[0] https://resgen.app

10 free resumes per month seems too generous. Also, $7 is very low for a paid plan, when your users are likely to churn as soon as they find a job. If this tool is really as valuable for job hunters as it aims to be, they should gladly pay three times that amount.

A couple years back employers were begging to hire seniors in a heartbeat, now its nearly impossible to get an interview. I am wondering if I should retake the CISSP and just abandon software for corporate security.

I’ve spoken to recruiters from big companies and many were laid off too, which makes the hiring process even more sluggish.

Either that or the salaries will be going down.

I don't know if you're looking for advice or just anecdotes here, but I'll share some thoughts for what might be happening...

Frontend development has changed a lot over the last 5 years. Obviously I don't know what skills you have, but a few years ago it was common for companies to be looking for a "frontend developer" with just HTML5, CSS & jQuery experience. These roles basically don't exist anymore. Typically a frontend developer today would be someone who's got experience with a modern JS framework like React (or similar), knows TypeScript, has experience writing tests, possibly has some experience with dev tools like Storybook or docker, etc... At least this the kind of thing I typically see companies recruiting for these days.

The last 5 years also haven't been very representative. The tech job market from around 2016 on has been very strong and there was a huge under supply of labour (especially during the pandemic). Today tech companies are cutting jobs, or slowing their hiring, meanwhile your average 12 year old has done some basic HTML and JavaScript coding. Just knowing your way around HTML and CSS isn't going to land you a job anymore – companies can afford to be much more selective.

If you're not even getting interviews you can assume your resume is the problem. Again, I don't know what skills you have but you either don't have skills that are being sought after or you are not showing your experience in a way that highlights those skills well on your resume.

It may also be that you're applying for roles that are beyond your experience level. In my experience if you've been a developer for 5 years that would typically mean you're a bit better than a junior developer, but unlikely to be a senior. A couple of years ago you may have been able to land a senior developer role, but today the market is far more competitive and you'll have people with well over a decade of experience applying for these roles in most cases. I know it sucks but you may want to look for roles which require a little less experience even if you believe you're worth more. It's far better to be employed and in a role where you're growing your experience than being unemployed. You can always look for something else when you have the experience you need or when the market picks up a bit.

The fact you've been out of work for about 6 months now would be sending huge warning flags to me if I were a recruiter. Recruiters want to place candidates that are in demand and as harsh as this may sound a 6 month gap in your employment will suggest you are not an ideal candidate. I would seriously consider coming up with a back story to explain why you've been out of work for this long.

Some will disagree with this, but you should think of your resume like an Instagram profile – only show the things others want to see, and don't be afraid to represent yourself in a slightly exaggerated way. Obviously you need to be able to do what you say you can do, but you need your resume to give a good impression of you and your experience if you want any chance of getting an interview. So for example, if I was the primary dev on some project I'll typically say that I "led" the project on my resume. I'll also always include things like "senior" & "lead" in job roles because, "Lead software engineer" looks way better than "Frontend developer" imo. Minor things like this can make a big difference and help your profile stand out from the rest.

I guess to concluded though, the market isn't that bad that you should be getting at least some interviews. It sounds like your resume is being dismissed for some reason and you should try to understand why that is. If you want to anonymise and share your resume I'd be happy to take a look.

This time, there are the dark clouds of AI and lots of economic instability, along with higher interest rates to deal with. Not to mention record corporate debt.

Also this time is much different because coding was marketed as a way to just go to bootcamp and get rich, so it brought in hundreds of thousands of people on the low end.

Much diff than the dot com bust IMO.

I would warn people against blaming the market entirely for their problems finding work. I've seen stats suggesting that most tech employees who have lost their jobs have been able to find work within a couple of months. My own experience suggests this is the case. It's harder for sure, but it's far from impossible.

If someone's been looking for 6 months and are not even getting to the interview stage something else is going on. To blame it on the market would deny themselves the opportunity to self reflect on why they're finding it difficult. I've seen a lot of that this year.

Reach out to former co-workers and see if their current companies have any openings.

It's tough to stand out in a stack of 200 applicants without a connection.

Is your front-end stack or experience too narrow? What are you using for frontend. Are there more front-end languages you have experience with that you could broaden your search/resume?

Have you done any backend? Is now a good time to learn Rails or Laravel?

Can you seek out any alternative job boards that are more specific for your niche? Linked and Indeed are the most saturated with applicants.

Freelance and Contract work might be an option to stay active and show on your resume. Show Consulting as your current gig from when you left your last job.

Lastly you could reach out to your old company if it's a place you'd like to go back to, not sure how things left off. A lot can change in a year.

I'd assume you're not actually hiring "thousands" of people, which means that a very large percentage of those "more or less qualified" applicants are not passing the interview rounds.

Since it's logical to assume that you'd actually want to hire someone for those open roles, it's not too hard to see where the disconnect is.

Of course, I don't mean "you" in the sense of you, personally, and I don't intend this to be a personal attack of any sort, but it really does say something about how utterly insane people on the hiring side have gotten in the past few months.

You can disagree with me on that, and that's fine, but stay with me for a second here... if there's an open role, presumably they'd be better off with someone filling it than having it stay open for months on end, right? And, given that the candidate pool has been recently enriched with people who were recently employed and would not normally be out on the job market (remember, these are "more or less qualified" candidates, at least according to their resumes), I have a hard time believing the disconnect isn't that companies either think it's a good time to go unicorn hunting, or they don't actually want to hire at all for some reason.

But, again, unicorn hunting only works out in a tiny percentage of cases, because the supply of unicorns is low, and the real unicorns probably are not the ones out there pounding the pavement. I can't even begin to explain why any sane company would post a job listing in good faith and then never hire anyone for it, given that they're supposedly inundated with reasonable-looking candidates.

So, what's the deal here? If you have the explanation, I'd love to hear it, because I've been on the hiring side, and you can damn well bet I wouldn't devote my time to resume screening and interviewing if I didn't think we were actually going to hire anyone.

I stayed with you. Here's the non-sequitur. New positions appear on an ongoing basis and the latency from opening to accepted offer is non-zero.

Context. Seriously.

Context. Seriously.

Going more macro, there are 1000 people out of work applying to every job. There are only 100 jobs open across all companies. The same 1000 people apply to all of them, only 100 get hired. 900 people post on forums they can't get a job.

This doesn't need to be a conspiracy theory. If there are fewer jobs than there were last year (particularly in sectors like junior dev and FE eng) there are going to be people who don't get hired.

One open position, 1000 resumes received, pick a handful to interview, hire 1 after a few weeks, 999 come to NH to ask if the job market is tough and say they can't get hired anywhere.

No need for some weird conspiracy theory.

Assuming the number of available roles isn't a limiting factor, you probably applied for ~1000+ jobs in that time. (1 job per hour * 40 hours/week * 4.3 weeks per month * 7 months)

Is that right? If so, where have you had drop off in your funnel? Are you getting dropped before or after the recruiter screening call?

If after, then the problem may not be your CV.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36901965

By the time you've filtered out suitable jobs, researched the company a little, written a cover letter, customized your CV, gone through their application process/questions, sometimes even a test, you're looking at 3-4 a day quality applications at most.

The market is effectively dead. Even if you set your sights extremely low. Even corporate suit-and-tie programmer jobs are drying up. I don't know what I'll do if I lose my job. Construction, maybe. I can't be without health insurance so I am always terrified of markets where it might take months to get a new position.

I am a contractor and for the most part it's still, thankfully, a meritocracy. So experience is, in my opinion, the biggest factor.

I have no doubt that sometimes, perhaps for the entry-level roles, they will discriminate against age but for senior roles, due to the cost of the candidate and the potential damage they can do, a younger candidate without the experience, could affect them badly.

I think the best description is "give me a piece of tech and I can probably figure it out"

As a full stack developer, you were expected to be able to do system administration for Linux, setup and configure Apache httpd server, work with MySQL (create tables, know SQL), and work in a language that typically started with 'P'. The way that CGIs (and Php) worked implied that you did front end and backend work as necessary... though front end didn't have the same degree of complexity that it does now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAMP_(software_bundle)

Full-stack adds the front-end, and that's why you won't find js devs that can configure nginx, because they've been surfing on that "full" part of "full-stack" for years but it really just means you can do node and JS.

Writing the page to do front end navigation was part of the expectations of the fulls tack developer. They may not be a web designer, but the "ok, this is what the designer wants the page to look like - here's the HTML that I need to write to realize this" was part of writing the perl (in my case) CGI to make it spit out the proper html in the proper spot... and you really can't do most php without doing front end development as an integral part of it.

The definition of full stack has changed over the years as the stacks have changed and more emphasis is on the front end as front end libraries and frameworks have evolved to take more of the heavy lifting for presentation.

I don't even know what the overlap between people that are looking for jobs at my level and people who have managed huge teams is... everyone I know who have managed teams that large is on massive comp packages at FAANG type companies.

It's all very confusing, it made me feel like I've picked the wrong field. I have been lucky enough in my career that I have a long runway, but I'm also not rich enough to retire and do something crazy like buy a farm like I've seen other people in my situation do.

Very frustrating situation, I have been trying to work on my own projects but I'm not a natural salesperson so it takes a lot of effort to motivate myself to do things like cold calls or even cold emails.

Best decision I ever made.

Post your resume in a comment here maybe? And as much as it sucks shoot a little lower? Are you you only applying to house hold tech companies?

We really need to make "employment at will" illegal.

Personal anecdote from Russia (I hold expired Russian passport and have many friends from there). Auto-translated from chats (reach out if you're curious getting the origin link):

=== 8< ===

Another moment. When I was completely desperate to find a job here in our region, I published a CV on the Russian HH.ru. And there is a lot of activity there. In one day, they wrote to me vk, sber, yandex and several other fairly well-known offices. And all as one are looking for remote employees, but for some fucking reason that is not clear to me, I have to be on the territory of the Russian Federation. That's just an exception with Yandex. They can arrange in Serbia. But you also have to go there.

=== >8 ===

I don't know what they did to the US economy, so now it's even worse here than it is in Russia.

(I'm in RF at the moment)

I know someone who did the same and then spend ~6-7 months outside Russia. Within RU, they work remotely and have never visited the office even. As a sidenote, not only did they get the job, but their income progression has been 1.5x since they joined as a newbie within 1 year.

I worked as a cybersecurity engineer for 2 years and I've applied for over 300 _entry level_ developer jobs over the last few months and still haven't heard back from most places. It's definitely not just you!

I've heard from family and friends that are still in the tech field that most companies still have a hiring freeze in place and that this will probably stay in place for the remainder of the year, maybe even into Q1 or Q2 of next year.

The best idea right now might be to get _any_ job (even entry level positions) and just hunker down while we wait for the market to recover before we can apply for jobs that are more commiserate with our experience levels.

I decided to go back to school and get my Masters in CS while I wait and I'm also planning on doing some web or app development on the side just to pad my resume a little.

I'm sorry I can't help any more, other than to say that you're not alone in this :)

I'd love to be employed, but a low IC position (haven't done that in 13-14 years) for 60-70% less pay (the last one who contacted me) is a bit of a tough pill to swallow in a market with (last year) 10% inflation.

Once in a job, you are more employable. And employers are for sure not entitled to their worker's unquestioning loyalty. So I see nothing wrong with moving positions if a better one presents itself.

don't hate the player, hate the game...

That is in contrast with a few years ago where a man changed his resume to be of a black lesbian and started getting calls.

This sounds more like a porn movie script. “Hardcore All-Girl Positive Discrimination XVII”

Where do you even put the lesbian part? College extracurriculars?

https://fi.money/blog/posts/faang-company-layoffs-what-cause...

- I see a couple of corporations on your resume, do you have experience working in a startup environment?

- ...

If you have Blind app access, try to search for "I really thought after Google, I should be employable" post

TC 0. how's that.

Well, I can see the employer side as well

"After Google" you'll complain about the lack of chef on site, about how the automation tools are not quite like how it was in Google, how "oh in G we used to do that differently" etc

https://babylonbee.com/news/former-twitter-employee-cant-see...

last 4 FED my company hired are ex-sales/ex-whatever bootcampers (yes my company is cheap).

remote working is the final nail.

still few good FED jobs but you have 10,000s expert leetcoders fired by faang to compete.

These could be managers, people on your team, people on OTHER teams, vendors, salespeople you've spoken to, anyone.

Ideally, you should ALWAYS keep in contact with people you've worked with, even if it's just emailing them "Happy Birthday!" every year for the rest of your life, but the best time to plant a tree was ten years ago, the second best time to do it is now.

A warm referral is the best way to get a job. It's tough doing cold outreach. Good luck!!!

I suspect the importance of networking and the likelihood of ageism are often related.

Everyone's experience is different?

Everyone knows that interviews have high false negative rates (depending on your hiring criteria). You have to mentally guard yourself that interviews are not a complete judgement of you; they are at best a small pinhole view into your capabilities.

The downvotes you got were undeserved. For most job markets: If an ideal candidate is interview-disabled, their odds of being hired are dismal.

Or random people from my past sending me happy birthday ever year.

I am probably not social enough to understand that, but that sounds like a lot of work just to stand out as kinda weird.

No, it's not "cold", the point is that you had contact with them, they know you. It is totally normal to say, "hey not sure you remember me but we worked together on XYZ project in 2017, and I noticed you're at a company now that is interesting to me, can we grab a coffee to catch up?"

> plus basically creating a list of 'humans you might have use for in future' and their birthdays for your personal benefit.

No, keeping track of people you enjoyed working with and reaching out to them periodically is not "keeping a list of humans you might have use for in the future", it is having a network of professional connections that you haven't lost touch with.

I think something you might be missing here is that this is not a unidirectional selfish benefit. You know what I love? When people I enjoyed working with reach out to me. I'm glad they kept track of me and I'm glad they thought to reach out, and I'm glad to both catch up personally and see if I can be helpful to them professionally.

This is what makes the world go 'round, and it's not weird distasteful or nefarious, it's a very good system.

In the last 20 years I’ve interviewed for exactly one job, and that was my first one out of university. Since then it’s always been people I know offering me new positions. People don’t just hire a random person off the street unless it’s some MegaCorp sausage machine or they’ve exhausted all other options.

Look you can follow this disengaged, unsocial approach, but it’s suboptimal.

I hear this every so often, but do you mean that literally? It's so far outside my reality I can't believe it still happens.

I've never seen anyone get a job at an established company without SOME kind of interview. Even Guido van Rossum (creator of Python) has needed to do some interviews when changing companies.

Even if they are the hiring manager at a new company I've never seen them be able to completely bypass the HR process in that way.

As for the HR process, yes there’s always HR. It’s usually a few days after the chat and just a formality to tick the boxes and explain leave policies, the medical cover, run background checks, but HR really has never had any influence over the decision.

It helps you also because most people aren’t sociopaths and will pay it forward. It’s a way for you to build your own network.

Your career is often only as strong as your network.

IMO it is absolutely not weird to ask connections if they can refer you for a job? The company even pays me bonuses for successful referrals! (Well maybe that's over now, I haven't checked recently)

What, why? This is what professional connections are all about! Sure it is weird when like a social friend from childhood reaches out with an ulterior motive, but it's not weird when professional connections reach out for professional reasons. You're the weird one on this one :) And you're probably limiting your own career with this hang up.

I love it when past colleagues reach out. Even if I'm not personally hiring or don't think they'd be a good fit for my current company, I probably know of other people and companies to introduce them to.

So if any of those people reach out to me looking for connections, I'll absolutely do so because I also expect they'll return the favour when I need it. It's worked out for me before.

You don't have to invite them to your wedding. But having a brief if awkward friendly interaction and then passing on a referral for a posting or letting them know about some opportunity you may have heard of isn't "socializing", it's just a career skill.

We're all in this together. Being able to have a career that doesn't suck depends in large part on networking, not on your coding skills.

I'm not sure this is the thread in which to do it, but I think this is an important thing for the "Rah Rah WFH" type folks to consider. Networking over Zoom/email/chat definitely isn't rare or impossible, but is a lot more limiting & difficult than in person.

But I can definitely see it could be tricky for introverted types, or people just starting their career.

What I want more than anything is a stronger separation between domestic and professional workspace.

It just never happened to me, I picked my jobs myself, bootstrapped my companies without promoting it in a inner circle.

In fact most people I know got their job by just applying for it or recruiting companies.

I wonder where I would be at if I had networking skills, when my coding skills already brought me everywhere I wanted to be.

Maybe it's cultural, maybe it's just my social circle.

People don't like feeling like a tool other people use to get what they want.

Or do you mean reaching out at all for a referral? This is simply because HR and managers love knowing that someone, ANYONE, likes you enough to be willing to work with you again.

Except the very first in person interview I did resulted in a job offer, just like in the beforetimes.

But it is hybrid, but I also wasnt opposed to that in the whole job search.

You were lucky to get a rejection!

Or an email.

We used have to lick the bosses boots clean, applying for a job paying penny a year, an' if we were lucky we might get a thrashing to within an inch of our lives, and a rejection screamed in our ear.

Luxury....

.

Yes sure, I'm in the same boat, but probably with worse prospects (took a 'career break' to work on side projects, etc), and it feels like I'm boxing in a cloud - 90%+ of applications are just ignored, not even a rejection.

I recall being at that position. I firmly believe those 90% of applications are actually fake job ads to trawl for personal data. The most suspicious cases come from recruiters who post the most generic job ad over and over and over again.

You could say that again. In the early 2010s, I always got rejection emails. 10 years later with milliennials now in hiring manager spots, ghosting is now the norm.

- 2 rejected after interview.

- 2 ghosted after interview.

- 3 declined on my part after interview for various reasons (1 paid essentially below minimum wage, and 2 required relocating to a different country which is fine by me for the right job, but I didn't really have a good feeling about either).

- 8 rejected by email.

- 18 no reply (but some might still reply, since it can take a few weeks).

So that's about a 50% reply rate, give or take (assuming I'll get a reply from a few of the application from the last few days).

Find a recruiter on LinkedIn. This is what it has come to. There are thousands of resumes being sent at my company, yet the recruiter can't find anyone. Why? Because no one is applying through her link. The regular resume channel is reserved for bots at this point. Contact a person and you have more chances.

It sounds like your recruiter is purposely ignoring any resume that is not explicitly sent to her personally. It sounds like a job security move at the expense of both the company and candidate's best interests.

When a resumes is from her link, there are high chances it's a real person who took the time to read the job description.

Sadly, this is not new:

https://medium.com/@jannaq/the-robot-takeover-is-already-her...

I don't see how this can be a problem. People do look for jobs by contacting companies. Isn't the goal of a recruiter to check potential candidates?

> Bots and other 3rd party recruiters are also trying to game the system so they drown real candidates.

I fail to see how this problem is avoided by ignoring the company's inbox.

> When a resumes is from her link, there are high chances it's a real person who took the time to read the job description.

I don't but it. This does not pass the smell test, as screening does not depend on which input you use.

It sounds like someone is failing to meet their job requirements.

Your comment makes no sense. You're arguing that a recruiter should miss 100% of all contacts because otherwise they would miss things.

It's like arguing to throw the baby out with the bath water because otherwise your recruiter would miss things like the soap.

Curious, how does one ignore something that is never actually sent to them, explicitly or not?

My assumption is that this is because many of the latter are operating under the "if we get you hired we get XX% percent of your salary" model, and are thus inclined to submit as many applications as they can.

As someone in a middling HFT shop my linkedin inbox is flooded with recruiter spam. But most of my friends in frontend work don't get any of this.

Hey, since we're on the topic of HFT developers...

How do people break into that area?

I've done a lot of performance-optimization work, so I thought I might be a good candidate for some of those roles.

But for all the job postings I've seen in the past ~4 months, they want significant prior experience developing low-latency systems.

Is this just a temporary thing, where the pool of already-experienced candidates is sufficient?

I suspect a lot of it has to do with the type of companies that tend to hire 3rd party recruiters. Namely, startups, and typically early stage startups who don't have any in-house recruiting staff. There's nothing at all wrong with early stage startup companies, except that my experience seems to indicate they don't actually know what they're even looking for. That's in addition to the likelihood that they just haven't been around long enough to develop a structured hiring process.

I don't know. What I will say is that your incentives and a 3rd party recruiter's are not the same. They want to place you quickly and get the commission, regardless if it's the best company or the most competitive offer. You're right that they do want to keep you at least somewhat happy, because if they get a reputation for treating candidates badly, that can be fatal in their profession. But, the people they really want to keep happy are the ones writing the checks. And, in this situation, that ain't you. You are quite literally the product here.

The thing about 3rd parties is they are really useful if you're already on the inside. If you have all the relevant CV points, they will get you interviews. This is the flip side of why people get ghosted by them: if they don't think you'll be easy to place, they won't bother with you, and in fact they think the employers will stop taking their calls if they push the wrong CVs.

Another thing about recruitment is that not everyone is good at it. There's a lot of young ones just out of uni who give it a shot, and suck at it. Badly organised, don't know the business, waste a lot time for a lot of people. I've got a bunch of LinkedIn contacts who are in various unrelated businesses because they started off in recruitment and couldn't bill enough to stay there. If you don't field a lot of calls the ones you do talk to might be these noobs who are looking for leads.

For recruiters within a company, try looking for them on LinkedIn, check out a recent post of theirs to verify if they still work for the company, and reach out with an application if they have an email address, or via LinkedIn messages.

How do you find promising companies in the first place?

But don't apply for the jobs on those portals, that is just a black hole. Just look at the ads, note down the names of the recruiters and firms they work for, and either phone them or message them on LinkedIn.

They'll have a chat with you to find out your situation, and then they will tell you what jobs they've got. Note that every recruiter in the whole world thinks they have a great relationship with Citadel, Millennium, and every other well known employer in the space, so those intros have no value at all to you, since anyone could be your gateway. They'll also have a bunch of less well known firms, so you need more than one recruiter since they don't all know everyone.

Of course LinkedIn is also a way for the recruiters to get in contact with you. Just set yourself to open and wait around, a fish comes every week or so.

That hasn't been my experience. In a startup people often wear multiple hats, so it's not uncommon for CTOs or CEOs to be directly involved in the hiring process. Startups usually list their open positions on their site and screen applications via email, or post on the HN Hiring and other niche job boards. Startups certainly don't want the cost and communication overhead of dealing with recruiters, especially because it costs them much more to make a wrong hire at an early stage.

In contrast, large and mostly technically out-of-touch companies love 3rd party recruiters. They give them a bunch of vague role requirements, and let recruiters do the dirty work for them. If there are problems with filling a role, they can always blame the recruiting agency.

My first job in 1996 was based on a return offer from an internship.

In 2008, I did the random submit my resume everywhere thing and in 2020 an internal recruiter from $BigTech reached out to me.

With remote work being more of a thing combined with my much stronger network and resume, I will probably lean much more on my network and resume the next time I’m looking.

It's like reconnecting with a work collegue every few years.

Not to say that what you say will never work, but I think it’s worth pointing out that at some companies, application processes might exist for a reason. For me, having all applications in a single place is key to actually being able to deal with them effectively.

Honestly, an internal employee referral helps in similar ways, especially from an employee who knows you well in a professional context. But that isn’t always available.

Even if only a few companies hire through direct contact, many of the ones that do will hire more than 1 in 10 of the relatively infrequent direct contacts, while their HR process may be sitting on the thousands of regular applications.

People should write you a cover letter on the off chance that you open a spam folder of such volume that you can't bother to manually label a mail as belonging in it?

If it's solely through LinkedIn fair enough I guess.

I’d suggest calling out on your job posting that LinkedIn messages may be missed and the email is the correct place to reach out.

1. We are only allowed to hire through either an approved recruiter or the company job portal. The company job portal gets so many applications for each job it's absurd, and we have to sift these ourselves to some degree (HR are meant to confirm we only see qualified candidates, but they're idiots) so rather than sifting the portal applications we mostly use 2-5 known recruiters who only give us candidates who can do the job. They do the first screenings, if they give us shit candidates we never use them again, so we rarely get a bad candidate through them.

2. Perks. We often meet directly with recruiters in person, and they have expense accounts and take us for lunch/drinks we don't have to pay for. This makes us want to keep using them over direct applications (yes recruiters, this 100% works, we won't use you if you're shit regardless but we'll 100% entertain looking at your candidates if you take us for lunch or drinks - check compliance limits before suggesting a venue though).

How badly are you paid?

Don't really get it myself, I think typically such people are drastically undervaluing their time.

Me: I'm not doing DIY, I'd rather pay someone competent than waste my time and energy.

Also Me: I'm getting 100% of the value from this perk goddammit it's free stuff who turns down free stuff.

Your opinion is wide spread, but it erks me. "There's no such thing as a free lunch" is an adage millennia old, and true.

The rule is, nothing is free. Nothing. There are exceptions the rule, but that is exceedingly rare, and if you think you're onto one, it's probably a scam.

"strings attached" is another adage, and often you get "free", by having the strings attached to you.

E.g. I was at an 'all-inclusive' resort for work and some of my colleages seemed to think it was their duty to get as much value out of the meals as possible, even trying to calculate the actual cost of different dishes.

Of course it isn't "free" in the sense it is a result of work, but it is free in the sense it has no additional cost.

Source: finally realized that half the reason I went to technical talks that bored me was for free pizza and beer that were bad for me anyway

The brief stint I was at the company, the recruiter gave me tickets to the local professional baseball team that included access to premium suites and tickets to the local professional football team.

But yeah I get it, having a free meal wouldn’t mean much to me.

We weren’t going to hire contractors outside of that agency.

Heck, my manager asked me did I know someone with the same skillset I had, I had a friend who was looking for work and asked for a rate of $80/hour. They wouldn’t hire them directly. I had to negotiate with the recruiter and my manager until we also settled on paying the agency $120/hour to hire my friend so he could get $80.

No my manager also wasn’t responsible for choosing the agency. That was chosen on higher levels.

Maybe 99%. This doesn't work on me. Any swag I am sent from a recruiter gets handed to someone else. I turn down dinner and drinks because I feel like I'm being manupulated. The harder a vendor or recruiter pushes here, the more uneasy I feel about using them. I don't want to hang out with people who only want to be around me so I can give them something.

Edit: Sadly, I think this doesn't help me from the perspective of being recruited, but I can't help not being comfortable playing this game.

My last job tried to address this by having a small technical test of skill that could be thrown at anyone as a first pass before getting any technical people involved. We got virtually no senior role "spam", so we didn't have to worry about making a challenging technical test, we just needed to weed out junior applicants who basically didn't know how to do anything other than apply for the job.

It worked pretty well for us but we were a relatively small company. I don't remember the exact stats, but I'm pretty sure we hired less than 50 people a year (across a couple offices in the US) for the technical roles we used that test for.

Use your new free time by not applying to…

Work on a project that interests you and share it online

Exercise both physically and fiscally

Spend time with people you care about and also care about you

And keep working on projects and sharing them, maybe even with hn

The comments on here are legion of individuals who post some project and have to then fight away recruiters…

This is good advice, but remember it's not the only way. Not everyone is comfortable giving their work away for free.

(maybe its a new product/business idea etc). If the new business idea fails or you decide not to proceed with it you can still put it in your CV as long as you can describe it in detail and/or show potential employers your work. Assuming the project is related to your work of course.

How would you go about finding a recruiter sans LinkedIn? :)

At which point you're pretty much always going to be asked for a LinkedIn, and pretty much noone will want to put work in for someone not doing something has simple as creating an account. So, unfortunately, as the other comment said, swallow your pride.

These networks have made it so that the cost of idealism is being cut off socially, whether that's friends or employers.

_Using_ LI, costs attention too, increasingly so, as with all social networks, but you also receive some in exchange, so if you don't value your own attention all that much higher than every other human's on the planet ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

...yeah, it's pride.

How much money have you made by creating a profile on HN and reading and posting to it and giving it your attention since 2015?

If you list the right skills they will find you.

If you haven't and your gap is for other reasons I'd write a "skills based cv" and definitely spend at least 2 weeks reminding yourself everything you need to know before you go for technical interview. There is no worse feeling than getting a technical question you knew an answer for, but you can't quite remember what is was.

I also found it's easier to apply directly rather than through recruiters if you have a big gap in your work.

This is how they do it, they don't mind if candidates do it back.

Likewise with follow-ups. Anytime I follow-up on an interview, I never hear back or it is rejected, so I've stopped following up after interviews completely.

But asking around is best; shoot a few messages to ex-colleagues on linkedin.

I don't understand any candidate who sends out a letter without researching the company for 30 minutes and taking another 10 to write a thoughtful cover letter. if you're not willing to put that effort into your potential future position, it's not even worth opening the CV from my side.

Now the trickey part is, so, to have solid recruiters hiring for real positions reaching out to you. For some reason, they did in my case more or less every time I kind of needed it. I have not the slightest clue so why, my LinkedIn profile was up to date but far from polished...

Well, I content myself with being lucky for some reason, and I am aware how lucky I am when it comes to that and quite grateful to universe, and hope to never have to go through that whole process again, because applying, getting new jobs, tinse and repeat, gets stressful at a certain point. And now I reached a point in my career where I like the stability of a job, collectively (and relatively high) bargained salary, good, bordering very good to almost stellar, retirement benefits, I job that is truely challenging (new stuff that allows me use my experience almost completely, while being borderline scary at times) working on a product for which projected end-of-service-life is over a decade after my legal retirement age.

That being said, I had a period in which I had to write a ton of applications whipe seeing the clock running down on my unemployment benefits. That alone can be soul crushing, so I try to cut people somenslack when it comes to CV and cover letter polishing. It still means one shouod put some thought behind both tasks so.

I sent a cover letter to my first 3 jobs. They never checked it. Never directly asked but it comes up in conversation at some point when talking about other new recruits.

I don't see the point in a CV if you're reaching out to the recruiter. That fried request message on LinkedIn or first email is your "cover letter". Letting them know who you are and what you want.

I'm not a recruiter and have no vested interest in this, but the experience with recruiters from the candidate side is just completely different to justify their existence. From the company side, we also get better candidates from recruiters.

Applying through portals make you feel like a second-class citizen. Companies often ignore you, ghost you, have terrible screening, take ages to respond, give no feedback. Recruiters that reached directly to you have your back and will push for timely responses, will help you negotiate a salary and will prepare you for the interview.

With that said: I had good experience with internal recruiting too. My best salary offer I got was from a company that had internal recruiting (I accepted and work at this company).

But I hope I never have to fill a form in a website ever again.

Definitely agree, hope I never have to apply via a portal again.

If a company is interested in me, they won't make me jump through hoops. On the other hand, I'm quite experienced and popular in the job market, so things might be different for other folks.

Your resume has way more chances to be considered seriously if instead of just sending it to the company inbox someone already working for that company recommends you. If you have any friends, family or ex-colleagues working on a nice place, tell them that you are looking for a position and ask them if they would mind referring you. Although it's becoming rare, some companies still have a "referral bonus" for employees that bring up other employees. You might even do them a favor.

(FWIW, this is also why I think recruiters work.)

Run enumeration on their company and see if you can figure out their boss's PERSONAL direct email address. Send resumes there instead of [email protected] - Often if you can figure out some scheme like first initial last name @ whatevercompany.com you can get that contact.

I tend to do this by simply waltzing into the office and asking for a business card if I can. Apparently nobody does that anymore but it gets results.

They keep fucking me over. Had one a few weeks back that messaged me with 2 roles that looked like a perfect 1:1 fit for my resume. Never heard from him again.

The most recent job the hiring manager saw my post on HN: who’s looking to be hired, and they just reached out directly.

It's basically spam at this point. How can we "stand out" without getting bombarded with low-quality "proposals"?

If you have to learn the "new tech" every few years there is no point of your experience.

- Don't focus your efforts on cold applications, the numbers are against you

- If you must do cold applications, use LLMs to customize applications and aim to send out >50 per day

- Focus on your personal and extended network, reach out personally to people you know and ask them if they have any opportunities they can connect you with. Personal connections are always going to trump sitting in a stack of 1000 cold applications

2. You have 2500 words limit in the About section. Write about all the projects you were involved in. Instead of just writing: "Experience in Mongo", it could be "Improved the system's performance by 30% by optimizing Mongo."

3. Again, add skills to each of your working history.

4. you can add the training courses or what you're learning for hot skills in the market.

5. Professional quality photo. You don't need to spend on getting a professional photographer. You can use AI tools to improve a selfie from your phone to look professional.

These will not get you the job, but will increase your appearance in search results.

But if I get my next job because I used an AI face fixer to get past the first hurdle of the culture fit, I just don't want to exist in this century anymore.

I don't think anyone experienced with fighting on the US software engineering market would have any struggle to get something here. Though it does depend on your expectations: You generally will not get 300k, 200k or maybe not even 100k starting and won't get any name worthy stock options unless you are doing very special things for very special companies.

Second consideration: Have you considered not applying for those FAGMAN level companies and their inflated salaries or overpaying startups, but something boring instead? Government, insurance, banking? In other words, have you considered lowering your expectations and standards?

You mean a month, right? Or you forgot one zero, or something is wrong.

...like what? And where did you get/find your jobs? I found a lot of jobs just by checking out all the big name companies directly (banks, insurances, BRZ, ...) of Austria, via recruiters from LinkedIn, I can also HIGHLY recommend contacting the company "ePunkt", they are supportive, almost pushy and forceful in getting you into in person job interviews. IT rat catcher consulting companies like Accenture and CapGemini are probably always hiring. Big 4 is always looking for IT consultants. BRZ, Kapsch, willhaben, Raiffeisenbank Software Gmbh, Raiffeisenbank International, Erste Bank, those are just VERY few that immediately come to mind and none of those are secrets.

Luckily they are transparent with salaries... 50k EUR annually in Vienna... before pandemic it was low and meantime we've experienced over 20% accumulated inflation. I bet they complain about the "quality of candidates", right? With this package all they can demand is ability to use QWERTZ keyboard and that's probably who they hire.

a high salary in job posting can attract the wrong crowd, so it's also not very advisable to do and I understand companies who got burned by this and dont do it anymore.

most I have seen publicly offered for senior IC is 75k. you can get more through connections or being an extreme outlier.

as far as EU is concerned, best tactic is to find a smaller German town for lower cost of living and join a company there as german industry and IT is spread our fairly evenly all over the place and there are quiet a few smaller university towns with desirable kind of people.

another idea in EU is to move to portugal or croatia or czech republic and contract remotely for western europe from there. language barrier being an obvious but not insurmountable obstacle. if you are US citizen I could imagine you could contract for US from eastern europe without problems as well.

> ...like what?

Russia and the US. All through personal connections.

Reason? I'd say 90% is because they usually have higher salary expectations so they dont bother interviewing them.

I was s contacted by Microsoft representatives offering 5000 USD as a B2B. It's that bad.

Feels like my FE days are over.

you have to be marketable in another way

> "you have to be marketable in another way"

Correct. I would look at personal GitHub projects over Leetcode BS if I was finding a candidate at this point.

I dont believe

I'm in the UK and the traditional dev/tech job route was via something like JobServe, Indeed etc., where you see a role advertised via an employment agency and you send your CV hoping for a callback.

I'm in a stable contract so I'm not looking but two weeks ago, I was contacted by two agents, one day apart, both unrelated to one another, completely out of the blue.

The first agent was more like a headhunter-type in that he arranged to "interview" me the following day via Teams to drill into my background and skillset. It lasted about 40 mins. Now, I can say, hand on heart, that in all my 20+ years of work that has never happened. Ever. He didn't have a role in mind, just that he wanted a few good candidates to pimp around to his contacts (CTO's and such).

My experience in the UK has been that you apply for a role you find on JobServe, you phone and chase the agent, and you hope to get through the cattle market, not this US-style agent-works-for-me stuff.

The other agent had a role in mind but he also grilled me extensively. Again, never happened before... they usually ask you about the keywords they're looking for and that's it: call done in 2 mins. This call took over 30 mins.

I asked the first guy what was going on as his style was more like the US system where a recruitment agent will work for YOU, and try to get you a role somewhere, whereas the UK model (unless headhunted!) was very much that the agents worked for the companies in question and acted like a CV-buffer to filter out the crap.

One of the agents hinted that there are a lot of average candidates out there at the moment looking for a smaller number of roles so they are aggressively filtering them before handing over to the clients.

I suspect that there have been a bunch of rejected CV's sent to the clients and they're now wanting better candidates... either that or agencies are indeed swamped in average candidates (not pissing on them, but if you have avg candidates and good candidates, the avg ones will lose out).

Anyway, things are a bit weird in the UK at the moment so I thought I'd chime in.

I would suggest to email directly to a company hr or apply directly through company's job portal. Apply to companies that don't advertise on linkedin or similar portals. This is how I got essentially all of my jobs and this is how I get leads even now.

The reason for this is 2 fold:

1. They directly stop you competing with their current candidate, who is probably the highest % cut.

2. They indirectly stop you being put forward by other recruiters when you say "oh another recruiter has put me forward" (which they haven't, but you have a verbal contract with).

So the number of jobs you think you're applying to is actually less .

If you suspect this is happening (and make sure genuinely it's not just a delay in the HR dept first by asking probing questions) call the company and ask them directly, state that the recruiter is being a little slow corresponding and you'd like to confirm the status of your application. If they haven't heard of you, terminate your verbal contract with the recruiter and send your CV directly to the company. This happened for my current job, and now I'm earning a substantial amount of money (think tech arch, top end salary).

My boss said during hiring "I don't know why they wouldn't pass on your CV, you were clearly the better candidate".

They usually send you a confirmation email to say that you're their bitch now but I reply to the confirmation email saying that if I hear nothing for 7 days, then I can go with another recruitment firm.

I've learned not to trust agents. At all.

If I get a call I assume that I'll be ghosted or that they're lying about the role.

If I manage to get an interview, I usually get the role (I'd say about 70%+) but getting to the interview stage is always a pain with the agencies.

That being said... the market is most definitely different at the moment: I'd hate to be applying for entry-level (or even mid-level) roles at the moment!

I have a friend who is looking and he's struggling to get anywhere at the moment and he has more experience than me (I'm more senior than him but his CV has extensive experience on it).

Not saying you are wrong, but my (London, mainly BigCo) experience and read is that 90%+ of tech jobs are filled through agents.

They're nothing but noise. Shotgunning messages to everyone. Calling me out of the blue while I'm at work. Just straight up spam and annoyances. We don't get much robo-calls here, so UK recruiters is the sole reason why I no longer pick up the phone from unknown numbers. It can sometimes be multiple a day. And blocking UK numbers doesn't work. If you don't answer, they call you a minute later routed through a Norwegian number.

F*ck every Norwegian company outsourcing their recruiting to these agencies. I don't think they understand how poorly it reflects on them..

How do you find out which companies are hiring, please? It's like a catch-22 situation: in order to know that a company is hiring, you need to know that the company is hiring. If I search for open positions for my role on Google, all I am seeing is the endless stream of recruiting agencies with no visibility into what companies they are actually recruiting for... Are there any places left where companies advertise directly?

So for me when I want to work for a company with embedded / audio etc I just google who is providing such services in the location I wanna work at.

Once I found the target company and their website, a lot of them have "career" or "job" postings on there. If they don't I just send an email with an inquiry about currently open positions with my cv attached, sort of an electronic cold call :)

I don't like to deal with the middlemen I go straight to the source, Frank Lucas style of the software era if you will...

These still exist for large companies (especially US companies) and those with internal recruiters. It's a shame that the latter get tarred with the general term - they have very different motivations and methods.

I have had good recruiters in the UK but they're few and far between.

Best to treat them like company contacts. Let them apply for a role or two for you, and contact somebody else for another role. I used a dozen recruiters at any one time when I was last applying in the UK.

- Indeed easily costs 500$ per month without result,

- Employees know it so they slack around. Not only they performed bad work during this period, but I also had to deal with firing one to show the other that bad work in unacceptable.

- Took recruiters at 7-10k€ per recruitee, for 1 year, didn’t work out, their candidates kept failing the basic Java tests (like they can’t align 2-for 1-if),

- Took an inhouse recruiter, 3000€ per month for 8 months, he overhauled the communication, wording style, videos, blogging, LinkedIn news, and did those 30-minutes calls before our 2 rounds of interviews.

Now we’re 8 and employees are actually pumped up motivated at work. And thanks to this, work is also more interesting than when we were few, because we have time to innovate, we’re not struggling under support workload or having to run around keeping the servers hot.

—-

I attribute the new fashion of 30-minutes calls to 1. scarcity due to Covid disorganization, 2. radios and media, even business shows, blasting out that the newnormal is 32hrs a week, 100% remote, and that if you haven’t been promoted to management in the last year you are wasting your life with your employer, 3. Students have been incredibly badly taught during Covid, so they suck at programming during interviews, 4. Therefore, employees are not worth spending the money on, and we’re better off spending the money on recruiters. So those 30-minutes call are a redistribution between who provides the value; the employee provides less value, the recruiter does.

The highest probability approach to getting an interview is via an internal referral: i.e. someone at the company you want to work at refers you.

After you've exhausted your network, cold emails with a strong pitch to engineers & engineering managers at companies that are aggressively hiring is the best approach to gain referrals.

A couple of friends and I wrote a playbook to help folks land interviews: https://koopuluri.com/get-interviews. We go into detail about what a strong pitch is, how to craft one, and how to effectively cold email.

Happy to help in any way, feel free to reply here / email me (in bio).

* Unclear if have right to work in country. This needs to be stated up front! Our company can't sponsor visas, so if based in another country unless it says something about the visa status, we basically have to throw it away.

* Poor grammar, spelling, attention to detail on CV. I get some CVs through that are almost unreadable. I'm not saying if there's a single typo then we'd disqualify, but if it's littered with them it shows poor attention to detail and that's quite important professionally!

Things that would make me think twice about interviewing:

* Too much emphasis on stuff that's not relevant.

* Big gaps in employment

* Working for weird companies that show poor judgement in itself. For e.g. - Crypto exchanges, predatory companies, etc.

Really curious what you suggest as a remedy for this one. It seems to boil down to "sorry, you're screwed now" or "lie but don't get caught"

And before you think you dodged it, I'm still wondering what you're suggestions are.

You’ve said 2 years here. What sort of gap wouldn’t be a factor to you? 3mo? 9mo?

Let's say for example your consultancy works with primarily physicians directly, or wealth managers, or attorneys - people who are not incapable of understanding technology, but have hired you precisely because they don't have the spare bandwidth to get into the weeds of another complex technical domain in addition to their own, and would have absolutely no idea how to comment on your understanding of algorithms or ability to function a small develepemt team as an IC, etc.

I've never seriously considered trying to parlay my experience into a mainstream developer role because I assume that in a sea of 100 applications all having a similarly recognizable list of roles and references, anything that doesn't fit this model is ignored because it's too much trouble to to make a side by side comparison with the rest of the candidates.

I'd interview both of them so long as they pass the requirements. The second guy I'd want to see recent projects, not employment.

How quick is 'quickly'? Going through the similar motions here, nearing towards the end of the MMO's current cycle of content.

I knew a principal engineer who heavily disliked blockchain because it uses a lot of energy for proof of work, but with proof of stake this should be better now.

Namely:

- what schemes are still left for us to pull a lot of money into before they get recognized as scams

- how do we get out in time to leave someone else holding the bag

They paid me to design an eventually consistent, self-healing data store with a cache layer / write ahead log, with peers determined by paxos consensus, transfers metered by finops and govered with kademlia, and a storage layer capable of byzantine fault tolerance, which we implemented via signature chains.

See, they had this crazy idea that they'd make a cryptocurrency that they could sell to western digital, who could offer hard drives that "filled themselves up" with other people's data when idle. WD would obv make a buck and maybe sell these drives for much cheaper than the component cost. I'm not exactly sure of the economics. I think the idea was to have half the drives be "receivers" and half be "senders" and actually sell the "senders" for way more than component cost, but provide trivial effort file backup.

I think they're still building it. I dunno if it'll be a scam or not. I had fun though.

Edit: to make that less bitter sounding.

To be more helpful: A resume gap that you’ll casually admit to or honesty in monetary requirements also are instant disqualified status these days. No more low interest rate free for all.

Good luck OP!

I found my current job through the January HN Who's Hiring post. This company doesn't post anywhere except HN. Would definitely recommend that since the August post is coming out soon! This experience inspired me to build a tool that uses AI to match your resume to the best matching jobs: https://hnresumetojobs.com/

Give it a try, maybe it'll help you! Best of luck, it truly is a grind and is emotionally taxing -- but you WILL find something soon.

And now that you can recognize that skill in isolation, do you use it as a major factor when choosing candidates? If you do, why?

Do you think the people interviewing you could recognize that you were specifically bad at interviewing, and not at everything?

Even if someone is really smart, you have no way of knowing if they are if they can't communicate that with you. Not to mention working on a team is all about communication.

I mostly agree with your assessment, except I don't think that it's unfortunate at all. If applicants are so dense that no one can get along with them, those people, imo, should be removed from the team.

It doesn't matter that you can 10x everyone around you, when you are bumming a team consisting of hundreds of people out.

The problem discussed above was that some people are simply bad at handling the kind of stressful situations that interviews present them with. (Note, it's not necessarily about any stressful situation, just one where you're under intense scrutiny.) Hence, you can end up not hiring someone because they're struggling to show their skills in an interview, even though they'd be an excellent hire otherwise (including being a great team member). This is, indeed, unfortunate.

Definitely. Motivation is of major importance in whether a new employee will be successful or not. And if a candidate obviously has put a lot of effort in preparing for the interview, then this indicates that he/she is motivated to get the job.

Ofc it is not the only factor to take into consideration, but surely an important one.

I never said that. I said it's a very important factor, but there are other factors as well. Also, not interviewing well doesn't necessarily mean that you didn't prepare anything. Preparing also means reading up about the company, putting some effort in your CV etc. What I'm looking for, again just as one of the indicators, is that the candidate has put some effort.

In case someone doesn't see the absurdity of this situation, let me make it clearer:

We all have 24 hours in our days. Given that fact, whenever I'm at the crossroads between "practicing my interview skills" and "diving deeper into <insert language/framework/specialization>" then it makes sense that I should be prioritizing the former because prioritizing the former implies that I will be motivated enough to learn and work with the latter, and nothing more.

Why not just learn the latter in the first place?

I'd argue that interviewing well is strongly correlated with skills that are valuable for a SWE role. It's not perfect, but overall I do feel like there is signal there.

Seems like a double standard.

There's got to be some give and take in a relationship with an employer. If you're feeling exploited, you're not in the right role. And that will show in the quality of your work. Work can be fun and interesting, and someone who enjoys what they do will relish the opportunity to learn. I know that for me interviewing, though tough, has always been an opportunity to solidify my basic understanding of the field I'm in. Maybe figure out what you enjoy, and find an employer who respects you equally?

I mean that's a good attitude, but really some industrues and some fompanies are exploitative.

And I am not talking Cobalt mines or McDonalds. Look at the game industry- really good developers, much more skilled than average web dev, and they get shit pay and long hours. Why does anyone work there? People exploit their passion.

So they are orthogobal concepts - maybe you are passionate, and someone takes advantage of that

Ask them. They are choosing to work there. They have options.

Also why is McDonalds an example of an exploitative company?

Because we (in UK) are paying in-work benefits to help people who work there survive. So the taxpayer is subsidising the labour costs of this business. If we didn't, there wouldn't be enough people willing to work at McDonalds.

We should only pay benefits to people who are unemployed, a job has to cover costs of sustaining employees. The same pronpem is faced by british farmers - they can't exploit romanian students with schemes where they pay them below minimum wage by charging £50/day for libing on the farm in a tent. And there arent enough british folks who want to break their back for minimum wage.

As a society we have decided that people deserve a livable wage. That is a good thing. Minimum wage laws are a distorting way to accomplish this because they put a cost that should be borne by society (no-skill workers should have a livable wage) and force it on industries that employ workers with no skills. Subsidizing the income through government transfers is frankly a more equitable means of achieving that goal.

That being said, in such a regime however minimum wage laws are necessary, not because McDonalds is exploring the workers, but because they are likely to exploit the government.

That only happens when McDonalds is paying exactly as much as the value they get back. Which is doubtful. If forced to pay more or shut down, your average McDonalds would prefer to pay more. They wouldn't be losing money.

The idea that someone investing time and effort into being a smooth interviewer somehow shows that they’re “motivated” seems like a weird tribal dance to me. Who does it benefit?

And again, this is not the only indicator I'm looking for. A candidate who didn't prepare much but can tell very enthusiastically about some project or technology is obviously motivated as well.

What I would say I look for in software developers is people who are genuinely interested in software development. You don’t need to be a committer on 4 open source projects, but show me that you actually like the work (the fun parts at least.) If you’re also interested in the business domain that’s not necessarily required, but a huge plus.

Well, yes, desperate people are going to be "motivated" and work really hard to get the job.

But remember this cuts both ways: people who aren't desperate with have no problem leaving you you for the next big thing. Being an employer doesn't put you in some default superior position. You need workers and workers need work.

I do, yes. IME, candidates that take the time to learn the skill will take the time to learn other skills required for the job. If a candidate can't be bothered to learn a skill to get a job, why should I hire them for a senior position? If it's entry-level, that's a different story.

Nothing is easy.

Everything in a balance.

Downturns always reveal the important of relationships — the true gold and what is always worth investing in and collecting.

This is my fourth downturn. Nothing — nothing — has fundamentally changed.

I expect it resolves just fine. The intense effort that you acknowledge is precisely what it takes to move forward in this field.

For example, I went from web-hosting software to fitness industry software. There is very little overlap in skills beyond 'writing software'. At hosting job, scale was the biggest issue (dealing with hundreds of millions of events per second) where now, legal/insurance type issues are the biggest hurdles. It requires a totally different way of thinking and knowledge set to be effective at a senior level. If you're just focused on 'writing software' then you're not senior material, you're just a programmer ... not an engineer.

Signalling is an important thing, it's why you iron your shirt before the interview - it may even be why you have a degree. The cost of false positives is high, so if this filters out skilled engineers who think are appeasing the interviewer's ego, the system is working.

This is a skill, learning to sell yourself. It translates into being able to get sell innovative projects to stakeholders, to learning new things, to understanding business requirements.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I’d love to hear why or how.

Why should I do algorithm or math related tasks as a frontend developer for example. Soft skills are way more important than preparing for potential interview questions.

You say this as if it's a bad thing.

The reality is, companies have multiple qualified applicants for each open role. Hiring teams are actively raising the bar and trying to find more ways to narrow the pool down. If there are 10-20 qualified applicants in the pipeline, and half of them interviewed terribly, it's very easy to cut the applicant pool in half by rejecting the people who couldn't communicate their experience clearly during the interview.

Remember, "interviewing skill" is just another way of saying "how good are you at communicating with prospective employers".

Communication is usually an important hiring criteria. Ability to communicate well in an interview ("good interviewing skills") is a good proxy for ability to communicate in general.

The same reason that your skills are required for the job you are paid for, I suspect. To ensure that you can actually perform your job properly.

To practice interviewing you need to firat get details about the job and company and develop a list of questions. If I really wanted a job I'd get 30-40 questions prepared, from job specific to behavioral ("tell me of a time you had to deal with a difficult stakeholder"). Then add variations of the question so you get used to being asked the same thing different ways.

Then always use STAR (situation/task/action/result) to answer the question. This will help the interviewer remember you a lot better and it will also highlight what YOU did.

Practice going through your CV/resume back to front and front to back. Be prepared to highlight what you learned at each role and why you left from it/got made redundant.

With sufficient grind you will become proficient at this and it will make a world of a difference. I can now confidently say "I wont get this role because I messed up X, so if they were paying attention they will reduce my score for this". You will still get rejected (sometimes there is just someone better than you) but the goal is to improve your odds at being the one that gets the job.

Hope this helps!

The other aspect is that I will view a company the same way they view me - a resource and a means to an end. I've been asked in several of those interviews "You don't seem to hang around a lot, how do we know you won't leave in a year" and I tend to answer that "You don't. The same way I don't know that some economic downturn isn't on the horizon and that you would instead scrap me a year down the road.". Some don't like it and engage in that discussion more and some accept it.

At the end of the day, I'm here to do a task you hired me to do, I'll do it well (they can check a ton of references in this respect) and when I'll find something better I'll leave. If I don't get hired because of this, it's not a job I would want anyway. I'm pretty tired of how capitalism and "the market" applies only to workers but it never seems to apply to companies and when it does then you're "not a team player" or "not in it for the long run" or, as we've seen recently on HN, "not part of the family".

So to do my part I always advise / suggest to friends and family to quit. Start looking for something else, get some practice, see what's out there, see if you could get paid more for your skills and see if you could do more interesting work. Those are all possibilities. Unfortunately, most people like to stick with the devil they know and then end up scared and shocked when they get made redundant. Hope that this explains it. PS - the job I most recently accepted seems great, the team and the product seem interesting and I'm looking forward to getting stuck in. However, that doesn't mean that if I start getting bored, if change isn't being effected at the rate I push for and if the product/team turn out to be not great, I might decide to move on.

I was very fortunate in that my girlfriend helped me a lot here. But quite frankly what she did was very straightforward. She would do a 30 minute mock interview with me, and ask me pretty standard behavioral questions. Questions like:

- Can you tell us about a time when you had to work on a project with a tight deadline? How did you handle it? - Can you give an example of a project or initiative that you spearheaded and the impact it had on the company or team? - How do you prioritize and manage your tasks and responsibilities when faced with competing demands or tight deadlines?

I answered these questions on my own in a notes app, and then when she would ask me I would then draw on my previous experiences and figure out how to answer question that tells a story as best as possible.

This really helped me a lot.

One tip I would give is to generate these questions, try copy/pasting the job description into ChatGPT and ask it to generate a list of interview questions for that role! I found that much better than sifting through the SEO spam for interview questions.

I noticed this when interviewing candidates and although it's nice to have someone with their interview skills together, you run the risk of hiring "the master of interviews".

this is what the job world has become and it's not going in the right direction.

1. social circle 2. attend conferences, exchange business cards, contact info 3. apply to companies through their own job portal or direct hr email 4. don't go for shiny companies (either location or business must suck, less competition this way)

anything else such as random recruiter agencies, linkedin, job portals is not going to yield any effect in this day and age. there is just too much saturation and bots + we are in a layoff cycle and AI uncertainty.

Many big tech companies went through a round or two of layoffs in the last year. I interviewed I think two or three junior devs a few months back who had been hired at Facebook or Twitter or some other company and let go within a few months of being hired.

Note that "fired" and "laid off" are very different things, with different causes, worker protections, and expectations around i.e. severance. I don't know that it is uncommon to get laid off at some point, but it also isn't something that you really go into a job expecting will happen either. Personally, the only people I know of who were laid off were in non-tech fields.

Of course this works only if you have a well-oiled HR machine and docile managers, which is typical for every Big Corp out there.

Any posting we had immediately got a lot of responses. We heavily tailored our postings to appeal only to people we actually wanted (e.g. were super clear about requirements, or talked extensively about company culture), and we still got dozens of applicants almost right away. And IIRC that was just through Linkedin, I hadn't even seen how many applied through other channels.

Granted, most of them were mass-sent resumes, but that still crowded any good-fit applicants and made it a pain to look through.

For positions at bigger companies, you could easily be competing with hundreds or thousands of mass-sent applications. Even if a human being ever looks at your resume, she'll most likely make a decision on whether to throw it away in a few seconds before moving to the next one.

At this point I think applying to postings is pretty much dead. Instead, I'd focus on contacting your past colleagues asking if they know of any openings at their companies.

Instead, I'd suggest: - Contact your past colleagues if you hadn't done so yet. - If there are relevant conferences or meetups in your area, consider attending. - Also, look into meetups for groups that might look for someone like you. E.g. if you go to a front-end meetups, you're just another guy in the crowd, but at a marketing or local chamber of commerce meetup there might be only a few people with the same skillset. Granted, this one often works better for freelancing, but still. - A friend of mine found his previous job by contacting people in the field and asking for advice. He moved to a different city right after university, so had no local contacts – I told him to look up people in the companies he wanted to work for, and just message them asking for a short advice call. I think the third person he spoke to recommended him to someone that was hiring. Though the key here was that my friend was only asking for advice on how to get into the industry – but once he spoke with people, it was easy to make a good impression and they kept him in mind next time they heard of an opening.

As to how to get hired, although I have succeeded with direct application, recruiters are a very popular way here to get a job, especially in web development.

Finding a recruiter you trust to be working close to your interests is important, but not critical. The best recruitment firms I have found through talking to colleagues and managers. Managers often have a strong opinion on which firms refer the best candidates.

I expect another angle is the type of company you're expecting to get a job at and the compensation level. I've never applied to a FAANG, but I expect all of this advice goes out the window. Perhaps though if it is applying to too-senior jobs that is your problem then talking to a trusted recruiter could be helpful.

I don't know anything about resume scoring services, but perhaps they are flawed in some way? Your CV could be great for applying to certain types of jobs, but not for the ones you are applying for. I can suggest forwarding it on to someone who you look up to, who is able to give candid, honest thoughts on it. For example the company you were working at may not be a prestigious company or the technology you were using may not contain the keywords that hiring managers often are looking for.

You haven't given much information so there are many possibilities as to what is going wrong, including ones outside of what I have mentioned. Good luck.

I am not suggesting that you start a PhD in some obscure domain, but any additional skill can help stand appart from all other generalist front end developers. For instance in my last company we did quite a lot with geographical data, and if a front end dev showed even just the slightest knowledge of geodata (like knowing what a map projection is, or a knowledge of the technologies used to display maps efficiently on the web), he would quickly go on top of the pile. So if the is any domain where you know just a bit more than the average guy, even just as a hobby, I would say that it makes sense to display it on your CV and search for postings that might be related.

Could you please specify how good? What exactly are your strengths in those fields? Do you have PhD?

* Client emails me asking if I can help with his site. I respond. He asks for more details. I respond. He provides a website with an MLM video on how to "be your own boss and sell a product that sells itself". I was talking to a bot.

* Try upwork. Spend all day to send 15 proposals, get 3 views, no replies. Upwork wants me to pay money monthly for more "connect" points. Looks like you need to do work for nearly free to get ratings, and you're heavily competing with offshore. close tab ... Try fiverr. Get no messages.

* Startup with revenue contacts me, shows me their business, discusses their problems, seems very interested in hiring. Offers $20 - $30 an hour for Cloud security work; software engineering, seems price sensitive to the extreme, doesn't seem to want want to pay for any time spent reviewing docs/analysis, only wants to pay for the execution time. Say no. Guy keeps calling. Guy agrees to higher rate for a tiny amount of hours to be done next-day. Guy doesn't give access, asks to review more stuff. Wasted many hours for no money.

Lesson learned, try to find a fast growing company and stay away from people that sound like they would negotiate on the price of corn kernels in the back alley of aldi

I have a couple companies I do consulting work that are great for but they came to me through my network, I have tried to get more work but either I get stuck in an endless sales cycle (think over 1yr of sales meetings and no money exchanges hands) or their budget is extremely low.

Once you work for free for a few weeks you might start to get some traction but you'll quickly run out of "connects", that allow you to bid for proposals. Basically you have to pay upwork to apply to gigs, and then upwork takes a cut if you get the gig, and most the gigs posted want to pay offshore rates, eg 10 - $30/hr for AI work, or skilled software engineering.

Definitely try linkedin, as they said, and talking to your contacts (outside of LinkedIn, I mean).

Basically don't spam the same thing but treat it as scientific experiment and try different things. Also prepare yourself for the different interviews.

When you get those, remember not to work for free "for interview projects" and stuff like that.

Create a custom datepicker following a strict design (that is the best part of a week minimum to make it polished perfect)

The other one wanted me to learn a complex product on my own, with no knowledge base and demo their own platform to them. All this while they knew I was working a full-time demanding engineering manager job.

Just the past two months I've gotten four offers (granted two was from the same company), but they are straight up job offers, not asking me to do interviews and I'm an average SRE/operations person.

So I think it depends on the area and whether or not you're want to work for small to midsize companies outside the bigger metro areas. Some of the jobs also isn't that exciting, but it beat doing nothing.

- ghosted by companies if you don't EXACTLY match and 'gel' with their stupid full stack takehome projects to the T

- multiple cases of simply no response

- hours of interview rounds taking my time away, when it's clear they won't take you

The list goes on, there is truly nothing I hate more.

Hoping to get an offer in my final interview for a role in 10 minutes!

I believe this is the key part. I see many people coming from coding bootcamps with a lot of experience with frontend dev in React, since that is (was?) probably one of the few fastest things you can learn to go to the market get a job fast.

Now the market is flooded with people in this situation, since their qualifications are so generic that they become more easily replaceable.

However, its now much tougher in the tech-adjacent fields such as graphic design, copywriting, and project management. Not so many openings, many applicants. Even if you get the job, pay and prospects are not great.

Also do you send a cover letter?

While you browse various job boards if there is no direct contact to a person or the email / phone is obfuscate, just find contact details online.

I often pay for various services that can give you contact details based on linkedin profile - give them a call and most often then not you will have interview shortly after.

Do the work to reach out to those people, establish rapport and you will be in a good place. If you are great professional they will make sure to keep you on their roster as an ACE candidate.

Guess we aren't getting the message! So job seekers, oh it was so easy!

Yeah, this my young kin is the dot com 3.0 bust!/ YUP! you be living in it!

Except, you never lived in the dot com bust so you dont how bad it was. I would say that its worse now, except that the "industry" hired so many people who cant code in the last 20 years that, its probably about equal, except that those laid off people now, weren't the savvy people back then.

The millennials that are being laid off now are completely clueless, should have never been hired and never did much anyway. Back in the dot com bust people who were skating into "big" tech were mostly real estate agents or con artists of some flavor or another.

But unlike the current millennial flakes, they knew how to take a punch and were already established. This will take down alot of millennials thankfully since they were mostly window dressing and maybe they can get a foothold in something meaningful in their lives.

However, change is coming, as the gen Xes will start aging out soon. Within about a decade, expect the media to be decrying the villainous gen Xes and Zeds, as the top editorial jobs go millennial.

I think it's caused by a number of factors:

(1) Investors are spooked about the health of the economy and are giving out less funding. Less funding = slower startup growth = less hiring for new roles.

(2) Since funding is slowing down startups can't count on future raises as much and are being told to preserving capital. Runway becomes more of a priority = also less hiring.

(3) ''"Covid revenue spikes lead to surges in hiring and lay offs when revenues reversed.'" I've been told it was only non-technical roles but I don't buy it.

I think what happened was companies needed to trim fat to satisfy scared investors and Covid was used as the perfect excuse to make layoffs seem like they were outside of companies control. But everything was about the mentality of scared investors. Investors were literally angry that more people weren't fired... So yeah, this is quite a toxic time to be in tech. But I do think it will stabilize eventually.

Companies are having record profits because they're reducing hiring and having layoffs.

Profits are measured in nominal terms, we've had the highest inflation in 40 years, and employees wages lag. Bigger revenue numbers, smaller costs means more profits.

If you apply to 1000 positions, but 700 are from those "zombie" job postings, then you've really only applied to 300 positions.

His approach was extremely different from how I would approach job applications though. The job he ended up getting was as a Ruby on Rails developer, as the 3rd person in a 3-person startup. And I don't think he knew Ruby when he applied, just html/css/js. And the job had him relocate to Ohio.

I think he's an extreme case, but I see "I applied to X-hundred jobs" posts so often that I do think it explains the massive applicant pools for most job listings.

I've never gotten a response from a job application where I put in very little effort though, so I can't vouch to whether it's a good strategy or not.

Then if there are still too many to interview after that first filter there's the easy ways to cut down numbers further like "This person has no visa and has not started any visa process to work in our jurisdiction" or "this person's entire career is in a single tech stack that is not our tech stack while there's other candidates with our tech stack or a track record of adopting new ones". Could these people work out? Possibly. But it's an overhead that when there's extra candidates, they need something to stick out to make it onto the shortlist. If there's others that have all the same pros and an already valid visa/citizenship or the right tech stack, they'll get on the shortlist first.

After those two processes, the number of applicants per role are not that crazy.

this also means you don't need to do leetcode interviews. anyone from a decent university with an actual degree will be able to code, or quickly learn how to. you said it yourself - too many candidates, so no time to do leetcode BS.

Shrug...

Ie toilet paper company: "Here at XYZ corp we believe we will change the world forever through market-leading technology that inspires generations. We hire innovators, explorers and change-makers. We're non conformists on a mission. blah blah blah"

The real job role: "be some sysadmin for an ancient legacy platform".

It might be worth asking friends or former colleagues, ideally people who actually are involved in recruiting (hiring managers etc) to take a look at your resume and LinkedIn profile and see if there's anything glaringly wrong with them.

Is your resume in a weird format, or is it structurally weird/overdesigned? For instance, a recent trend in resumes was to show (programming) languages known in a pie chart (do not do this; it is nonsensical). In many companies, the text from your resume is going to end up in a standard format anyway; they'll have tools for this and if their tool can't extract your text they may not bother.

Are you applying jobs for which you are dramatically underqualified? One thing to keep in mind is that some small companies (if you're coming from one) have _wild_ title inflation; a small startup might call someone with 5 and a half years experience their director of frontend engineering, say, whereas everyone else would call that person a junior engineer.

Does anything particularly unfortunate come up if people Google your name? For instance, a real-life version of that Seinfeld episode where Elaine's dating a guy who has the same name as a notorious local serial killer.

It could last longer if your company does not have a normal title (i.e., they consider junior == !senior), but someone with 10 years of relevant experience should have earned a seniority title of some sort.

Seniority is about experience and not skill in my opinion, we see many talented developers who don't qualify as senior because they simply haven't experienced enough situations. I expect a senior to have some war stories and a breadth of notable situations that they can walk me through, to demonstrate their ability to predict common issues and pitfalls, and to show how their experience helps their troubleshooting and informs their choices.

If I had told 20 year old me this, 20 year old me would have balked. 20 year old me was an excellent programmer, but he didn't know shit about long term software development.

For me, this most often comes up when acting as a reference for someone. The hiring person will ask me stuff, and often a 'senior' label question will come up. Almost invariably the person I'm acting as a reference for is beyond 'junior' connotations, and I think have to ask what the hiring person mean by 'senior'. Getting their definition helps me answer most effectively.

"Yeah, AB is pretty close to what you class as 'senior'. He's going to work well in a larger group with defined roles and a set schedule, which it sounds like you have."

"Well.. SJ is not 'junior' any more, but does need to have someone more senior to help mentor/check in on more advanced topics. If you don't have that - if this is a 'lone wolf' role, they may struggle some".

These are just my opinions though, it differs from company to company. One place the difference between a Developer and a Senior Developer was a senior could be expected to own a feature and all the moving parts to get it deployed, eg: taking it to the board, organising all the approvals and business requirements with other teams etc. Other places senior just means "not junior" and the roles are the same, you just expect more talent from the senior.

Yep. I've been doing this for... almost 30 years now, and... interacting with 'seniors' with 2 years of experience is really weird. My recollections from the 90s having worked inside a few places was that 'senior' had a lot more weight/heft to it. It indicated, at the very least, long experience (8-10 years or more) and some ability to at least work with other tech people (non-tech was a bonus).

Can't quite figure out when this shift started, but have definitely noticed title inflation as a regular thing over the last 10-15 years.

Have you ever taken down a database by mistake? Dealt with bad backups, "on production only" issues, rounding errors in historical data, security breaches, multibyte character set conversion issues?

"Coding" is eventually only a small part. Better coding skills up front can help prevent or mitigate some of the potential issues listed above, but only to a point. You're not always even the author of all the code in use; learning how to deal with that, maybe under pressure of "prod is slow/down", has an impact on how you consider these issues going forward.

I was at a meetup years ago, and one of the "senior dev/architect" folks at the company hosting the meetup was talking informally about IDEs. I jumped in a bit as I'd recently started with IntelliJ (this was... 2010, I think) and was excited to share a few bits that were new to me.

As I listened more, the guy was lecturing the meetup folks that "IDEs were really for juniors and newbs". Specific language is somewhat lost to the mists of time, but the gist was "This is your code, you've written it, you should know it inside and out; fumbling with slow IDE just burns productivity, wastes time, and just shows you don't really know the codebase."

I eventually interjected that it might be reasonable for him, personally, to know all the code in a system that he'd built up from scratch over the last 7-8 years. However, for anyone new coming in to the codebase, an IDE is invaluable because it makes the entire thing far more discoverable. Jumping around between sections helps you learn and narrow down bugs/issues much faster. "Well, you should just be asking your senior if you have questions" was the main response, and IDEs were still beneath him.

I realized a bit later he was actually giving a small pitch; as host of the meetup, they had an intro period, and they were recruiting. I'd heard about this company before - growing, funded and in a space I had some experience in. Had 0 desire to work there after talking to him. But "the senior architect" always knows best in many places. :/

I'll bet it can be tracked down by looking at job-hopping. That's how it happened to me in the early 2010s: I was never told I was promoted to senior developer, one day I was just invited to a meeting for all our senior developers to get opinions on something. I hadn't noticed before, but during the meeting I realized I technically was in the older half of all the devs in the office (in terms of time at the company, not age), just due to all the hiring that had been done in the previous year or two.

Of course this is about the level the employee is capable of operating at in absolute terms but hiring is relative. In an employee's market someone might be able to land a "senior" role before they're really ready for it. In an employer's market the average candidate who gets hired as a "senior" might have 10+ YOE. We've gone from one to the other recently and everyone's expectations will need to adjust accordingly.

I think I would drive myself mad if I tried to live up to the crazy expectations of senior from most internet commenters.

And maybe that's the point of it. Senior without the title inflations is meant to be an actual high level position - not 50-100% of the company.

A lot of places have just replaced senior with staff/principal engineers instead, but senior used to be a well respected and unique title back in the days.

But suppose a senior is someone who can work mostly autonomously under general direction from their management and tech leadership, which I'd say is a reasonable basic definition of what "senior" level has historically meant in software development. We would expect to see a lot more people reaching that level and sticking around on a tech career path now because of the rapid growth in the industry and the greater awareness that people can be a high-level IC but not have much interest in formal leadership or management roles.

Moreover there is no rule that says an employer should hire mostly juniors, some mids and only a few seniors. Good seniors are almost always disproportionately cost-effective if you can manage to hire them. The trend for rapid job-hopping has left juniors as an almost worthless hire in many cases because they probably won't be around long enough to make a good contribution in return for all the early overheads they incur.

There is definitely a longer formal tech track in large organisations now. I'd say it used to be more that you reached senior and then any other responsibilities like leading a team or dealing with large-scale software architecture issues were kind of attached. So historically you'd associate those higher responsibilities with "senior" people where today those with the skills and experience to do them probably have higher job titles like lead/staff/principal instead.

So I'm not sure senior has been deflated or replaced by staff etc. It's just that senior used to be the top of three levels for many employers but now there's more recognition that your development doesn't just stop after a few years and "senior" today mostly means "first few years as a senior" in old terminology.

That's where I disagree. A senior should do a lot more than that. Seniors would mentor and train juniors. Software or not - that's how it's traditionally been.

What you describe is more like an engineer (no senior). Juniors are the 1s that can't work autonomously. When you are recognized as fully fitting the role you're just that. A senior then excels the role.

> We would expect to see a lot more people reaching that level and sticking around on a tech career path now

What does this have to do with what roles are available in an organization?

I start a company. I have 1 CTO, 1 tech lead, 2 seniors and the rest are engineers. What level someone is at should not impact what I call the titles available, but to suit the current market, instead we have 1 CTO, 1 principal engineer, 2 staff engineer, 1 tech lead, some seniors and a few engineers. Same same. No 1 actually grew additional roles.

It's all a trick to make people think they've levelled up.

I agree that was typically also something that came in at senior level.

Maybe it's a regional thing? I'm in the UK. I'd say it was fairly standard here for a junior to be someone in the first couple of years on the job who was still learning the ropes and probably couldn't do much beyond very basic grunt work without the assistance of someone more senior. Losing the "junior" label came when you got beyond the near-full-time hand-holding and started doing routine stuff independently. The "senior" label came when you could do the less routine or more difficult stuff mostly independently as well.

What does this have to do with what roles are available in an organization?

It means an organisation that wants to hire a senior-heavy team can now do so. That wasn't realistic for most organisations a decade ago because there weren't enough seniors to go around.

There are 2 distinctions and that's what might be confusing. 1 is your experience/level and what you're referring to. The other is the roles an organization offers.

I might have 50 years of experience but if the other roles are taken by more qualified people in THAT organization I can take a normal engineer route. Doesn't have to be senior. It doesn't make myself not qualified to even be a CTO elsewhere.

The roles are fixed. It has to do with budget, balanced, etc. Having all seniors might mean fights and everyone wanting to contribute and pull the project in different directions. A good balance is needed. A senior heavy team might not be good just because you can.

Where we perhaps disagree is your final paragraph. The roles might be fixed but there is no rule that says they have to be. Usually things like budgets and the work that needs to be done that are fixed for the team as a whole. An employer might have multiple hiring options available that fit those constraints - for example hiring a smaller team of more senior developers or a larger team with a wider range. My argument above is that if you can hire a smaller team of good senior people then this is often cost-effective.

I don't really recognise the picture you're painting of a senior-heavy team being prone to conflict. A big part of that ability to operate autonomously that I suggested characterises senior developers is learning how to communicate and collaborate effectively without needing constant intervention from above or heavy formal development processes.

What you described seems like what happens if you want a senior-heavy team, hire people who aren't at that level yet, then still manage them as if they were seniors. The team doesn't reach consensus and get behind its choices collectively. However it also doesn't have the stronger leadership and safety rails that less experienced developers might need to be effective. I agree that situation is bad but it's not what I was advocating before.

> I understand (and agree with) the distinction you're making.

Isn't this contradictory?

That's the trap we're stuck in. I remember Amazon HR saying their Senior titles are the equivalent of Staff Engineer titles elsewhere.

You can hire a highly experienced small team and pay each of them more. They don't all have to be "senior" in title and responsibility. They're just engineers. Fixed budget divide by the number of people (roughly) has nothing to do with titles. It only does according to some system where compensation is tied to titles.

You've said you understand the distinction but then some sentences later have just walked it all back.

> What you described seems like what happens if you want a senior-heavy team, hire people who aren't at that level yet, then still manage them as if they were seniors.

I repeat, you're after an experienced/skilled team - not senior-heavy. E.g. you may need someone highly experienced in React and Rust with 50 years experience. It doesn't make them senior. Working autonomously doesn't make you senior.

After more than a 2 decades in software development (rails/web/...), for me to consider a developer to be a senior it needs to:

* Communicate: For example: can explain tech concepts to non tech people, or inform on Monday that the sprint will be unlikely to be done in time.

* Can estimate and adapt to changes. Be boring and predictable.

* Can work/collaborate/teach with other devs.

I got tired of interviewing tech people that though that to be senior is the same as to be specialist (or worse even, that it was related with the number of years).

I've promoted juniors in months. I've also had people start, stay a few years and leave as a junior. It's all about learning and what work you take on. Also, I see this often when interviewing. 5+ years of experience looking for a junior role. Usually, it's either someone who did not learn and was not promoted, or it is someone from an company that did not let people work on important things because they were junior. So they stayed that way.

A programmer can program code good enough, but that doesn't mean they are good at solving the goals business requires and communicating it.

A developer can program and develop a small enhancement with good communication. Sometimes can also break things down so other developers or programmers can work on it to.

An engineer an orchestrate an entire new project and can identify multiple areas where developers and programmers can be involved. A good engineer will do so while maintaining great communication with the users to ensure they get what they want.

An architect is someone who comes up with a plan to build something without any real care about budget, labor costs, or labor skills - both in software and in buildings.

This is definitely not true. I always have to balance on time/on budget/meets requirements and the skillset of the people who are using my designs.

Disagree for both cases. The building architects I know surely have to work with a given budget and in software architecture likewise.

I wonder if any newcomer to an organization, regardless of how senior they are, won't be in this same position. In order to solve business goals, they need to understand them properly. In order to understand them properly, they need context. The context comes from working in the organization for some time (months to years, depending on the size and the transparency of the organization).

Whenever I hear developers say stuff like this, they just sound junior/inexperienced.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=m00dy

    about: someone important...

I had colleagues with 20+ years of industry experience who couldn't communicate efficiently, extending every short call to 1h+ meetings, require long and recurring discussions for the smallest details, or define tickets that always had to be reworked. The same people were often off by magnitudes with their estimates and reluctant to suggestions to improvements in their tooling (i.e. linter plugins for their IDE when necessary).

On the other hand, I had teammates with ~5 years of industry experience who outpaced the whole team, delivered optimal quality, were empathic, held workshops for other devs, and still had enough time/power to work on things like refactors.

Being a senior dev is IMHO much simpler. It's all about being able to solve problems independently, without needing supervision, guidance or tutoring. If you can pass to a dev some business requirement, and know that they'll return with an optimal solution implementation, you've got yourself a true senior dev.

I was horrible at communicating succinctly in both written and oral form and bad at PowerPoints and diagrams until 2016 - at the age of 42. I definitely wasn’t comfortable talking to “the business” and customers.

I got my first dev lead job and watch how my manager - the director of IT - at a mid size non tech company was able to translate my technical designs and challenges to the higher ups. I learned a little from him through osmosis.

I changed jobs in 2018 and I started proactively working with my CTO (my manager), sales and the documentation writers to become a better communicator.

By the time a chance to interview with BigTech in the cloud consulting department (yes full time job) fell into my lap in 2020, I had no problem passing a 5 round mostly behavioral interview where I had to describe technical accomplishments, business impact, scope, etc in STAR format - over video conferencing without the use of a white board.

I was still a little rough around the edges. But three years later, I consistently get great feedback from customers about my presentations and my ability to explain concepts and challenges to technical and non technical audiences at the same time. I’m not bragging just saying that it can be learned like anything else.

On another note, being able to work independently when spoonfed business requirements is considered mid level behavior according to the guidelines at every single major tech company that I’m aware of.

But part of it was also me just watching people who were good at small talk and reading articles about how to be a good conversationalist since I am on client sites and go to lunch/dinner with them.

For instance, since I work remotely, I’m constantly taking notes when I’m on client calls and even with internal people when they mention something about their personal lives - families, vacations, hobbies - so I can ask then about it later.

Heck, I even have scheduled messages on Slack to ask them how was their vacation to $x when they are scheduled to return.

How does that work? Explanation is fairly important there, I'd have thought.

> Being a senior dev is IMHO much simpler. It's all about being able to solve problems independently, without needing supervision, guidance or tutoring.

See, I think this may be the disconnect/product of title inflation.

In a system where you have junior engineer/engineer/senior engineer, what you're describing is probably engineer, not senior engineer. In a junior/senior system, it's, ah, a senior junior? :) A senior engineer should be a kind of force multiplier (though such is the level of title inflation that that maybe is now more staff in some places).

I wrote a blog post about it: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/2812 which got some great HN discussion a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20485006

tl;dr: being a senior engineer at a startup is different than at a consulting company is different than at a large retail firm is different than at a FAANG.

* able to take responsibility

* able to transfer skills and to guide juniors to productivity

This is the big difference - seniors will track and resolve a roadblock or issue that they could justifiably ignore, in particular where other people in the organization are being difficult or obstructive, giving incorrect guidance, etc.

A junior will just go "We were told it cant be done/will take 5 weeks" whereas a senior will know that's bullshit and escalate it to the right people.

I'm my environment, senior developer needs a deep understanding of technology but more importantly a deep understanding of business and business processes. I'm in the ERP space so a senior Dev can talk business language - they Co develop and guide functional specifications with business analysts. In other words they understand hr or pay or financial processes of the company.

I wish I could assume all those other qualities as well, but while some here think good communication is easy to acquire early, my experience is the opposite - there are many 20 year veterans that cannot / should not be put in front of a client. They are wizards at technology but not at communication - presenting things to non experts, understanding other points of view, etc. You have to WANT to learn things other than technical proficiency, and even here, that's frequently derided / seen as uncool. "Manager" is of course a swear word insult so anybody who wants to learn communication or empathy or estimates or hard conversation is "no true techie" :-/

I call it do you have 10 years of experience? or do you have 1 year of experience 10 times?

No one says everyone with 5 years of experience is a senior, but most likely is mid.

I sometimes get even funnier CVs, where a person with 2-3 years of experience (usually from the Army) is already in a tech lead / architect position.

That's true of every field, and doesn't really relate to the claim of bimodality. If ability followed a perfect normal distribution, it would still be true that some people with 2-3 years of experience are better than some other people with 10-15 years of experience.

The difference is the kind of environment you're working in (E.g. high growth tech company vs non-tech company) and the learning rate in that environment, which is where the modality comes into play.

For example?

In pretty much any field I can think of, it is definitely not rare. The norm is that some people pick things up quickly and other people don't.

It is normal for good musicians with 3 years of experience to be better than bad musicians with 10 years of experience.

It is even more normal for good secretaries with 3 years of experience to be better than bad secretaries with 10.

My mother once partnered with a local university to offer students internships clerking in her medical office. She remarked that the students, with their zero years of experience, were more effective in this generic, unskilled role than anyone she was able to hire into it. (Those people had many years of experience.)

The partnership with the university wound down and she went back to hiring no-hopers with plenty of experience. According to her, that was the best she could hope to do for the dead-end position she was offering.

- dev lead - non tech company responsible for one “team” of two developers and a bunch of contractors on another team

- “Senior Software Engineer” - no reports and I actively refused a promotion to be a team lead. I was already the de facto “cloud architect” over the “application modernization” efforts via no more than influence and reputation.

- mid level “cloud consultant” - full time job working remotely at BigTech.

That being said, if she got hired as a junior in the last 5 years (despite tangentially having some programming experience) and never got promoted, I guess I can understand that, but really, why even keep someone on who refuses to learn new things, is difficult to work with, and consistently writes poor code

At this point in time, it's completely normal for people breaking into the industry.

I'm wondering if it's important to put a specific title on one's resume. I assume many companies don't have any titles at all and everybody is just a "software engineers", whether they are a fresh graduate or 10 years of experience tech lead. What is more relevant is the scope of the job done which should be listed in a job description.

If you're applying to a Frontend Engineer Position, and you're a Software Engineer who's comfortable with both parts and the full stack, you just shut up, put frontend engineer in the CV, and let them choose you, you can always tell them you also know to do backend stuff on the interview....

First passes are pretty simple, they just match their job position with the stuff recieved.

ATS filter you based on keywords before a human does

I’ve met people with 3 years experience who I’d consider more senior than myself (8 years). Some folks just learn really fast and/or don’t do much else other than work.

Not sure time is relevant to your skills or title after about 2-3 years.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't consider junior/senior to be defined by how "good" you are at programming. Obviously the hope is that senior > junior, but there are other, softer, skills involved with being a senior.

What's your definition of senior?

I have already made the mistake you are about to make.

If you only know one system and think you're going to be able use it forever, then you're still a junior developer. If you're afraid to move on and learn something new, then you shouldn't be a developer at all.

Tbh there should be real ways to measure all this but there aren't.

If you can code by your own without handholding, are you a junior at that point anyways?

I may be a competent framer that can stud out the plans for a house, but I may not totally understand why the walls are positioned that way or how the roofline will work with the landscape to avoid water issues later. They're just different skill sets, I'd actually also expect the architect who can design the house wouldn't be particularly useful with a framing nailer.

Ive never actually liked drawing solid lines between skill levels because it is so contextual, but here's the closest I can get.

Any developer should be able to write code when it's already known what it needs to do. The next level for me is being able to write code with an eye towards testability, maintenance, and flexibility based on where you expect requirements to change later. I'd expect a senior to be able to go beyond that, starting from a set of product requirements and designing the code to work for those needs. Beyond that it starts to get really gray, and you likely lose more of the earlier coding skills, but that's where I'd be looking for someone who can help define what the product requirements even are, considering technical risks and limitations of how they might even build and host the product.

Anyone can fix a button's css.

Not anyone can refactor big parts of a codebase into something better, or help them create from scratch in a cohesive, modular, future-proof way.

Every time I get into a new job I get a various degrees of this.

The more business-context you have, the better you can solve business requirements with tech, the better tech toolset you have available, the better choice you can make on what solution to use or not to use to such problems.

True seniority means understanding how all the system works, regardless of getting into the grunt work of each of the steps, but being able to do so and understand it at the lower level too if/when needed.

It's a hard act.

I have worked with some of those individuals and they really are worth every bit as much as, if not more than, a systems-level thinker that enjoys mapping business needs to technical solutions.

Most large tech companies I've seen promote standout ICs to either architect or manager, assuming that the skillset and interest largely transfers. I've seen this blow up many times, it's painful to watch and I really hate it for everyone involved.

If I were hiring for my tech business, I agree that it doesn't mean a whole lot. One can experience a multitude of different environments before lunchtime. One can also do the exact same thing over and over. There is no seasonality to hold you back or push you forward.

Ultimately, what one is interested to know in questioning years of experience is how many scenarios someone has run through so that when something similar happens again you can believe, with reasonable confidence, that they will know how to react. This is quite measurable, but it can be hard for someone in tech to keep track of as there isn't a good frame of reference like in farming where you can simply remember each year.

Honestly, I don't even know what agricw is, so that is no doubt true. I've been working on farms for 30-some-odd years, though, and my farming operation has been going for 17 years now, so I speak from that background. We plant once a year, we harvest once a year, etc. so the lessons to learn only come around once a year. Thus years of experience starts to become a decent proxy for what you are really trying to measure. Indeed, that doesn't work in every industry.

Having worked in multiple fields throughout my life, I deeply miss the presence of truly experienced coworkers.

For example one of the lessons of experience is that skill in the immediate task at hand is only a part of the overall engineering skillset. Experienced professionals (in any field) can often solve problems better with a tool they are unfamiliar with than less experienced professionals can in their area of expertise.

One trait of experienced devs I've seen, that I've not seen in even the sharpest but less experienced ones, is the ability to see problems that will arise down the road from miles away.

Likewise I also rarely see less experienced devs, no matter how smart and talented, see solutions outside of the main path massively reduce the complexity of the original problem. I fondly recall working in research orgs when I was much more junior, and asking a 30+ year industry vet how to solve a tricky problem only for them to, time and time again, that the best solution was to avoid the problem.

This is called second (or third) order thinking btw.

This is a world-wide, ancient, phrase: If it ain't broke don't fix it.

Which derives from the universes oldest rule: Nothing is more permanent than a temporary fix.

Senior devs have internalized these two constants of the universe. I suggest you do as well, before the third rule of the universe takes hold of your life.

Third immutable rule of the universe: He who noticed it, broke it.

If you have a hard time contributing to starting on projects or resolving problems, AND you have a hard time contributing to finishing projects or resolving problems, you’re a junior X (where x is programmer, engineer, sysadmin, etc).

If you can contribute to starting on a project/problem but have a hard time finishing it, OR you have a hard time starting on a project/problem but can contribute to finishing it, you’re an X.

If you can contribute to starting on a project/problem, AND you can contribute to finishing a project/problem, you’re a Senior X.

Not sure the current term of art to being able to start and finish projects / solve problems and your work regularly being good and reliable, maybe Architect or something like that.

A lot of the other comments are defining seniority in terms of years of experience or breadth of skills developed. Those are both important, but for me they don't capture how "well-rounded" you are. When I was a manager in consulting we used to distinguish between resources who had "5 years of experience" and resources who had "1 year of experience 5 times". Your years of experience need to be extending your capabilities, not just repetition of skills you have already mastered.

I think simple rules of thumb, like "5 years is a junior" or "5 years is a senior" aren't very helpful. When I'm hiring I may suggest a certain amount of experience as a requirement to indicate to candidates that I see the role as suitable for someone "entry-level" or someone further along in their career. But I'm not going to reject a candidate with good experience simply because they don't have the number of years experience I suggested. I'm going to look at what they've done.

One more thought on this topic. For me, years of experience can also be shorthand for variety of experience. Someone with 3 or even 5 years of experience is unlikely to have worked on a lot of big projects in different organizations. Someone with 15+ years of experience is more likely to have worked on a variety of big projects in different organizations. Some commenters here are probably going to tell me "5 years of experience at a start-up" is as good or better than 15 years of experience in a big corporate IT shop. Maybe. Depends on the role I'm trying to fill.

I cannot disagree with this more. In my own experience, I've never met anyone with less than 5 years of experience that I'd call "good". And I've worked at several places in SV, FAANG included.

This isn't only about title inflation. It is in some ways true in the real sense also. Because in a small team you get exposed to everything and if things don't work, it's very obvious why and there are no excuses to hide behind. Whereas in an enterprise you could sleep behind the wheel, roam around in pointless meetings, wait for the other department blocking you, ride on your teammates merits, close 1 story per month and nobody would question.

This isn't to say there aren't great minds in big organizations, I've been in both contexts and learned tons and met absolutely fantastic colleagues and experiences in both.

But yeah there’s definitely no cruising at the wheel when you’re in a small, fast-moving organization. In my experience it’s helped me level up very quickly.

It's about having the brain to reason around problems efficiently.

I worked with someone who become senior & team lead after 2 years (and a really good one at that), after having done business PowerPoints for their entire working life.

I link IQs test (in informal channels) and all the juniors who picked up development really quickly and become very effective, all have high IQ.

If it were allowed, I would definitely use IQ tests in an interview setting.

I think leetcoding started as a proxy for IQ tests (which could totally be, if people couldn't prepare on the subject) but nowadays it's just testing people's ability to memorise different cases and being comfortable enough with coding to be able to implement (and mix and match) them.

It's dumb, but it is the standard nowadays.

I wouldn't pigeonhole someone into a level based on their years of experience or previous job titles, either. Interviews can reveal some surprising things. I've worked with people with less than five years of experience who were senior-quality developers at all aspects of the job, and I've worked with people with ten years of experience who just wanted to sit in their cube and write code without making any decisions or talking to anyone except their boss. And these people aren't going to straightforwardly tell you what their position should be. The one who wants to sit in his cube with no responsibilities might tell you he's senior (and his resume might back that up) and the one who is ready for a senior position might tell you they're mid-level, because at their last job they worked with extraordinary people.

I've moved a bit between different sizes and government vs startup vs mid-sized etc, and the titles vary wildly.

Some government jobs had people with 4 years experience be "senior" or even "tech leads" because they weren't paying enough so they simply promoted any bright spark that was going to last to senior roles so they could at least get a few more years out of them before they left, as HR wouldn't pay more money without them getting the a specific title.

Other place I've worked, your title was essentially a lottery system, others you were hard pressed to be a Senior without anything less than 10 years experience.

But each of those places, I encountered people with very specific ideas of exactly what a senior was, and they were convinced their own standards were the "accepted" ones.

There are definitely general guidelines for senior, associate etc, but they aren't normalised, just like you are saying.

So point is, in support of your post, you can't dismiss someone just based on the title they give themselves, as it might have been perfectly normal thing to call themselves in previous positions.

Back when I was even bothering in Jan/Feb it was me and 20 other L8s interviewing for the same L6 opening. It’s a coin toss at that point.

Price discovery is not functioning at the moment, there are plenty of theories why.

But high-end tech hiring is a slot machine and will be until monetary policy lets the bond market stabilize a bit.

I take it being an L5 is a good thing? but just six months ago you were an L8, and competition to become an L6 was a coin toss? No idea what 'price discovery' could mean in this situation, other than a fairly weird way to say 'salary range'? And any of this having to do with 'the bond market' is just baffling!

The reason I bring it up is that I'm genuinely curious what life is like in other corners of the tech world. Any way you could translate the above into non-Meta terms?

I have never worked for FB and I thought it was fine. None of that is FB-specific.

> I take it being an L5 is a good thing?

It's implied lower numbers are better.

>> it was me and 20 other L8s interviewing for the same L6 opening

> but just six months ago you were an L8, and competition to become an L6 was a coin toss?

Yes, due to the number of people competing for the same position.

> No idea what 'price discovery' could mean in this situation, other than a fairly weird way to say 'salary range'?

Salary range implies stability. eg What a company is willing to pay for what positions. There has been a lack of standardization in talent across tech and instability in compensation. Another way to think of it is an increased risk tolerance in wages. This has been fueled by leniency in promotion/raises/hiring when profits were higher.

> And any of this having to do with 'the bond market' is just baffling!

Monetary policy (around interest rates) is directly related to profit margins and hiring. Suffice to say, this is common knowledge for anyone who owns property (beyond a car, maybe) or tracks the job market.

I was 35 years old before I had the faintest idea how money works, like even a little.

And the only way I learned even a little is because I lived in NYC for a bit and ended up hanging with a bunch of Street cats after work, who laugh their asses off about how clueless we all are (in that moment personified by yours truly).

But you get a few G&Ts into them and they’re pretty happy to teach you Econ 101.

That’s at least tangentially germane. :)

I thought it was too minor to even note.

Did we cross paths at all?

I was on Ads for ages, Sigma for like a year, and IG ranking Ml for like 2-ish.

What did you work on? You should pop in the Ex-this/that groups from time to time if you havent, very cool crowd.

The bond market/interest rate comment is saying this is part of why the economy is bad.

Price discovery I am not that confident in the meaning. I think it means companies and candidates are having a hard time figuring out what each other are worth. So you have highly skilled people not getting the offer numbers they want because their skills are not being recognized.

I think you and I are thinking similarly about price discovery. Markets get disrupted, it’s not unprecedented or anything, but in general there’s some price between zero and infinity that a person can make, and seeing that go from X to “no transaction” abruptly is less ideal than it going from X to X - Y because supply and/or demand changed.

Well behaved pricing curves are existential in a bunch of really key markets, to the point that institutions preserve those properties.

Whether one is a tech worker or a struc steel pro or a teacher, anything, it seems a weird exception to “we need differentiable pricing curves here”.

From roughly 2009-2022, the “benchmark” target was ~0, a policy position called ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy). This might have made a little sense to like, avoid a depression in the 2009 housing-originated (ha!) financial crisis, but it turned out that running the economy in this super whacky way drove asset bubbles in a bunch of stuff which is an effective wealth transfer from people without serious estates to people with them. This was very popular with the sort of people who decide stuff. There’s this other whole can of worms called “easing” (QE) that arguably made the target rate negative, also a whole other topic.

For reasons that I haven’t heard a persuasive explanation for, beginning in roughly March of 2022 the FOMC started cranking this target up (selling a ton of bonds) and is still doing it, the most recent increase in the target was 2 days ago.

This is going to slow economic activity and on paper inflation, but the effects will usually be felt first and most in what are called “growth” sectors, basically stuff where the value is perceived to be largely in the future rather than the present. With a healthy hand-wave, “software” is a “growth” sector, which is why 500k tech people can be fired in 6 months and the Wall St. Journal can still keep sort of a straight face that labor markets are strong. There is a roaring demand for gig workers who don’t get dental.

This is already too long, so if you want my personal opinion on price discovery in elite software talent markets, reply to indicate it and I’ll write a mother micro-blog :)

I will say that understanding a modicum of finance (I’m certainly no RenTech quant!) is basically a prerequisite for understanding politics, sociology, war, energy, technology, pretty much everything.

One doesn’t need a ton, but being able to give or take eyeball whether the market believes e.g. Powell is kinda table stakes.

And it’s just insane this isn’t taught broadly. I learned even just my modicum mostly by improbable random chance.

decision makers making blanket generalizations because candidates don't fit the mold they've invented in their own minds using only their personal experience as a baseline.

tech experience is wildly diverse. looking at candidates with a one size fits all approach is passing up plenty of qualified people, but everybody wants to hire like Google.

Employees generally don't decide on the job titles used in their company.

Of course, there are also junior level jobs by responsibility but not title.

surprised to read this, I don't find it invasive in the slightest. I've turned off notifications for most things but its the only "social" app I have on my device.

I will say it's gotten a lot more content focussed lately, with everyone and their mom sharing their thoughts on jobs and employment. Personally I just use it as a profile for recruiters to hit and a way for me to talk back to them

I'd turn off notification entirely or for all but messages

I don't really bother with notifications or the app for any social media site.

I prefer to share my information when I want and with whom I want, but LinkedIn feels like a meat market. If FB was personal marketing 101 (only sharing what makes you attractive), linkedIn feels like an advanced course on being fake. It kind if disgusts me

That being said, I don’t post or participate in the social media aspect. It’s a virtual resume and an index of recruiters and companies who are interested in you, and it’s good to know where your colleagues you want to work with again are at.

Don’t install the app for minimal invasiveness. And also consider that anyone who actively uses LinkedIn has probably disabled or filtered out all the notification noise themselves as well, so don’t get too caught up thinking about it.

You don't have to notify anyone when you update anything, it's just a setting. Most people don't.

The "fake" ones are the people trying to become linkedin-fluencers, I agree I'd never want to do that. But setting up your profile is basically a copy paste of your resume, and leads to an in-flow of recruiters you can always go back to when it's the right time.

I can't really believe I'm preaching for linkedin because I barely spend any time on it, but it's a tool, and when I've decided to move companies, it's made life far easier than it would've been manually applying to companies. That's without making public posts or sharing public updates to my role

Not saying you won't find stuff without it, but why make it harder than it needs to be?

Recently I have been online dating, and while talking to a match, she dropped that she works a relatively high position in state government. So naturally I googled her name (only had her first name) and the position and clicked the first link. "Oh wow, she is, that's cool!"

A minute later she messages me "Checking out my linkedin?"

I was super confused at first, being that I never use linked in, only set it up for a job change about 4 years ago. I checked the website on my browser and I was not even logged in.

Then I pieced it together.

The first search result was her linkedin, which I clicked. Without me even noticing, it opened in the app on my phone (which I wasn't even aware I still had), which was logged in. Of course then it sent her a notification that I had looked at her page.

She stopped responding pretty much right after that. I am guessing because my totally outdated linkedin didn't at all match what I had briefly mentioned I did for work, and was much more junior.

So thanks linkedin.

It's reasonable to have a default posture of not trusting people you just met online and if you give them a further reason not to trust you (online profile doesn't match what you said), even if unintentionally, it's also reasonable to cease communications before more time is wasted on someone who is potentially untrustworthy. It's a red flag. And there are hundreds of other people you can communicate with instantly online who don't have glaring red flags. I find the behavior reasonable unless they had already met/had a lot of time invested.

I did however have talks and interviews on podcasts and other things they could find, and a history of things I’ve worked on which I can talk about, and a previous colleague had referred me so I already had an in.

Also, if I did find myself in need of a job, and didn't have anything particular in mind, I'd probably start replying to the recruiting messages I get on LinkedIn.

I think you can turn off the notifications; it notifies me for messages but nothing else. I assume I configured that at some point.

But set up a LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn is the lubricant of "hey, my friend X is looking - here's his linkedin" in a way that "hey ..., here's his personal website" or "here's some word doc or PDF in some random format that is annoying."

I've hired a lot of people and there is little more irritating than highly polished, curated resumes with a lot of noise and fluff on them. There may have been a time when that mattered, but honestly I just want to see your location, education, degrees, and the jobs you've had.

I don't know about you personally, but people in my social circles and employed think the job market is the same as it was from 2015 to 2020. They have no data point and assume their 2+ year old experience of looking for work is relevant today.

The market is bad.

I was getting calls from recruiters in 2020. I looked and found work (contracts) twice in 2022, the first time was not easy, the second time was very difficult.