Effectively no offer would be able to generate through the system.
I would say the Amazon spam will go away for next 6 months if not longer.
That's how Germans are perceived but having met Germans I know that's totally not the case.
we will hire backfills to replace employees who move on to new opportunities, and there are some targeted places where we will continue to hire people incrementally
But I also don’t think it’s prudent to say “don’t worry about that layoff, you’ll get a new BigTech job tomorrow!”
Times are weird.
Most recently Clojure work. I’ve done a lot of Java of course, although I’ve been rejected from some of those jobs because I spent the last year doing Clojure full time instead of Java.
Plus, senior folks are expensive
It's the SV way.
Startups really need senior people only to hit the ground running; only established companies with seniors can afford to hire juniors.
The thing is after a certain level of seniority, there is really not that much difference so you may just as well focus with someone with 10 years experience who charges a bit less, compared to a 15y dragon.
From what I have seen, it's slightly hard to get the first position, easy after that.
It's not hard to get a position after 10 or 20 years, but, if you lose your position, you may need to adjust your expectations.
Something happens, idk what, after 10-15y. Either people made so much money that they retired, or they all become managers, or idk?
I'm at 27 years experience, and my problem is not finding positions that I could get (with some finessing about how I want to stay hands on and/or love their specific company), but finding places that have sufficiently senior roles at the kind of salaries I expect. Most smaller companies don't need someone as experienced as me and/or can't afford me, and I don't really want to work at a FAANG or similar (had one big corporate experience and don't particularly need another) unless something truly exceptional is on offer.
Here's a tip to those looking:
If you struggle, look for roles that look undervalued and/or are slightly below your level, and apply anyway. Be honest about what you expect as long as you're not overvaluing yourself relative to your experience. Recruiters are often fine with putting forward a few expensive candidates if they look good enough. Especially external recruiters whose pay is usually at least partially linked to the salary you're hired at, but also because a spread helps give hiring managers an idea of the tradeoffs they're facing.
Undervalued roles (roles advertised with too low salary for what they're looking for) tend to attract fewer applications, so you're both more likely to get a shot and negotiating salary up beyond the stated level is usually possible. Applying to roles slightly below your level makes it easier to get past the first level recruiter filter because they like to give a range and for lower level roles they're less likely to have applicants to push on the upper end.
Shift your target down until you get the interviews. Then work on getting offers. Then work on lifting the offers to the level you need.
It's usually far more important to get past the recruiter than it is to get a perfect match with the role because a lot of companies have a lot of flexibility in what they're actually looking for. Especially for more senior roles the hiring manager will also often have reasonable influence and ability to get the budget lifted for a candidate that stands out.
E.g. in my current job search, my currently most promising prospect is a role where I told the recruiter I would not consider offers lower than 20% above the high end of their advertised range because I thought the advertised range was too low for the years of experience they wanted. And they wanted someone with less experience than me. She put me forward anyway, and on the back of seeing my CV they came back and wanted to interview me for a more senior role that has not been advertised, and where I'm currently the only candidate. I may or may not end up there, but to me that's a pretty normal experience when approaching companies about roles which fit those criteria.
10 years of CRUD APIs is as productive as 20 or 30 years of CRUD APIs.
If anything, the older you get the higher the chance you won't know the latest BS kids are using these days.
I'm at 15 years, I keep specialising in different things (leadership, people management, mentoring, backend, frontend, infra, performance, crypto) but I'm just running out of things and the best paying companies (remote only) still want the same 3 skills.
My dad is doing pretty much what I'm doing with a 30 years advantage and getting jobs is harder and harder.
It does get boring, but my passive income from products is still not matching my ever growing daily rate. I guess at some point I'll stop being able to raise my daily rate, my passive income will catch up and I'll drop consulting entirely.
People expect the 10 year engineer to be a 10x engineer lol
Interviewers always ask for more specifics anyways, which is good because you can use that as an opportunity to jump into things you accomplished near the end of a job, or at the beginning of another.
I don't put dates on at all. I never have, even when I was 20.
And all the 5-7 year devs who no-hire senior folks, will eventually find themselves being no-hired when they hit the 15 year mark.
I just keep the last 5 years of work on my resume and delete the earlier ones
"senior engineer" is like 2 years of work experience anyway, it doesn't matter.
Only APAC companies have asked though, haven’t really bothered with European companies
If you have a CS degree it doesn’t matter what the gap is there to where your years of job experience begins, assuming degree is before experience starts
https://grnh.se/08cec3bb4us - Senior Engineer https://grnh.se/5c028b554us - Staff Engineer
You should take a look and let me know if you have any questions.
I have been recruiting quite a lot and at the end of the cycle you go through making difficult choices. Often times you get 2 good candidates and only one spot. So you compare them and pick a better one. The dismissed candidate can be picked next year due to lack of better candidates.
Unless it has been clearly stated in the reply that you seemed to be below their expectation of a senior candidate. And even then... a lot can change over the year and if you feel like you are better you have every right to reapply. Most companies will inform you of reapply policy terms if your are outside of it.
It's good to have your technologies listed, and be honest if your doing something out of your comfort zone... but there really isn't a technology out there that can't be picked up in 1-3 months.
+1 to this. Especially at the 16-years-experience level. Maybe earlier in someone's career where their primary focus is how to fit in and ship stuff without getting stuck all the time. But at ~staff level, your thinking and your contributions become a lot more language-agnostic (not entirely, but mostly)
If the job mentions the technology and most clojure/haskell/elixir dev jobs do then well unless they state "looking for experienced person willing to learn" in description I would not bother them. (at least with my complete lack of experience in tech). Similarly as I would not apply to "weird-tech-i-merely-heard consultant". Also think there should be consistency on the job titles/descriptions on the side of job posters.
Were you unemployed or working.
I went through about 15 interviews and applied to maybe 50 positions.
If it’s a buyer’s market then employers can say “work in the office” - take it or leave it.
Also, you got to be confident and toughen up before your interviews, because even if some would be interesting, constructive done in a pleasant way by nice people, many will be nasty. I got through many interviews were there were several people acting like machine guns, spitting dozens of sometimes silly questions just trying to catch me with a mistake.
Boy, how much I would wanted to switch roles a bit and show them that is not a constructive way to lead an interview.
The process is kind of random. I aced all the coding tests but ultimately I ended up accepting the offer from the only company which did not make me do a coding test.
IMO, the smartest engineers can identify talent without relying on the outcome of a coding test. Coding tests are shallow and misleading; they don't evaluate the skills that really count.
And it's probably wise for countries to be using COVID as a test run for something worse. We live in the age of pandemics now, and will probably get hit by something worse eventually. Something like an airborne Ebola strain (50% mortality) or airborne Rabies strain (100% mortality) are going to require a rapid, whole-of-society response to shut it down. If anything like that happens, the US and other countries that made a complete wreck of our response are going to be fucked.
So why doesn't Japan and Sri Lanka and Hong Kong and Taiwan and every island Caribbean/Pacific nation not have limited zero-COVID policies right now? It works right? The data shows Delta is still kicking.
At least be honest they made a very serious gamble with their citizen's freedoms, the economic well being of the poor, and the livelihood of small businesses and it didn't work. And every time a compromise is made in the future it will be easier to make the second time.
You can argue it might have worked, people were scared, they were working with limited information, the media cheered them on for acting boldly, etc, etc. But that's how we evolve. We learn from mistakes. Which is critically important for discourse going forward.
We tried for zero Covid and failed.
A 50% or 100% mortality rate would keep even the most pro-liberty people home. The issue is that COVID was nowhere near the civilization killer that is was made out to be. Some countries/states recognized this and rightly decided to not lock society down.
Any response to a novel outbreak that spreads rapidly, like COVID, needs to err on the side of caution initially, until we have better knowledge of the short and long term effects.
And it wasn't a civilization killer, but US excess mortality rate during COVID exceeded total deaths of WWII, among other great cullings. It was worth taking seriously and striving for a competent response.
This is the very definition of "zero-COVID".
They didn't abandon zero-COVID for another 5 months (Oct 21) when they finally admitted the data showed it didn't work.
Of course it's good they stopped using the strategy. But I remember vividly how the NZ PM promoted zero-COVID (and this was cheered by the media in Canada) as a working strategy until it no longer made sense politically or scientifically.
China has the bulk of the blame for continuing this failed strategy, but they were far from alone in the reasons why it was adopted it in the first place.
This doesn't sound right to me. I live in Australia, and we adopted a very similar policy. Lock down migration until a large percentage of the population was vaccinated. When the vaccine was rolled out, the restrictions eased. It wasn't because "the data showed it didn't work".
And fwiw "lockdown" for the most part meant restrictions on international travel. Most residents got to lead very regular lives for theozt part.
That's exactly what China has been repeatedly criticized for doing in Shanghai and Bejing and elsewhere (and is still doing today).
Of course NZ stopped doing it after 5 months, after reviewing the data (I mean I hope they were reviewing data and evaluating the human costs).
From what I can tell the initial order (after a single case) was for 7 days in Aukland and 3 days for all surrounding cities. How long it actually lasted I'm not sure, but this merely is one example of an idea that was promoted globally.
You can pretend an entire city spending 7 days locked in their house, after a single COVID case in a city of 1.6 million, is not much to ask of people. But we might have different value systems.
You do understand that people were not actually locked in their houses in NZ? There were reports of people literally being locked in to their apartments in China, but don't confuse "lock down" with "locked in" when it comes to NZ.
In practice lock downs (at least in Aus) were stopping people going into offices or non-essential places of business, or congregating in parks or other places. Whilst definitely an imposition on people, it wasn't equivalent to what was described as happening in China.
Of course they stopped it eventually because the costs were unsustainable, and it was never intended to be a permanent solution.
The whole point was to go hard at the start, get the population vaccinated, then open back up.
I haven't checked recent numbers, but last time I did, the number of deaths in NZ/AU per capita were far lower than in the US. Which you might not consider worthwhile, but we might have different value systems.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33460388.
I mean there is a reason why so many Kiwi’s go work in Australia.
Singapore on the other hand. Best 10 years ever.
Edit: the rest of Australia is nice. Especially people in Brisbane. My comments and negativity is to Sydney which is a horrrible place to live and work.
For context a lot of mortgages of recent times people got at very low rates fixed for 1-2 years (https://www.asb.co.nz/documents/economic-research/home-loan-... ) and now (https://www.asb.co.nz/home-loans-mortgages/interest-rates-fe...) that's a brutal shift for people that had budgeted at 2.5% when their food bills are heading for the moon as well along with other living expenses.
Not discounting that most countries are having these problems, but it's fairly extreme here.
"Wellington continues to have the greatest proportion, with 38% of first home buyers who bought during the last three months of 2021 now in negative equity." https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/property/129611585/first-ho...
Job prospect wise: Devs are (and have been) enjoying a very strong market, but I think (personally) we're going to see some challenging times ahead once the retail reality of Christmas flows through. The banks had been on hiring binges (hey just like US tech co's) and they're going to wind off just as quickly as they wound on.
So come, but eyes wide open if you do. If you've got a sh*tload of money to bring with you, can get over the cost of living, there's probably some deals to be had in a year or two...
As much as I don't wish anything bad to anybody, stupid people being bitten back by their stupid decisions is very low on the sympathy list for anybody, compared to say civilians being shelled at their homes because vladimir woke up pissed off this morning.
The historic average over 10 years is approximately 6.5%.
https://www.canstar.co.nz/home-loans/what-is-the-average-hom...
At the time, almost every conversation at work kept devolving into property (oh and crypto lol) which was annoying. And what was even more annoying were people who bought that were _convinced_ that they had got a good deal, lecturing me I should buy as well.
I ended up leaving the country for better pay, lower housing cost and good amount of savings to last me a while . I hope in 2 or so years when we go back, the prices are more reasonable.
Plenty of people bought in during Covid, at the peak, at 1.X variable rates that are now north of 4% and rising.
Lots of Reddit posts from people asking “why is my pay off period 89 years now?”
It’s going to be interesting.
Yeah despite the rampant, unrelenting racism, of course. Perhaps this should be prefaced with "If you're a white European with an English name"
Why Australia?
Public transport is SO SHIT. You'll be driving everywhere. If you end up in Auckland (which you probably will), prepare for a two hour commute each way unless you live in the city. I'm not joking. Unfortunately, you don't want to live in Auckland city because it's dirty, lacks amenities, is stupid expensive for the terrible apartments, and is actually really dangerous now. The Labour government has spent five years trying to reduce the prison population, and people are rarely given prison terms anymore. People are getting regularly assaulted now and perpetrators are being sent through a "restorative justice" procedure designed to keep them out of prison. In practise this means sending a letter to their victim and doing a few hours of community service.
Gangs are a regular part of life in New Zealand now. There are members in parliament with family gang ties. Unsurprisingly, gangs are getting a free pass. This is one of my favourite headlines from the last few years: "Govt funding for gang-run meth treatment programme cleared" (https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/450633/govt-funding-for-...). Spoiler: they were importing meth (https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/130267411/antidrug-mo...).
The health system is juuust about to collapse. I don't mean that in the modern colloquial sense. I mean thousands and thousands of staff are missing from critical positions all over the country. People are dying now. If you go to the hospital for assistance, unless you're actively dying, you could be sitting in the waiting room for days before some intern hurriedly gives you a painkiller and sends you home. NZ had a funding freeze for all healthcare workers during covid. Why? God knows. Similar issues exist in the fire service. There was one day when only four emergency line operators were on the phones for the whole country of five million people.
This one you might find controversial, depending on your politics. The current Labour government is ALL IN on racial politics. New Zealand has something called the "Treaty of Waitangi." A document signed between some Maori tribes and England a couple hundred years ago. Property disputes are still happening. The government occasionally gives these tribes billions of dollars in reparation. This might be okay, but they're getting really aggressive more recently. At the moment they're trying to pass something called the "3 Waters" bill where they give half the governing rights to drinking water in most major population hubs to a small group of Maori tribes. Permanently give away control based on race. This is in addition to them setting up a separate health system based on race. I have a colleague in government in New Zealand who has to use Maori words in official communications now, in addition to saying Maori prayers each morning, and regular mandatory Maori "cultural knowledge" training. As you might expect, they are taught that science is a "racist white construct, and traditional Maori knowledge is just as valid." So now the government pays millions of dollars when building roads to consult local Maori taniwha (spirit monster) hunters. Just to ensure that the taniwha are happy.
I could go on and on and on. I'm glad I left. I strongly urge you not to go unless you are independently wealthy and love the outdoors. NZ outdoors is really nice.
I guess this turned into more of a rant. Something like 800k Kiwis live in Australia. There is a very good reason for this.
Glad you are happy outside of New Zealand.
- Higher interest rates = Less access to capital for tech companies
- Remote work = More out-of-state and international competition for jobs based on tech hubs
- Easier to use technologies = Lower entry barrier to engineering jobs = More people switching careers and becoming software engineers
- More people opting to become software engineers
- Stacked ranking and mass layoffs
I don't take these events personally, it's strictly business after all, esp when the termination agreement is generous enough, and conduct is kept professional and decent between the employer and employees.
It's like a breakup but on very amicable terms, it sucks at first esp when it's abrupt but you get used to it, and there's always the chance of you getting back together.
No hard feelings!
If the company shows generosity during the separation, going beyond what was expected, I would certainly consider going back. If they only do the minimal required or less, probably not.
Sometimes companies need to do layoffs to survive, or they merged and have duplicate roles. Lots of reasons. It makes sense to take care of good talent that have to be let go in case they come back later.
We laid a ton of people off due to Covid. One year later back in business, hired most of them back.
I can think of three jobs I would happily go back to if they paid what I get paid now (and the companies still existed). One game dev company, one game publisher, and one retail job, where I mostly chatted with other employees, stocked and cleaned up shelves, and helped about a 1-2 dozen customers a night.
My current job I might be willing to come back to at some point if I left it. It has some warts, but it's been pretty good overall.
Other past jobs, not unless they paid 50-100% more than I'm making now. Nothing against them necessarily, but I wouldn't want to have that job again.
If they handle it poorly, then not a chance.
Unlimited PTO also discourages using PTO because nobody wants to be seen as the person taking the most vacation. And there are therefore no useful guidelines about how much is reasonable or allowed. A written or de facto company policy of "if you take more than 2 weeks of PTO per year, you'll be seen as abusing the system" is not unlimited PTO, it's an excuse to not pay people.
That depends on the management. I took more vacation at Netflix than anywhere else (where we had unlimited PTO). But the management made a point of talking about their extended vacations and making sure all the VPs took at least a few weeks of vacation every year to set a good example.
There was no stigma to taking vacation.
This fallacy needs to die. When I was at GE everyone in my blast radius took at least 1 month per year. Many took much more than that. There was no stigma.
It may not be true everywhere, but every company I've worked in that had "unlimited" PTO had far fewer vacation days taken than companies with a limited allocation of days.
But in both cases, the CEOs actively encouraged PTO. At my current job, people take PTO regularly (several people at my department have taken roughly 3-4 months of PTO over the course of the past 12 months, and were promoted). What matters isn't time-in-seat, but whether tasks get done.
They actually have difficulty hiring people though because it wasn't a great place to work under the previous CEO a few years ago, so the Glass Door score is pretty low, and it's been slowing edging up over time. But it's gotten to the point where about half of the people who leave for greener pastures end up coming back within 6 months.
I'll take one for the team then. When do I start?
Most companies just give out minimum severance. No acceleration of vesting. Healthcare continues for maybe 1-2 months. I know at my current company, I will lose all PTO.
Oh, sweet summer children and children of recession free economies for IT.
If job openings fall to 10-20-30% of current ones and tens, hundreds of thousands of IT workers are fired, good luck getting hired quickly, when any of the few good remaining job opening has hundreds of good applicants.
We'll be back to the days of:
Sure, you can code, your algorithms are efficient and your CV is impressive, but can you tell me how many overloads of string.contains are there in the Foo lang standard library? Ah, you say that's unfair? Well, the previous 10 candidates where just as good as you so we need more. We need you to hit the ground running, be productive the first week and be coaching our experienced devs within the first month.
https://www.quora.com/Who-started-the-phrase-you-sweet-summe...
It's just art imitating life.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Attacking the phrasing is not what we're looking for here at HN. The meaning of their comment is clear.
Well, George RR Martin would be super happy to know he's under 30 :-)
For what it's worth, I'm not under 30 either.
It's light-hearted and slightly irreverent. Whimsical, one might say.
As someone in my 30s, I've always thought of it as an "old-timey/old person phrase", same as sibling comment's "bless your heart".
It’s ok, take my karma.
ZIRP has created an entire generation with absolutely no clue about the very existence of, let alone the harshness of, cycles.
There's always non FAANG boring crud apps to code.
Which, to be fair, is still almost twice the median household income in the USA
If you intend to buy a family home, chances are there are two people sharing the burden. If you make $120k and the partner $60, you could borrow $540k, for a total home price of $720k if you have 25% starting equity.
That opens up quite a lot of options.
Personally, though, in the current market, I wouldn't borrow that much. It's quite possible that the biggest housing crash in several generations is just around the corner, and interest rates may very well be 15% within 5 years.
Especially if China invades Taiwan.
Hopefully, inflation will go down at around 5% unemployment. But if he has to continue tightening until unemployment hits 6, 8 or 10%, I suspect he will will be forced to eventuall pivot, even if he doesn't want to.
As a consultant, earn 2x as much and work on legacy systems that offer a lifetime of work.
It really is quite wonderful
Only issue would be remote work!
It isn't fun, but it is lucrative
Doesn't mean it won't get really bad, or that you'll be happy with what you find.
So you have 1, maybe 2, data points?
I learned the importance of saving during the good times so I'm less worried now
but it would be foolish to pretend the growth of many was stunted during bad times
Stripe began aggressively hiring in Europe in 2021: https://twitter.com/collision/status/1356275041277657088
The same applies to all the big tech cos. Facebook was actually complaining about not being able to find talent as recently as December. [0]
[0]: https://www.protocol.com/workplace/facebook-docs-hiring-recr...
Stop believing the bullshit you're being fed.
The parent is simply stating that market conditions are changing and that it might not necessarily a given that it will be so easy to find something new if we continue to see layoffs. That all seems pretty logical. However your response seem to be two links that are now a year out of date and bizarre statement to "Stop believing the bullshit you're being fed"?
Software engineers are needed all over the place and thus are often easily employable.
Needed as in must have or nice to have?
There are tons of devs creating tons of tech for the sake of creating tech. Cryptocurrencies come to mind, or all those half baked government automation projects where the digital version is in the end slower and more error prone (plus with limited or no recourse in case of failure).
And secondly, sure, they are, but what happens when you have 10 million devs and 8 million dev jobs? Past success is not a guarantee of future performance. Detroit and the car company cities and towns were amazing places to live in, and car engineer jobs were great, decades ago. Until they stopped being great.
it sucks and is unfair, and I might suffer from that myself, but isn't this the very essence of capitalism? if I'm ridiculously good and there are 10 more people who are also ridiculously good, it's going to come down to nitpicking, because we all compete in a market for this same req.
Most developers hitting the market with CVs are bootcamp generated and they don't have the slightest idea (and neither the interest) of what they are doing. They'll disappear as soon as the money does.
Unless you have a family and live in the Bay Area, you should always be able to move to a low cost of living and wait for the recession. It'd cost much less than $30k/year to spend a year in Kuala Lumpur with all your food delivered.
No, it's not.
And I understand this is the market. I'm just pointing is that it's not as near bad as the previous poster has claimed.
I was mentioning small companies in my previous post (think 4-6 devs and maybe a dozen other employees). $100k/yerar can sometimes make it or break it. Tech developers remain inaccessible for these companies making them disadvantaged in this market.
This might explain the crazy seed rounds the eco-system has been going through in the last few years. $3 million seems be the bare minimum for any startup looking to do something technical now.
I'd like to hear the aforementioned spiel about the "advanced Python ecosystem," which to me could mean anything between "knows what a virtual environment is" and "ML/TensorFlow expert."
Tech skills and domain knowledge are transferable and learnable. So if you’re targeting hires, maybe aim for people who excel in non-transferable skills and then just teach them (or pay them to learn) the domain skills.
There’s also the side benefit that if you hire a person and ask them to repeat something they’ve done before, you still need to figure out a growth path for them. But if you hire a person and ask them to do a new-to-them thing, you have the bones of a growth path baked in.
Are they insisting on full-time in-person with in a high cost of living area? (Or a dress code?)
Do they have a policy preventing employees from working on open source software?
Do they have a reputation for requiring things like mandatory overtime or off-hours availability?
I have trouble believing this is true unless they’re answering yes to at least a couple of those questions. If they aren’t, have they considered changing how they’re looking? It wouldn’t be the first time bad leads are due to a recruiter who just isn’t the right person for the job.
Get ready for the definition of 'decent' to get a lot more scary...