. I have very high criteria, I'm selective asf. No one talks back to me, they're all super rude. But now I've got a job. Ok, it doesn't meet my criteria, and yeah, bad rep on glassdor, but my spidey senses say we're cool. #alwaysfollowyourintuition"

this should become a copypasta

Agreed. If you read the article carefully, the author holds no degree in CS but rather went to a bootcamp. I don't know how much this qualifies you for a senior position, depends a lot on experience.

It looks like bootcamps started getting popular around 2012. Assuming this guy has been in industry for the past 6 years, that's probably enough experience to start considering Senior level coder roles in the current climate.

Looks like this is his resume http://estiens.github.io, doesn't look like a senior "coder" to me.

Nah, if you're gonna out me, at least use a current resume (not including current job):

https://ericstiens.dev/resume.html

Not sure this throwaway HN account is responsible for your obnoxious un-fan-mail; though I'd be reasonably interested to hear if any of them mentioned links in HN comments specifically.

Alas, writing a blog post about how nobody will hire you and give interview feedback is a sure-fire way to get an abundance of unwanted interview critique for an interview you never did. If I ever find myself with an over-abundance of faith in humanity, I might just do this with a fake name, email and CV and see what gems of human garbage get thrown at me.

On the upside, I'd like to take this opportunity to say that #3, #4 and #5 are absolutely on the money, and all boil down to ease (or, depending on your bias, laziness). It's not easy telling someone their faults - unless it's in an anonymous email to a random stranger on the internet, clearly - and it's far easier for a recruiter to throw cvs / job opportunities everywhere and see what sticks, than to actually be careful and methodical.

You mentioned it's a lot like dating; essentially, many recruiters are the equivalent of those dating gurus who show you how to become an alpha and promote a mixture of negging and other horrible practices; it works based on percentages, not based on content. If 1% of potential partners have low enough self esteem, and you attack 1000 people, you're almost guaranteed to find someone. Lose your soul, find a bed-buddy. To some people, that seems like a good tradeoff. If you spam enough people about your opportunity - often at no cost to yourself - you're bound to get one hit, often at significant profit.

I'm afraid this is never going to change; hedging a critical message so that it doesn't hurt someone's feelings is hard, especially when there is no incentive; letting someone know your budget for their role and missing out on an unreasonable bargain is hard, especially when there is no incentive; and putting real work into recruitment when email spam is just soooo easy is hard, no incentive.

Our only option is to be the change. I'm lucky that I work for a company that values giving recruitment feedback; when people I know well broadcast job opportunities I encourage them to publish a ballpark salary; and when I find a good recruiter I broadcast them far and wide and review them positively on LinkedIn. It might not change the world, but it might help a few.

Thanks for the note. I agree that incentives are difficult. However, I believe the incentives are better in this industry than almost any other one.

Programmers switch jobs frequently, and the startup world especially is still a small place. Word gets around about your company culture, the way you hire, the way you fire, what you pay, etc.

Programmers have hiring power. Especially senior ones with a lot of demonstrated experience. That doesn't mean you deserve to /be hired/, that's not what I was trying to say. It does mean you will /get hired somewhere/, so if you are not under immediate financial pressure you can afford to both be more selective and push back against crappy hiring practices more than other professionals/industries.

--

Re: the emails, I can't prove causation, I only know that the moment someone decided to point towards a /person/ that it went from comments /here/, to bizarre anonymous emails attacking me for being an overly-sensitive whiner that probably can't code and that's why I didn't get hired. Which is fine, we all know the internet is a shitty place these days, but it just seems like such a /strange/ reaction to me.

Agree or disagree with the idea that employers should offer prospective employees money for take-homes, or more feedback, or even whether you should tell a jerk to go shove it.

But what is the emotional urge to somehow align current hiring practices in the tech industry with some kind-of, let's be honest, masculinity and toughness and if someone critiques them, they must be #1) a bad programmer, #2) a wimp, and #3) dumb.

I truly don't understand, but honestly, I don't want to put that much effort into it. These days it's easier to block than to empathize, on all sides, and that's a little sad.

Ah, sorry mate.

I just found the first resume that google returned that was clearly yours. Not that you have to care about random google searches, but you might want to consider taking down your old resume.

What do you mean "not including current job"? This resume clearly says 2014-present.

Do feel free to ignore me, I'm not really trying to force you to explain yourself here if you don't want to.

meaning I just went through a long job search and am now spending all my time learning the ropes of new systems and haven't updated any resume anywhere, because I don't need to send it to anyone for a while I hope.

I have like 19 more projects I'd love to get on the site as well. Cobbler's kids and their shoes and all.

I'd love to ignore you, but when you dox someone with a throwaway green account, presumably to throw some shade on them not being a "true programmer" and they get a bunch of obnoxious emails first thing in the morning, I kinda gotta deal with it.

I've posted all my contact info in various HN hiring threads, so I'm not exactly anonymous here, but making an account to post old resumes just to make some sort of point about my experience or lack thereof was kinda bad form in my opinion, and maybe you should look into your own motivations for doing so for someone that just wanted to vent about how grueling the hiring process can be in tech.

I think #4 is spot on, really.

But it's an opinion at best. Unless it's your profession to evaluate the entire process, you're not in a position to claim it as a fact, thus it's hot air.

Of course there is a difference between really great and average recruiters, and of course the outreach is almost spam. That doesn't mean they're useless though, think of them like fishnets dragged around, except the fish can decide to leave

> But it's an opinion at best.

Oh, I have enough recruiter emails to write a blog post on how it's objectively bad. Any attempt to hire someone is going to need to cover at least a few things: What am I doing? Who am I doing it for? (and maybe, what do they do?, since SWE is usually combined w/ some other industry) How am I being compensated for that work?

Now, I "get" that many companies seem to like to withhold compensation information until the last possible moment so that we can try to negotiate a candidate as close to 0 as possible, so I don't really expect to get all of that information in the first brush. But half time time, I get none of it, or nearly none of it. E.g.,

> Your profile seems to be impressive for a [senior backend SWE] with our direct client in [location I am not interested in, which is mention in the LinkedIn profile the recruiter is coming from], If interested, please do respond with your contact details.

That's the whole email. We got like… half a role. Okay, Senior SWE, backend, but that's basically my résumé. What does the company do? What industry are they in? What is the team working on? What might I be working on?

Alas, it's not even geographically relevant, despite LinkedIn having that information in a structured format, so, it's not relevant.

Lots of talk about unicorns and VC funding though.

The funny thing about holding back compensation until the last minute is that we're not negotiating until they've decided they want me. They're exhausted from the search, have found someone they want (and I know it), and we start negotiating.