I did ~11 applications (on company websites, tailored resume), of which like 9 were moonshots (NVDA, Valve, etc). I heard back from everyone, and then interviewed and accepted an offer with a smaller international company located locally. This was during the 2023/4 downturn (Dec '23 to be exact).
Caveat: I have 15YoE and work in embedded (especially embedded Linux); it seems this specialization has suffered less than others. I also don't have a degree. I had to accept a slight paycut and hybrid - but I was in office before... and hardware generally just requires you to be present sometimes.
Don't be afraid if you don't have a network, the advice is good, but it doesn't apply to everyone.
Learn C and C++. Find a cheap micro pc board, pick one of the embedded linux distros that run on it, and make something with it.
Repeat until you get bored, exhausted, or a job. :)
Another big part of embedded Linux is managing the OS itself and updates. Things like Yocto handle building an OS image
I'm just exhausted with the search. I finished yet another programming take home only for the company to stop hiring at the turn of the quarter.
But yea, my network also failed me. Mostly becsuse 80%+ of them were paid off themselves.
But sure, I think almost all of them got severance.
Had 3 interviews through contacts that bounced back. Failed two interviews, one technical, one cultural. Third one never really got off the ground; talked to a recruiter and then nothing ever really got arranged. Not even a call.
One got a job at a place I previously worked at and had no interest in returning to. He's on a different team though so I can't say his experience will mirror mine.
One was asking around about any open roles days before he got laid off himself.
Asked a few others and no positions are really open as of now.
Funnily enough me and another colleague applied to the same job and he got it. Right before they invoked a hiring freeze.
And those are just referrals. The nightmares from jobs I just found myself get even better. I'm just tired. This market suuuuuuucks.
I work in games so I was pre-programmed far in advance to expect shakey times. Just not times where I'm ghosted for over a year with no sign of anything opening up (quite the contrary, still plenty of gaming layoffs!).
Hang in there and take what you can get. The market is super shitty and you are absolutely not alone. It ain’t you. The market will pick back up again… it always does.
It will, but this time it's probably going to be several years. It's the covid lock down train wreck. Most people underestimate the cascading damage done by the lock downs.
“It’s what everybody wanted” is something I often say. “Everybody was cheering this on”.
Spot on. I read that somewhere that during WWII when people were sent to the gas chambers, crowds would be cheering on. Common people terrify me.
Citation needed. The execution of Jews by gas chamber during the holocaust was not a public event.
We should be encouraging people to look at alternative careers to tech. Life after tech.
We should also be making it clear to students that while there are exciting things happening in tech this is not going to translate into large scale demand for people.
Large parts of technology are mature, indeed moribund. This is not a message that the technology industry wants to hear.
Since referrals became the meta-game, companies have adapted their referral process to be more selective. Most companies I've worked for have required people to enter some basic information about how and where you worked with the referral, why you're referring them, and a statement that your referral means you are vouching for that person's work performance.
It cuts down on the number of people referring people they know by happenstance, which defeats the purpose of a referral program. I doubt your friends meant it as a personal attack. They probably just had referral programs that were more rigorous than putting names into a queue.
Network is important as long as people see you as a reliable professional that can help them.
There's lots of skills involved, last but not least soft ones.
If you're applying for a B2B SaaS product manager job there are 50,000 jobs and 200,000 applicants and it's a completely different situation.
B2B SaaS is broad. If you're a generalized you're fucked.
But if you're specialized in a specific B then you should (probably) be doing fine.
That said, most of the new-gen PMs are generalists who drank the "domain experience doesn't matter" koolaid.
That's been my consistent experience as well. Conventional wisdom is that you only get good jobs through referrals, but about half of the companies I've worked for have been through referrals and half "cold" through monster or linkedin, etc. and BY FAR the worst working experiences of my life have been the internal referral ones. The last time I was looking for work was 2017, though - I get the impression that things have gotten really, really bad in the past year or so.
Remember with networking there is often only one person in your network of hundreds who can do anything so you need to find that person. Often it will be the guy you just barely talked to who won't think of you at all unless you remind them, but they then know enough to know you are good enough for some position and then they are not interviewing they are convincing you to take the job.
Those cases where the network ensures you are the only candidate are one of the reasons why they work well. My current company doesn't work that way, it doesn't matter how good you are, all I can do is put your resume in the HR stack (unless it is for my department in which case my boss might ask me about a couple resumes). I'd be considered a conflict of interest so I couldn't interview you.
I was fortunately able to leave a terrible job 2 years ago and immediately had contract work, now I run my own business and get constant referrals from my network. I make more than ever, have incredible work-life balance, and for the most part love what I do.
If you don't have a network, the moment you quit/lose a job you are dead to the world. Even now I have people approaching me for FTE roles, I haven't even worked with them for 2 years. Am I some god tier programmer? Not really, but I have a good track record and people always want to go to someone they already trusted.
Connecting with other professionals in various ways is all there is to building a network and anyone can do it. They just have to do it.
I always built my network mostly at local meetups and online communities.
It helps if, like in my case, are into functional programming, as people into that niche prefer working with other functional programmers.
As someone without a network and left their FAANG-adjacent (or whatever the current acronym is) job in 2022, this is mostly true.
Amazon still hits up my inbox every month or so, though.
The other is a consultancy where I help resolve tech debt and put out fires at SMB's, which I get most of my work from referrals.
Hit up an old college buddy on linked in, got a referral, went through a ton of interviews (6) and got a job in two weeks. It's nuts how far a referral will get you.
I did post my availability few times on HN "who wants to be hired" but with poor results and lots of wasted time (as again, the person on the other end does not know me or has worked with me everything gets bureaucratic again).
Also, all of the people I had hired for my clients came again from my network, there was never a public posting.
There's also other benefits, in general, you don't get to do silly technical interviews, as you're bringing former coworkers you can vouch for.
Not saying this can scale anywhere, but in smaller companies with good teams and professionals they always know someone from their previous jobs or their online communities (common in open source related githubs/discords/slacks) and I like it.