One little tip I learned the hard way: an applicant tracking system (ATS) can claim to have imported your fine-looking Word or PDF resume, but that does not mean that it has correctly parsed it and populated the key fields (eg skills) that it shows to the hiring manager.
The problem seems to be that ATSes struggle with the "modern" style of resume, much beloved of Word template authors, where you might have a left column with your contact details, github, and maybe some skills and then a borderless table on the right side with your positioning statement and job history.
I went from zero callbacks to 80% after I junked Word and rewrote my resume in a much more old fashioned, linear format. I used Overleaf (LaTeX) like it was 1999 and exported to PDF.
I have seen one behavior with ATS that was actually tracked down and might hit fellow HN readers. A recruiter I worked with at a company asked me why I didn’t have any experience with artificial intelligence. I said it was all over my resume - I’ve been in the field for more than a decade. He said that it didn’t show up until that ATS.
It turned out the ATS didn’t properly parse ligatures like “ffi”, “fi”, etc. It rendered them as a blank space, so “artificial” became “arti cial”. I turned over ligature rendering in my resume and started to get more callbacks.
Upon further inspection, I discovered that a lot of LLMs also have problems with ligatures and just ignore them when fed a pdf.
So, maybe those annoying job apps where you upload a resume and still have to fill everything in an HTML form aren’t the worst thing.
There may be edge cases where some obscure software can't parse a weird resume format, but in general if you put anything remotely resembling a common resume format (Company name, dates worked there, optional description and/or bullet points) it will be parsed properly.
I'm in a big Slack where people ask and give career help. Several hiring managers have offered to test people's resumes on their company's ATS over the years. Nobody has ever found a combination that actually failed the ATS except when it was an obvious problem (like someone who made their resume in Illustrator) or an obvious user error (exporting a resume as an image).
I wouldn't say it's a "myth". My experience is a lot more like the OP's than what you describe.
A few job sites, like WorkDay, have mangled my PDF resume every time I upload it. Like the OP, I've had to massage the layout and formatting to make it more compatible.
Same experience from me. Most website will show you the result of the CV parsing and in the end I find it takes me less time to populate the different parts manually on the recruiter's website than to try to correct the mess those systems made with the risk of errors it introduces. I wish there was some kind of json/xml standard for CVs.
Same. Instantly got two hits back after reformatting. I also simplified my experience section by reducing technicals and focusing more on role responsibilities.
My sense is _most_ resumes are actually reviewed by a human. Most job postings aren't getting 1000s of applicants. If they are, 3 people can review 1000 applications in 2 hours (30s look).
Most companies are not Google. I did some hiring (3 or 4 positions) at a 10 year old stagnant growth “startup” and we got at most 10 applications per day to these engineering positions. This was 2022-2024 so not just the good years.
It's not a myth (I wrote ATS systems, and you usually just pay some third party to do the core parsing job as a library or a service and take your failures on the nose) but at the same time most recruiters are NOT going into past resumes and filtering through them, and most of the wide shot resume hits you get on linkedin are for the lowest tier of jobs.
Almost all recruiters are "most recent resume in" type of folks or "curated long term list" type of folks - they'll either circle you for years trying to get you hired for something or they'll forget your name in 25 minutes.
I've been applying to jobs for the last three months and many companies use systems that automatically parse your resume and then let you manually correct the parsed data. It's nearly always a mess, and I use a very straightforward linear resume template.
It's possible that there is some selection bias here, where mediocre parsing systems give you the option to manually correct everything because they know they are mediocre. I remain skeptical.
Would you yourself be able to write a Figma-generated PDF parser that reliably extracts necessary semantic content from rasterized text with random layout? If no, likely an average programmer that wrote the application tracking system wouldn't be able to do that either. If yes, then you are very good, and top companies are hunting for you already, you don't need a Figma resume.
Latex and git has been advantageous to authoring a resume for me. It separates the layout design ant content.
“Oh no it’s 2 pages with only education on p2.”
Quickly comment out a bullet and print off a fresh 1 page pdf. I don’t use dumb words or phrases now to fit layout, at least far fewer. And git makes me less worried about deleting when it isn’t working.
One pattern i use, that i think makes things simpler, is to have a layout/contact template with definitions, then different context specific main latex files inputting from a sub directory of section blocks: experience, skills, education, etc.
I’d thought I was slick with word table layouts for sections, until a counselor told me the table structures persist in the supposedly flat pdf.
I wish there were an standard optional JSON attachment with a ridiculous small kb size limit to upload along with a human readable resume to help out the user data AST parser.
> I wish there were an standard optional JSON attachment with a ridiculous small kb size limit to upload along with a human readable resume to help out the user data AST parser.
When applying for jobs via LinkedIn it’s very important to use a PDF. A huge number of people submit Word documents, however, LinkedIn doesn’t render them in the browser. Given that most roles get hundreds of applications, unless someone’s previous roles really catch my eye, I am probably not going to download anything.
That I don’t have a general answer for. Except for the year before last, it’s been responding to recruiters that reached out to me.
The year before last when I did do targeted outreach, it was because I both had relevant experience in a niche AWS service and I was a major contributor to an open source official “AWS Solution” while I was at AWS that was popular in that niche.
But that trick had a very small window.
So I guess the answer is do something that allows you to stand out from the crowd and then you can do prior outreach and tell them why they should hire you over someone else.
My biggest piece of advice is don’t be a “ticket taker”. Volunteer to lead larger initiatives.
And please do not pay anyone for "ATS compatible resume templates" or other ATS related services.
I don't think people realize how many of the ATS myths have been promulgated by people trying to sell services to job seekers. The ATS myth resonates with people for some reason, so desperate job seekers will often pay (unnecessarily) for various "ATS friendly" templates or ATS reviews.
Can you elaborate on the exact layout syntax these ML idiot savant agents want to read? Lack of an industry wide standard data interface makes this terrible.
Even that can fail. I’ve had multiple cases now where my name (!) was auto-parsed wrong in a way human would never do, not even after copy-pasting into Notepad.
The reason? My resume lists my name as follows, where I means the initial for my middle name:
Firstname I. (Nickname) Lastname
And yes, even professionally I do use my nickname and my last name, except for things which must match my government ID, such as offer letters and payroll/tax records, where of course I omit Nickname and use the legal Firstname as well as sometimes the middle initial or full middle name.
With this format, how does Personio parse my name? It thinks I’m called Firstname Nickname. No human would make this mistake, nor would a copy-paste into Notepad cause a human to do that.
And if it has any LLM intelligence at all, it should know that this is unlikely, because Nickname is actually a very common nickname for Firstname, so it should suspect a disperse and have a human double-check its conclusion. Alas.
I’ve also had other issues with these systems misparsing my employment history, since they don’t always properly parse jobs that span corporate acquisitions (changing title and employer at that point but being the same job) and are accurately reflected as such on the resume.
I think mashing up of names happens a lot, since they are not common words. Personally I don't see what the problem is of your name being mangled in a parsed resume, other than when it would look offensive. The name mangling can get easily cleared up after first contact with a real person.
I’ve indeed cleared it up quickly every time it’s happened, but in my opinion, it makes the company look unprofessional in an easily avoidable way. (And yes, I’ve been in the hiring manager role myself - I’d feel the same way if this happened to one of my candidates.)
I call this easily avoidable because name is usually a separate field in the application or referral forms, so this is the bad auto-parsing overriding accurate manual input.
Parsing names is like writing a time library. Sounds easy until you learn the hard way that it definitely isnt.
Some examples that come to mind from my experience are applicants with Chinese names that also use a western name professionally ("Yu-Chen Liew, but I go by Janet"), Spanish names that include patronymics ("Penelope Cruz Sanchez") and cultures that place the family name first ("Park Lee"). Maybe (f,l) = split(name, " ") works in some very homogeneous country like Iceland, but it sure doesnt work in the US.
>Even that can fail. I’ve had multiple cases now where my name (!) was auto-parsed wrong in a way human would never do, not even after copy-pasting into Notepad. [...]
sounds like they did something like:
first_name, last_name = name.split(" ")
which is an issue, but unrelated to what everyone else is talking about, which seems to be how text data is being parsed/encoded inside pdfs. Pasting into notepad would check for that issue, but obviously wouldn't do anything for bad first name/last name extraction logic.
I felt that the general topic was "software failing to do the right thing parsing the text in PDF resumes in ways a human would get right", which includes all of these types of problems, not specific to encoding issues. But, sure.
I can only speak for what worked for me. A shorthand heuristic might be that if the resume can be read in linear fashion by a screenreader without any weirdness or non sequiturs, it's probably pretty good (another argument in favor of paying attention to accessibility!)
In my case, I had a simple layout with sections clearly delineated and very simple formatting (bulleted lists). Dates were spelled out eg September 2024 rather than 9/24. UTF-8 throughout. No difficult latex packages, just classic ones like enumitem and fancyhdr.
Word/Google Docs -> PDF conversion is perfectly fine, and every system will understand it. Just don't try to get fancy with layouts and stick to headings, subheadings and bullets. People reading the resume will appreciate this as well.
This is how I formatted my resume using Pandoc to generate a word document from a Markdown file. Having everything in Markdown also made it easy to quickly create customized resumes by reordering specific sections or lists in a section as well as tracking changes in Git.
There is an industry standard - HR-XML[0] (disclaimer: I was on the committee for a little while). But I would be surprised if any of the job boards let you import it directly.
Frankly, plain text rendered to PDF is probably going to be the most easily parsed by their systems. If they let you add attachments separate from your resume, then stick your "beautified" resume there.
I've spoken with two technical recruiters who say they prefer reading templates instead of hand-crafted Resumes on top of them also parsing better in the ATS system ):
Can confirm a similar attitude from an HR person - they prefer a single-column, easy to scan resume that follows a tried and trusted standard structure and layout.
I've used LaTeX, online resume generators and Google Docs templates, but they were unfruitful. I've applied to 350 jobs and only got one screening recruiter call (then was ghosted). Despite having 2+ YoE and published research as well as having worked as a contractor for FAANG (I even made one loads of money in stock after they applied my recommendations)!
If you've applied 350 times with that kind of success, then it might time to revise your approach, your CV or both.
I've never found good leads with cold approaches. Even when getting contacted and receiving an offer, it was always low salaries on that method. What worked best was going to related events, talking to people hosting the booths, talk to presenters of topics where I'm an expert and this way get warm introductions.
Yeah, it's probably because I took a non-tech job (stock broker) for the health insurance. Also I went back to college after I quit my last FT cybersecurity job. I also used ApplyAll which may of messed up parsing my resume in Workday.
If you're into tech development nowadays, it goes a long to list a portfolio of things you've built. That goes a long way to tell an employer if you have the skills to build what they need.
Yeah, I just have a text file and convert it to HTML for people that want to view it on the web. Has never been a problem. I'm not a graphic designer and if that's a skill you want, you got the wrong girl.
I have done two different types of resumes; long and sort. When I was learning about resumes in high school and college, they said to just list your jobs and maybe some key skills. I have been told this is useless to recruiters. So I rewrote things to have a couple paragraphs about major projects at this jobs. I have been told this is too long and nobody has time to read it. So now I have both and you can pick the one you want.
I got laid off recently so this is fresh in my mind, but I got a job through my network instead which did not involve a resume or interviews. That's really how it should be. (I'm kind of just waiting for the founders from my last startup to start something new... they didn't survive the reorg either, which was a "sort by salary descending and only keep the last 3". The joys of having your software startup bought by an indecisive large company that doesn't do software ;)
> I got laid off recently so this is fresh in my mind, but I got a job through my network instead which did not involve a resume or interviews. That's really how it should be.
Not sure about the 'should', but I think it is. Over the years I had the pleasure to work with quite a few good people, but there were also some buffoons (not counting those in marketing). I can only imagine, that the resume of the latter will look more appealing.
+1 here. I have two resumes. One looks nice/modern and its what I send recruiters/managers once I have an interview scheduled. One is an ugly, to me, plain looking word doc that application tracking systems can gronk.
> much beloved of Word template authors, where you might have a left column with your contact details, github, and maybe some skills and then a borderless table on the right side with your positioning statement and job history
The design always struck me as a clumsy attempt to take up space.
For me, a similar approach is actually the exact opposite. It's always a struggle to fit a good summary of your professional life on a single page and being able to put some short stuff in multiple columns can help you save space. For example I usually have certifications, trainings, etc in two columns since they're often fairly short entries.
I wonder what the origin of that template is, because it looks almost identical to mine, and I yoinked my template from somewhere back in 2012-2013. It says it's based on sb2nov/resume [0], but that only goes back to 2017. They must've based it on something as well.
It would be useless to test against a system that companies weren't using. I wouldn't count on anything open source in the HR space, to be honest.
I remember seeing a list of companies you could "apply" to with your resume that would then show the ATS-parsed version back to you. Every single person who used it got a reasonable result back, which is usually enough to put an end to all of the ATS myths out there.
The biggest pain / fear related to layoffs for me isn't the immediate actual loss of income...
It was that I have to go job hunting and how demoralizing and toil heavy that process is. Heck I'd likely go job hunting just out of curiosity, the idea of exploring other options should be interesting at the least, but naw it's too much of a pain.
>Recruiters. Don’t discount or blow them off.
That's all they do for me ... I suspect there's a subset of people who are very attractive to recruiters and they actually do things for those people and I am not in that group. The advice surrounding recruiters is always so disconnected from my experience that it seems strange.
The leetcode grind is my biggest dread. I can do it and I do well, but I'll be damned if it isn't a lot of mindless rote memorization that immediately leaves my brain the second I land the job, never to be used again (even in my job) until the next time I apply around.
Remember when fizzbuzz was the gold standard in trick interview questions? And Joel was a revolutionary for advocating it? Things have certainly changed.
In some sense, leetcode is fizzbuzz on steriods. As I recall, the "trick" to fizzbuzz is knowing about the modulo operator. Most leetcode problems have a similar trick that you need to know/learn to complete them correctly.
Fizzbuzz wasn't about seeing if a candidate knew the 'tricks', it was to test if you knew how to code at all. If you know about loops and if statements you can do fizzbuzz even you've never heard about modulo operators. Fizzbuzz was designed to catch the complete bullshitters who literally could not code. Apparently that was a real problem people were having at the time.
It’s not about testing ability to solve those problems, it’s about testing conformity, determination, and IQ (while being job-specific and thus legal).
Every place that tested leetcode in my interview (easy/mediums) never impressed me with their work culture. Usually it's a proxy test for obedience and/or accepting bureaucracy.
Also forget about career advancement. (Why would we promote you when we can replace you with another code puzzle solver?)
These are just completely bog-standard cognitive aptitude tests; in fact, they are if anything less rigorous than a modern IQ test. They're generally not specialized to specific jobs. You can read Reddit threads about people taking (and studying for) them.
Don't get me wrong: I think this is an incredibly dumb practice. But there's a mythology that IQ testing is a super-effective tool for recruiting that has been suppressed by anti-discrimination law. That is not the case. Most companies don't use IQ tests, because they're not fit for purpose.
Honestly I just stopped interviewing at leetcode places and those that expect you to "prepare" for their interview, especially those that are dumb no-name SaaS companies.
It's less about me being stubborn as it is those places are hiring based on the wrong skills, and those end up not being good places to work.
Except at smaller companies, your network just gets you a referral and interview. You still have to go through the same interview process.
The two exceptions I have had were when a former coworker who is now the director of an f500 non tech company was going to create a strategic position for me. He needed someone he could trust.
The other time was when a CTO and the director of application development were both former coworkers from another company and it was just a matter of me saying yes.
The first job would have been more stress than I was willing to deal with and I don’t do large companies (I was suffering from PTSD from my time at AWS). The second didn’t have the budget to meet my compensation target.
Oh totally! My aim is to avoid leetcode as a 10y+ developer with real track record delivering $XM projects. To me it is a game breaker to have to study up on leetcode problems, as it keeps me from juggling multiple interview in the pipeline.
Every network job I've gotten (two) has been a walk on interview, I'm fine with this as long as I don't have to do circus problems.
Sure you can avoid leetCode if you’re okay with not maximizing your compensation by working at one of the FAANG or adjacent companies that pay at top of market.
But you aren’t going to have a walk on non leetcode interview at one of the companies that pay a quarter million+ for a mid level developer based on a referral. I’m not saying you are a mid level developer just giving an example of comp.
The amount a returning intern I mentored when I was at BigTech had a return offer that was the same as I made two years prior at 60 person startup.
Now that I’m out of BigTech, I had to get a job as a “staff software architect” at a 3rd party consulting company to come close to what I was making in 2020 as mid level consultant at AWS and I’m making over $80K less than I would make as a senior doing the same thing at AWS or GCP.
I’m 50, an empty nester and I’m good with making that trade off. I would rather get an anal probe with a cactus than ever work at any large company again.
But if I were 30 in 2024 instead of in 2004, yeah I would grind leetCode to make a 300K+ a year.
And yeah I got into BigTech without a coding interview and could probably weasel my way into Google/GCP in the consulting department without one. But that needle would be hard to thread for the vast majority of prople
That’s why I always advise anyone in CS to practice for coding interviews
good advice - I do hard disagree with Sure you can avoid leetCode if you’re okay with not maximizing your compensation by working at one of the FAANG or adjacent companies that pay at top of market.
I think the BIGGEST misconception in our industry is that it is only FAANG that pays TOP dollar. No one teaches CS grads coming out of college the hardest truth of it all - you will get paid what you are worth to the company and your career should be geared towards figuring out how to make yourself more valuable to a company that company is to you - this is where REAL money is and this can be had in A LOT of places. there are maybe 10 people at FAANG that have this - 99.76% of people at FAANG are expendable. too many bodies - most of the people are no ones. on the flip side there are 1,000’s of companies that have been in business for decades - there, with proper planning (much better time spent than fucking leetcode), you can become more valuable to the company than company is to you and your salary will reflect that - even higher than highest of salaries at FAANG…
I don’t care how much I’m “worth” that 60 person startup I worked for pre-AWS wasn’t going to pay me $225K and I went in as a mid level consultant. That was fair, I only had 2 years of AWS experience at the time.
The 600 person company I work for now isn’t going to match what I could make at Google. On the other hand, Google would require me to be in an office and I would not have unlimited PTO.
Everyone is expendable. No matter where you work.
I don’t think you know the salary ranges at BigTech and how they compare to the rest of the market. Those thousands of companies aren’t going to pay FAANG salaries.
That grad I mentioned coming out of college is making $160K their first year and that was working in Professional Services not development. An SDE was starting out at $175K - $190K
> Heck I'd likely go job hunting just out of curiosity, the idea of exploring other options should be interesting at the least
When I grew up, my father worked in commercial banking in the 1980s and 1990s. There were so many bankruptcies / mergers / financial crises, that he got (painfully) used to being laid off. Watching him go through this had a large impact on my view of my relationship with most employers (hostile, wary, defensive). He once said to me, "At my level (middle manager), as soon as I start my new job, I start looking for my next job." He was exaggerating, but the point stayed with me.
I definitely agree with you: Looking for a job (or "keeping your doors & windows open to new opportunities") while having a job is much, much easier -- mentally. In my industry, most connections with head hunters are made through LinkedIn. You can set a special flag in your profile that says "I'm looking for work", but this is only visible to professional head hunters (they pay a lot of money for an account with these special privileges). It works very well. Normally, the calls start with: "Them: Are you looking at the moment? Me: No, but I am open to new and exciting opportunities. Them: Oh, great. I have something for you." Do that enough, and eventually something very good lands on your doorstep.
> At my level (middle manager), as soon as I start my new job, I start looking for my next job." He was exaggerating, but the point stayed with me.
That’s no exaggeration at all. I’m not always looking for a job. But everything I do I do with one eye toward how will this look when I get ready to interview? Am I working on tech that is demand? Am I working at the correct “scope, impact, and ambiguity” or am I just being a “ticket taker”?
You're saying that the "vast majority" of recruiters receive your CV (from wherever) and instead of contacting you on the email address on your CV they will Google around for your personal email address? I don't believe you. Why would anyone do that extra step when they already have your email address?
I’ve had recruiters find my work email after a phone call. They proceeded to send a bunch of emails while I was screen sharing. I was able to hide it but it was almost a disaster.
Might depend on the niche you're in, or your location. My experience with recruiters (on the hiring side) mirrored what I heard from friends who got hired through recruiters: they're basically match-makers.
If you're not a well-known name, you can have your job-postings but you won't get any applications. Either you spend time on advertising and try to convince people that you're really real and actually really want to hire, or you just get yourself someone who introduces you to people who might be a good fit. That's a recruiter.
Out of the 10 jobs I have had since 1996, 6 came from external recruiters. I met five of them in person over lunch or in their office when I was looking for local jobs in Atlanta until 2022.
The one I didn’t meet in person was a specialized recruiter for my niche.
Two came from me reaching out to them and two were from internal recruiters
Yeah -- the best recruiters have been "let's meet in person and chat about what you're looking for" people who would send me jobs when I was looking. The worst ones open the conversation by asking for my social over the phone.
> I really wish companies would start giving honest feedback even if it’s hard for the candidates to heard at first. It would be a much better way for candidates to improve themselves and we’re all adults here and can take the feedback.
I’ve said it before, and I say it again. This isn’t true. When companies try to be helpful and give you well meaning feedback, you find out that their reasons for rejecting you are absolutely banal, and you’d have been better off not hearing anything.
When I first become a hiring manager I thought I'd be the exception and provide everyone with detailed and honest feedback.
I didn't last very long. Candidates would see the feedback as an invitation to prove me wrong or argue with my assessment. I got a few very angry e-mails from people who took their rejection very personally and made it clear that I was their enemy. One person (who was actually very unqualified) even went on a mini rampage across the internet, trying to "name and shame" my company and even my personally for the rejection. There were even threats of a discrimination lawsuit.
So I stopped. It's back to something like "We've decided to proceed with other candidates"
I once interviewed for a job where they admitted I was the only person in the pipeline. I was then rejected with a canned "This was a highly competitive process and we've decided to proceed with other candidates" email. Did not feel great.
That surely depends on things the company knows and sadly also on things the company doesn't know. Are the reasons things that the applicant can change (e.g. lack of relevant experience or poor presentation skill?) or things they can't change (too old, wrong gender), but also how sensitized is the applicant to rejection (due to recent experiences)?
It is better to ask your internal recruiter / HR department to inform the candidate of your feedback (if you work for a big enough company). It is also good practice to always have a panel, not just the hiring manager, doing interviews.
So the candidate gets feedback along the lines of: "Thank you for participating in our interview process. Unfortunately, our panel decided you weren't the best fit for position X at this time, because ...reasons.... Under company policy, we won't accept further applications from you for one year from today, but we would encourage you to apply for a role with us in the future".
There is a chance they will reply back to HR arguing, but it is their job to be polite but firm that the decision is already made, and that they can apply again in one year (and not pass anything back to the hiring manager).
The key is to think long term and about the company as a whole - the candidate who gets helpful feedback and is treated fairly is more likely to apply again in the future (after the mandatory cooling off period), when they might have more skills and experience working somewhere else. There is a finite qualified labour pool no matter where you are based, and having the good will even of rejected candidates is a competitive advantage. The message should be "not now", rather than "not ever" (although of course, if they do go on some kind of rampage, they could turn the not now into not ever - that's a bridge burning move). If a tiny percentage go on a rampage, but the company protects the individuals from it, and has lots of counteracting positive sentiment from prospective and actual staff, then it's still a net positive.
This happened to me when I had to reject a doctor from my research study due to his site manager being unprofessional and his site being an audit risk. I sent a brief professional two-sentence vague rejection note thanking him for his time and wishing the best in his future research and he responded with an absolutely unhinged 17-paragraph rant, threatening lawsuits, calling my vendor CRO a crazy cat lady, saying she was too old to find happiness in life, ranting about San Francisco liberals (his clinic was in NYC), threatening to sue me, threatening to sue my vendor, threatening to turn us all into the FDA for fraud and wasting his time, and on, and on. It was completely shocking to read and really opened my eyes to how viciously and crazily people can lash out when they feel rejected. I was really glad I kept my rejection brief I can't imagine what he would have latched onto and ranted about if I'd given any specifics about why we didn't select his site. The weirdest part is he came to us very highly recommended from another doc!
If I gave the last candidate I interviewed candid feedback it would be “You need to bump up your technical skills (obvious during interview) and the photos on your photography site which you added to your resume for me to click on makes me question if you are a serial killer.”
Instead I sent something akin to “we decided on another candidate”
It's not about online world, I think. When I was younger, I used to call each candidate with interview results — I've heard some of the rudest words directed at me ever. Stopped forever after a few rude calls.
Here's another issue, the interviewer is sometimes wrong. Or, there was a miscommunication. At least twice in my career I missed an offer because the interviewer didn't think I had experience in something, but turns out I had decades of it. But, I don't brag. Heard thru the grapevine, "oh they said you didn't have database experience," hears me using databases since the late 80s. WTF?
So I could imagine debating a point while being in the right.
And even in the case where the candidate is right to push back on the feedback, the process has usually moved on with another candidate already, so it's just awkward for everyone.
True that. I just got some "honest feedback" that I didn't agree with at all. I'm all for criticizing myself, but this feedback totally missed the mark. I didn't have deep enough experience with "object oriented programming". What does that even mean? I've been creating and using objects every day since 2007. I literally... don't know what to do with that feedback. It's like the carpenter interview, "Have you ever built brown houses? Our client is very interested in brown houses."
> didn't have deep enough experience with "object oriented programming". What does that even mean?
This could mean two things. "You aren't knowledgeable about OOP" or "you couldn't show us that you are knowledgeable in OOP". If it isn't the former, maybe it's the latter? Maybe the real+underlying feedback is that you couldn't convey your breadth of knowledge in your interview?
But especially after a take home assignment, feedback should be given 100% and face to face. It's almost embarrassing to spend X hours/days of your (spare) time only to be rejected with an email and usually some random reasons, without having the chance to explain why you built this toy project that way, how much time you spent and what would you do with more time or in production or even showcase some live coding on top of what you did.
But everything has become really inhumane, no-one cares. That's why AI is dominating and ruining the field.
Got rejected after a take home, and the feedback from the recruiter was 1. a reviewer thought I used a library incorrectly (they actually misunderstood how the library worked) and 2. I didn’t implement something that the instructions had explicitly said not to implement.
I didn’t argue with 1 because I figured it was pointless and it sounded like the recruiter was having a rough day. I politely pointed out 2 as a courtesy and he said “huh, the other guy yelled at me about that”.
Although honestly, I left the process thinking “lol” instead of “I’m a dumbass” like I might have absent the feedback.
Another issue is that positions which are advertised are often already filled by some acquaintance, but we need to go thru the motions of posting the job, sifting thru resumes, interview questions, leetcodes, etc. and interview theatre before we go and hire the acquaintance.
Sometimes, HR doesnt know and the interview panel may not know.
I have a spreadsheet of my job hunts since 2008 across 8 times I was looking for a job. I was working at my first two jobs between 1996-2008
I’ve been rejected three times once I started the interview process. I have also always gotten interviews from companies where external or internal recruiters reached out to me and I submitted my resume.
All three times I’ve gotten rejected was post mid 2023.
It was clear from one within 10 minutes that I wasn’t what they were looking for. I’m not sure why I didn’t get hired for the second one after going through the rounds even though I have my suspicions.
The third I got ghosted after the HR screen where the representative from the target company’s investor interviewed me.
So by 2008, I was 34, starting over and applying for enterprise CRUD jobs where I was competing against people with a lot less experience and maturity. I was cheap labor. That held true in 2008 and 2012 and I was digging my way out of the “expert beginner” years.
It wasn’t until 2014 when I was actually starting to be recruited for strategic positions. In 2014, 2016 and 2018 I was an early strategic hire by a then new director/manager/CTO to lead major initiatives.
My interviews were two adults talking about strategy. By 2014, I was 40 years old.
2020, a remote position at AWS Professional Services fell into my lap. I was 46 then.
Now looking for a job in 2023 and 2024 targeting full time roles at cloud consulting companies, can you imagine how easy it is for a 50 year old who knows how to communicate decently, with 25+ years of development experience, 6 years of AWS experience including 3 at AWS to get a job at those companies?
Now when you take AWS away from me, I am just another enterprise Dev with above average communication and project management skills.
Two of my three rejections were at product companies even then the interviews were behavioral. It does concern me a little that I got rejected from product companies that were looking for “architects”.
My title right now is “staff software architect” at a consulting company.
With regards to what they're saying, the first thing to do is reverse the perspective. The applicant is hearing a yes or no, so if it's a no they want to know what they did wrong to improve themselves.
From the interviewer's perspective - we get someone who is average, then another person who is average, then someone who has trouble with basic questions, then we get this person who may be as average as the first two, then we get someone who answers every question correctly, and has a deep knowledge of the domain if you drill down, then you get an average person again.
There's nothing really wrong with the person, they did as well as four other people. It's just that someone else came in who was a standard deviation above the majority of the people in the bell in the normally distributed Gaussian curve.
> More than 150,000 layoffs were reported in 2024 and a whopping 264,000 in 2023.
I switched careers in my 30s to get into tech. It was big, difficult pivot. At the moment, I do not regret it and really like what I do.
But the job market is shockingly bad. I do not have an optimistic outlook, so I am looking to pivot again, likely a small business. All the extra cash I have after expenses, I put towards various side hustles. One big upside to being a SWE is that I can make whatever app I want and put it on the internet publicly.
The job market is bad because a lot of people joined tech when there was a lot of open roles (and a lot of SV money). The money has returned to its pre-bubble level, so there's fewer jobs. But the same number of people looking for work as during the bubble when they switched careers. Most of those new workers lack deep skills, so the existing jobs are going unfilled. Most of the listings I see now are for senior and above.
Another problem is management attitudes towards hiring. They are switching their capricious attention and investment towards AI [1] and off shore to save costs [2, 3].
The combination of all this is making for an ugly combo of negativity. Tech used to be a lot more fun, even before the SV ZIRP hysteria.
Been programming since I was 14, pursued a career in another field so that I could program for fun. I have considered pivoting my career to software development many times. Seeing people far more qualified than me have nightmarish job hunting experiences always makes me think twice. When people with 10+ years of experience can't find a job, there's no reason to believe self-taught programmers without degrees ever will.
Starting a business seems like the only real answer. Struggling only makes sense when it's for your own company.
You and the other million of devs think the same, that's why the indie dev market is exploding and twitter is full of influencers posting their app revenue..
This is so true, and I'm in fact going through this right now. One of my semi-technical friends followed an online tutorial and created a stock tracker web app, almost entirely using ChatGPT. It is a pretty good achievement (in the context of someone who isn't a programmer and started from scratch), and I'm encouraging him to keep going down this path and developing his skills. He is however convinced that he can launch this app and make millions, and is even considering quitting his job to do it full time. There is zero chance it is going to get any kind of traction, and I keep telling him that, but he is too enamored by all the "influencers" on LinkedIn/X telling him that he is basically a 10x engineer now.
I think we will see a small business "renaissance" of sorts:
- many local small business owners are aging baby boomers, they will be exiting + retiring; that's opportunity to back-fill
- the culture among younger people (millennial and younger) seems to be more focused on employment over entrepreneurship; they seem to prefer the safety of stable employment over taking risk on their own (I have no data backing this, just anecdotal experience...but I think its bc of student loans)
- stable employment with a big company is not so stable anymore, most of human history leans entrepreneurial, big corps are recent phenomenon
Yup, I've been calling this out as the other side of the coin of LLMs for a while now. If dev skill is no longer a barrier to entry and you can spin up an application using chatGPT over the weekend, then so can literally EVERYBODY else on the face of the planet.
You think it was hard competing against 10 other similar apps? Try 1000 or 10,000 competitors.
Yes because it’s harder to land a stable job, it’s much more realistic to start a business that is going to convince enough people to pay you enough to support yourself.
Also you have to convince companies to do business with you instead of a well known company.
Oh and to be competitive you need to have some type of funding.
And you need to make enough to pay for health care.
> it’s much more realistic to start a business that is going to convince enough people to pay you enough to support yourself.
I only have to convince one place - Google Ads. Plus bring in the "eyeballs" with my free app, but I have accomplished that more than once.
> Also you have to convince companies to do business with you instead of a well known company.
Just one company in my case (actually several, but 90+% of the money comes from Google)
> Oh and to be competitive you need to have some type of funding.
I have to be competitive enough to make a few thousand a month, and with my programming (and database design, and UX, and SRE etc.) skills, I have achieved that.
> And you need to make enough to pay for health care.
In the US you do.
> the top 5% of apps generate 200 times the revenue of the bottom quartile after their first year, while the median monthly revenue an app generates after 12 months is less than $50 USD.
>Success rate: According to Zippia, only 0.5% of mobile apps are successful, with 9,999 out of 10,000 apps failing. Fyresite estimates that 99.5% of consumer apps and 87% of business apps fail.
Now imagine what would happen if more people took that advice?
For context, a new grad working in a major city in the US not on the west coast - even an ordinary CRUD enterprise framework developer - can make $70k- $80K a year.
What exactly is a “few thousand a month”? That’s a good side hustle. But even that’s not enough to support yourself
1. Sales = learn to knock on a 100 doors to get one sale.
2. Marketing = learn to communicate your value prop to specific companeis and hiring managers.
3. Delviery = learn to deliver products/projects end to end with all the management that goes in between.
If you know all 3 you'll never be in a position where you don't have income.
It takes about 4 years to really get a grasp of all 3 so start now ... don't just do a 8 hour job and go home and watch tv.
Keep trying to sell your services to others ... at least 2-3 hours after work to other companies/startups/other industries. Its a big world - smeone needs your services - your survival depends on finding those people nad packaging your skilsl so that they buy.
Having a wife who is working takes some of the financial pressure off.
My children were four and eight when I started my business and it wasn't a problem at all. In fact I would say it made many things easier because I had a more flexible schedule.
time-management and sleep deprivation, should write a book with that title
0600 - 0900 Your project
0900 - 1600 Corporate job
1700 - 2100 Family & free time (you need to learn how to make the most of it so that you can recharge as well)
2100 - 2300 The low-CPU low demanding part of managing a business paired with some interesting background content goes here
Considering the schedule has you stopping one task and one time and starting another exactly seven hours later, that’s not seven hours of sleep. Most people don’t stop a task and immediately fall asleep, or wake up and can start working. That gap means less than seven hours of sleep. And for many people seven hours isn’t enough. Sleep deprivation means not having enough quality sleep, it’s not a single number which can be applied to everyone all the time equally.
It's a rough schedule. It's not work to the minute of 11:00pm then start unwinding. You might be pretty unwound by 10:30 and then answer a couple of emails before making a hot drink at 10:45 and calling it a night. It seems a bit silly to overly argue how that can't possibly describe a full night's sleep, when it clearly can.
Yeah it’s pretty simple. Just teach your kids to walk and the importance of no sleep interruptions, then they can get themselves to kindergarten and make their own food. /s
Some people will criticize but I follow a similar time management schedule.
It was only when I've built my first startup that many of those skills had to be learned and to be quite frank, I only wish to have started earlier rather than being throw into for making enough money.
Nowadays that schedule is accurate and I'm a family person with two young kids in the house. I just don't wake so early but that is mostly because I keep working on my personal projects until midnight~1 AM.
The good thing is that I'm no longer so attached with my employer company. Mismanagement, demotion or those issues don't affect me so personally because my professional value is no longer just defined by the company where I work. My work outside company hours is valued by many others, albeit not profit-driven it serves as a good backup whenever falling into unemployment situations.
My “backup” is not working 40 hours a week, then working on a side project and sacrificing time with my family and friends, not having time to exercise and travel and just relax.
My backup is an always up to date resume with an up to date skill set, and a longer career document, a years worth of expenses in a HYSA in addition to retirement savings, low fixed expenses, and a decent network.
I figure in a year someone , somewhere will give me a job or contract. While my wife hasn’t had to work since 2020 at 44 when I was 46, she has kept her CDL so if push comes to shove, she can get a job with the school system as a bus driver for the benefits while I build up an independent consulting clientele.
You probably don't have kids. Or if you do, that's really low amount of time and overall pretty horrible long term life quality setup, I guess then wife picks up most of family chores. Maybe your career is stellar, added value as a parent and (not only) emotional anchor for your kids... not so much.
Where is commute? Corporate jobs in IT are not 8 hours sharp and ciao, there is also lunch break to count in. Also 23-6 means 7 hours of sleep, too little for many. And so on.
Yes is just that easy. You don’t actually have to have anything to sell. If that’s all it takes, why do only 1 in 10 startups succeed and that isn’t even counting all of the people who are struggling in obscurity.
This will not work if the status quo actually changes to a degree that a significant portion of developers have to do this. It'd very quickly saturate the people willing to give you a chance.
This was a good advice 10-2 yrs ago, but going forward? We'll have to see, but my gut says this will become just as likely to succeed as becoming a successful influencer... By which I mean that a few will occasionally make it/succeed, but it'll only be such a low fraction of the people trying for it that it rounds to 0.0%. and the ones succeeding will generally have been able to leverage an opportunity that most trying the same never had.
(Not to discourage people from trying - without an attempt you won't even have the chance to grasp such an opportunity. I'm just looking at it from the perspective of an observer)
> It takes about 4 years to really get a grasp of all 3 so start now
That 4 years number sounds like an ass pull. What’s your source? Everyone is different and some of those skills come naturally to some people, so I sincerely doubt that number is even close to universal.
Honestly, your whole suggestion seems straight out of one of those generic self-help scams that ignore the realities of life and always blame the user: “You gotta do the thing. If you’re not successful it’s because you didn’t want it enough, not because we’re dispelling the same dated advice to everyone”.
Note I don’t think that’s what you’re doing, you’re not selling anything. I’m just saying I question the helpfulness and quality of the advice.
> If you code, you should be building a business on the side.
This is incredibly far from being the universal claim you say it is. 99% of software developers work for someone else, not at their own business, and most are perfectly happy.
By all means, building a business is great for many reasons, sometimes including financial reasons, and you should do it if you want to. But not wanting to is not an "excuse" and you shouldn't feel pressured to do so.
100%. people wanna blame companies for laying people off, doing leetcode, having ATS systems that don't parse resumes correctly.
if people realized - aimed at software engineers - that the same company you're applying for - someone went through the pain of creating the initial product, marketing it, selling it. I'm sure you can do the same - maybe not at the same level but at 80%.
unlike in zero-sum games - real life you can have multiple winners - 80% will get you there.
I do wonder about that. If you had it in you to start a business then I doubt you would have been sitting around waiting for the next downturn to do it.
15 years of experience. Laid off twice last year. 10+ years at 2nd last role, 3 months at last.
Like the article mentions, it's an employers market.
The thing I struggle is the question to why you want to work at a place. Either I'm short and to the point, or it ends up written like I used to when working for one of the Big Three.
And coincidentally, that is exactly the kind of stuff that ChatGPT generates.
It will end poorly. Even if it's objectively true, employers will not want to see such a reason, so you'll have to make something up, even if it's not true. It's just the name of the game.
Exactly. It’s mating dance. Nobody cares about one’s family. One must talk about good products, nice working culture, positive vibes, professional development on topic X, suitable experience in topic Y, similar finished project Z, interesting personalities of the interviewers. Motherload of well crafted lies. I learned a lot to lie during interviews. As a graduate I was absolute truth teller and every interview changed me a bit. After hundreds of them during a decade I am comfortable with any lie. So sad when I think about it.
Related. But people should also keep in mind that layoffs throughout the industry are extensive. So don't make the mistake of only keeping good connections with your team and managers. Try, to the extent that it's possible, to keep good connections across whatever enterprise you work in. We could easily enter an era, especially in tech, where all of your team and managers are unemployed at the same time you are. Or they otherwise may not have the ability to help you. You should always have a plan for using connections in the event you find yourself in that situation. A prudent pillar of that contingency would be to expand your network as far as you can. Even the facilities guy or the guy in marketing may prove useful one day. No connection is too low or too high.
After the dot-com crash, I was laid off when the company I worked for went under. They specialized in creating e-learning courses for large corporations.
That experience taught me a valuable lesson: there are some industries you just don’t want to be involved with when the economy takes a downturn. Companies tighten their budgets, and the first cuts often come from areas like training and marketing. On the consumer side, people quickly drop non-essential luxuries like streaming services or food delivery.
If you work in industries that provide those kinds of services, they’re essentially “fair weather industries”—great during good times but highly vulnerable during tough ones.
Since then, I’ve made a point of only working in what I call “recession-proof” verticals. These include energy (avoiding risky sectors), insurance (because companies rarely skip paying premiums), and certain areas of banking (where money flows abundantly).
Another critical strategy is diversifying your skill set and building a strong internal network within your company. The more indispensable you become, the more secure your position. In more technical terms, this is akin to “obligate mutualistic symbiosis”—a relationship where both parties thrive because they rely on each other.
How are people searching for programming jobs? LinkedIn is garbage because it keeps showing jobs that don't even contain the word I searched for. I go directly to the big company's career pages, but it is hard to discover new jobs or new companies.
Using Google site search is a great way! For example - site:lever.co “Software Engineer, Machine Learning” OR “Machine Learning Engineer”. This is helped me search for a lot of jobs that weren’t advertised.
You can do this similarly for greenhouse.io, ashbyhq.com, myworkdayjobs.com, breezy.hr, workable.com, dover.io, ats.rippling.com, icims.com and other popular ATS websites.
In the last 12 years of employment I've pretty much received all my jobs through the friends, friends of friends, and former colleagues network. There was one job which I actually applied for on their website and had a standard interview process for, but I had former colleagues already working there, so I include that.
I am in Game Development so it is a much smaller community than the overall tech industry and you're more likely to know people in different companies as people slowly disperse after completing a project.
I think as you get older you kind of have to find jobs in this way, relying on your network and reputation, rather than doing a fresh cold application each time.
Find a job you find interesting and have a compelling value add. Find that job’s hiring manager on LinkedIn/Other Social. DM the hiring manager and start a conversation. Has worked for me multiple times. You cut the line (or black box) and start to build rapport instantly.
If someone reaches out to me unless they have a very unique skillset - no “full stack developer” and “I got my last job because I can invert a btree on the white board” are not special skill sets.
I think its amazing that posts like this exist, and more should definitely be written so that people don't feel powerless after a layoff. Too often we tie our identity to institutions and it isn't doing anyone any good (well maybe it helps the shareholders).
I also got laid off during parental leave. I had a strong feeling that it would happen but due to the stress of a medically dangerous pregnancy, I made the excuse that I didn't have the capacity to simultaneously focus on a preemptive job search. That was a bad decision.
"How to Tell a Layoff is Coming" another tip from personal experience, a manager and key people always know. Be in the inner circle. Also I was once laid off on my Hawaii vacation, talk about perfect timing.
i knew someone who was QA his boss approved his PTO to go to the dentist. however that day turned out to be the layoff day so HR threated him to come to the office. was hilarious. god i hate HR. anyways if you ever go on PTO turn your phone off completely.
Similar to the article's author, I also once got laid off shortly after being hired; three months in my case. I was promised they were on a growth track to nine-figure revenue. One month of down subscription growth, the CEO panicked, and I was gone.
I used to reject 6mo contract offers but after being a laborer the 2.5X pay increase even for 6mo made sense. So I accepted one and now I'm here typing this on a 16" mac at a new job. I am now thinking about making better choices financially.
I wrote extensions to through LinkedIn's jobs and other boards but ultimately luck (some company person finds you). It's even harder for me no degree but I have 5yoe.
My job though was niche my robotics/hardware projects stuck out to the interviewer.
I worked labor for a year it sucked. But yeah I turned down a few 6mo roles thinking they were not secure but I was like f it I need change and will just pour my higher income into my debts.
Misalignment of interests is the core error of reasoning the traditional employee makes in offering up unquestioning faith and loyalty to a random corporation run by strangers; that greedy incompetence will somehow give them enduring security. This is decidedly not the case. Instead, more sensible employees should form worker-owned co-ops to both share in the treasure of livable earnings with potential immense profits and structure themselves for the maximum security of those who "sail on that ship" together rather than optimizing short-term profits of someone else.
>> If you haven’t searched for a job since then it will surprise you how much more of an employers market it is now.
Could you clarify further? Front what I hear on the news, there are hundreds of thousands of open engineering/ai positions in the US and we cannot find workers to fill them. You mention ZIRP, so I'm assuming you're probably in the US.
Practically every news show in the past two weeks has noted the importance of having a concerted US policy to help fill these open positions. They also mention the existential risk to the US caused by the massive shortage of engineers.
How does this square with you saying " If you haven’t searched for a job since then it will surprise you how much more of an employers market it is now." Where is the disconnect?
Fake job postings to give the appearance of growth for funded companies who are struggling to grow to meet investor expectations.
Posturing to distract from the actual practice of hiring less-expensive talent overseas while pretending to be on Team America.
Political spin to avoid losing face/clout during an election year.
In short: some form of lying (or at best, twisting) to avoid the shame of not being as successful as one might look on their <insert social media here> profile.
And even more cynical take: They are marketing for AI hype cycle. That is there to drive up the stock prices, not actually hire. Spread out effort to make companies and AI overall look more popular.
> Could you clarify further? Front what I hear on the news, there are hundreds of thousands of open engineering/ai positions in the US and we cannot find workers to fill them.
The only thing that matters is the ratio of job seekers to open positions.
There are always a lot of open positions because there are a lot of companies. Even during recessions most companies will be opening to hiring the right candidates.
When there are more candidates than positions combined with a lot of layoffs, companies get more selective. Companies are hiring, but they're being more careful about who gets hired.
The other disconnect is that the employers are trying to fill positions at a certain price point which is usually much lower than most people will accept. Asking why we can't just take those positions when desperate is basically asking why you can't work for significantly less than you have been making for the past 10 years. People have houses and families to support. In some places those jobs pay so little that you can barely make rent with roommates. They exist solely to prove there aren't any qualified US workers for H1B purposes.
A lot of really good people can be had in certain US states if you're willing to pay them a lot of money relative to their local market. I've gotten several applications from some pretty overqualified people simply because the pay for the associate position is higher than their local employers are offering for mid-level people. If you then turn that around, it suggests that some of these employers struggle to fill positions because they actually have to compete on the nation-wide market for people.
Most software engineers lack credentials to get hired to build ai, unless you view conventional software engineering as ai.
The time to build out ai tracks in universities was back in the Obama administration. It’s ridiculous that all of a sudden the whip is being so harshly cracked for everyone to re-skill. I applied to CS grad programs for two straight cycles, with strong GRE scores and a solid CS undergrad degree, and not a single non-remote university program offered me admission, seemingly due to enrollment caps as bottlenecks.
I ended up joining a well-known online MS program, and I feel that it is teaching me so little for the effort I put in that I don’t think my ai skill has improved over what I had from outside of the program, but hey, if the system is broken, what can you do? I can learn nothing, remotely, and use that degree to get an ai job where I do genuinely valuable work, but I’m definitely not allowed to make those genuinely valuable work contributions in a remote role.
The opportunities available are extremely limited or they don’t make sense/aren’t very good. Just smile and play the game… or is it the game that’s playing with candidates?
These stories are bought and paid for, to pressure lawmakers to make it easer to hire H1Bs and/or offshore to lower wages. Much like recent stories about the shortage of engineers or workers in general. Shortage of suckers willing to work below market, that is. None of these companies will consider training existing engineers for a month either.
I agree. H1Bs are akin to indentured servants who do not have the ability to vote. Meanwhile, employers make large payments to politicians to keep the status quo.
What I dislike most is the cheating from H1Bs though. My friend in an AZ university described how foreigners were known to cheat on their exams based the clique of the country they came from. Similarly, I met an H1Bs who sends his work to Indian cheaper workers even though it is supposed to be confidential. They also collude to get their family and friends into the U.S.
Just because a position is advertised does not mean the position is going to be filled - a lot of companies advertise a job that doesn't really exist. They do this for several reasons - to look like they are more successful than they are (if they are hiring they are expanding), and some just collect resumes. They might even do a few interviews, which helps their team practice doing interviews even if the company isn't going to hire. I'm sure there are other reasons.
I've been in the tech job market about 30 years, and this might be the second worst time for people in tech, the dot-com bubble of the early 2000s being the worst. My boss knows it too, he knows I can't leave and find another job that pays as well right now. A couple of years ago I was still getting about 20 recruiter contacts per week, and now I'm lucky if I get 1 per month.
If you haven't noticed how bad it is, I have to wonder why?
I started working in 1996. The dot com bust wasn’t bad if you were in a market with profitable enterprise companies like banks, insurance companies, etc.
I could throw my resume up in the air and find plenty of commodity Windows programming jobs.
It’s much worse now. I found a job quickly both last year and the year before. But that was only because I have a combination of skills and experience that puts me at the top of the pile of resumes in my niche.
Hey I got laid off too. It actually has worked out as a positive over-all.
Job searching is a shit process though. I applied for ~40-50 jobs, only got 1 offer. Small country too, so thats basically all the jobs I could find. But landed in a really good company, and have a bit of a break before I start.
So I've been using all my spare time to learn Graphics programming, C, and Audio Engineering.
I've made a little Wolfenstein3D-type raycasting engine [0] that I'm proud of, as I'm just a frontend coder for work.
I really, really wish the industry would give the fuck up on resumes. It's such a stupid way to hire. Huge waste of time for all involved, inaccurate, lengthy, difficult.
As a hiring manager, I want:
- Your references are already vetted and testimonials left on a public profile,
private on invite for those who haven't left their job yet
- Actual qualifications, like job training and certifications. Even Scrum Training.
I want to know you were actually taught the right way at least once, by a
reputable source
- A written contract that what you say is your experience is true, and that I can
use arbitration to seek damages if you lied
- A standard set of tests administered by experts chosen at random.
- Your requirements to be hired
As a candidate, I want:
- The salary range, hire type (contract/full-time), benefits
- The location
- A description of the project you want worked on and skills required
- Your company's pitch deck or equivalent
- Glassdoor reviews
- My name, age, gender, picture, etc are hidden until the company has clicked a button
that certifies they are interested in me based on my qualifications. I get that we can't
stop hiring bias, but at least make it more obvious when they pass up why they have.
We can't we just agree as an industry that we should all pitch in and make this? There's enough capital here, and it's not like we don't know how to build these things. Certainly there's enough people here motivated to work on it.
Your references are already vetted and testimonials left on a public profile,
No one is going to give you a negative reference on LinkedIn. That doesn’t provide any meaningful signal.
Actual qualifications, like job training and certifications. Even Scrum Training.
Certifications don’t prove competence. Anyone can memorize enough to pass a multiple choice test and there have been brain dumps for them for decades.
I went through the 6 certification .Net “Architect” path back in 2010 basically as a guided learning path with a goal at the end. I knew even back then they were worthless as far as competence and never put them on my resume.
More recently, at one point I had 9 of the then 12 AWS certs as late as 2021. I have 6 of the 9 current ones now and I’m working on the other 3 by the end of the year.
I got my first one without ever opening the console in 2018. They also served as a guided learning path so I would know what I didn’t know and I could talk the talk. But I don’t consider myself knowing a service until I’ve used them.
They are all very shallow marketing certs except I’ve heard good things about the Kubernetes certifications and that they require hands on problem solving.
I want to know you were actually taught the right way at least once, by a reputable source
How would you know that? I have a degree in CS. I graduated in 1996. Is the source I was taught COBOL and FORTRAN from “reputable” or “relevant”?
A written contract that what you say is your experience is true, and that I can use arbitration to seek damages if you lied
Arbitration is biased toward the client and the clients industry. The judges don’t get hired if they consistently make judgments that are against the industry that hires them.
A standard set of tests administered by experts chosen at random.
What I am looking for when hiring is specific to the company. But they have that already - leetCode style interviews that don’t give a signal to whether they are “smart and gets thing done”.
This whole post feels like a elaborate troll. Still, I cannot resist replying.
> testimonials left on a public profile
As a future candidate, what will you do if someone leaves a very negative testimonial about you?
> Actual qualifications
LOL. Then, it is basically impossible to hire most good programmers, because none of them will have "actual qualifications". To make a joke: Linus Torvalds applies for your latest CRUD role. Has no certifications. "Linus Torvalds? Who is this guy thinking he can apply with no certifications? What a silly git.
Next!"
> A written contract that what you say is your experience is true, and that I can use arbitration to seek damages if you lied.
Likewise: You will be personally liable if the candidate wishes to seek damages via arbitration because you oversold (read: lied about) the role during the interview.
Forget about tech for a moment: You can re-write it for hiring people in oil and gas field operations, and it seems just as absurd. Re-write it again for a hospital trying to hire nurses. Still absurd. I picked both of those industries because they are very much learn on the job. Yes, certs exist, but there are many people who work most of their career in those industries with few-to-no certs.
This thread has a lot of interesting anecdata so I’ll add mine.
Over 25 years experience in frontend web, searching since July, and the water is as ice cold as I’ve ever felt it. Low response rates, low interview rates, zero offers. Wondering if the backend grass is slightly greener at the moment or that’s just my perception from the other side of the fence.
Also doing frontend, but my friends from the other side of the stack fence tell me that employers have been piling up responsibilities, so when you apply for a backend position, you're automatically assumed to fit a DevOps role as well.
Anyway, I've found that back in our field it's largely React roles which were affected. Angular jobs are fewer and typically lowballed, but not nearly as much as the rest.
If someone (I don’t know if it is true in your case or not) has a generic set of skills like - “full stack developer” or “front end developer”, there are hundreds of people applying for the same job and it’s hard to stand out.
Firing someone during their parental leave is a special kind of messed up. The fact that it's not completely illegal in any reasonable country is horrifying.
It's illegal in my state in the US. Also if you do FMLA in the US it would be illegal if you're the parent who gave birth. Outside of a few states here in the US you're basically expected back at work as soon as you get out of the hospital unless you have a doctor's note.
I have been let go three times in almost 30 years and I’m on my 10th job.
The first time was at a struggling startup. We all knew they were struggling and the company was very honest with us and kept us abreast of all the companies that our VC backers were pursuing. I was in some of the interviews with potential acquirers.
Our backers promised all of us that “we would get paid for every hour we worked”. Of course they couldn’t promise us we would not get laid off.
All of us stayed until the bitter end. That day we all got laid off after being acquired for scraps, we went to lunch together and hung out in the office just joking around until the end of the day.
We all had something in our back pocket anyway and from looking at LinkedIn, everyone found a job that was either as good or better within a month. This was 2011.
Our largest customer arranged for me to get contract with them to finish out a project, the acquiring company gave the customer access to all of their code and gave me permission to keep my work laptop and waived my non compete.
They gave everyone a month severance. I was treated fairly and have no ill will toward anyone there.
The third time it was a shit show of a company last year. But this is where I have problems with the author
> How do you succinctly summarize and highlight all you’ve done there?
I keep my resume and longer form career document up to date at least once per quarter. I list out the details of major accomplishments in STAR format while it’s still fresh. I have both a technical summary and a business oriented summary for non technical people.
It looks like he learned that lesson too.
> I was being selective and only applying for places I’d realistically want to work
He has a newborn baby. His first priority is to work for any company that will allow him to exchange labor for money to support his family. Even if you do have savings, no need to use it unnecessarily.
I got a 3.5 months severance from Amazon the year before last and my stretch goal was to get an offer before my paid out PTO of 9 days was over let alone dip into my severance.
Of course I reached out to my network first and targeted outreach to companies specializing in my niche (strategic cloud consulting emphasizing app dev). I also spammed my resume to any CRUD enterprise app dev job as a Plan B.
I could always keep interviewing while working. I was working remotely.
I did end up getting a Plan A job offer within 9 days of leaving AWS. But I knew three months in that it wasn’t going to be a long term job.
When the end did come, I was already in the early stages of interviewing for my current job and had an offer three weeks later. But again, I wasn’t going to let the perfect be the enemy of getting any job and I kept applying for Enterprise CRUD jobs until the offer was finalized.
I did work on a side project in 2023. But I got paid for it. A former CTO had some work he needed done.
> I keep my resume and longer form career document up to date at least once per quarter. I list out the details of major accomplishments in STAR format while it’s still fresh. I have both a technical summary and a business oriented summary for non technical people.
I have a bookmarklet that opens a new gmail compose window, with the recipient being "me+journal@employer.com", and the subject being today's date. As I'm working throughout the day, I jot down what I'm working on.
I also used to review these every Friday, and type up a summary, and every few months - or as I'd remember to - update a "hype doc" that's basically like an internal resume that my manager can use to help argue for a raise for me, or whatever.
I also copy this data, without any stuff that might be considered company property, to someplace local I can access if I'm fired.
As a consultant working full time for a consulting company, I usually can’t mention the client. It’s always “a healthcare startup”, “a state government”, etc
These posts are so badass. Thank you to share. Please keep writing. We need more of these.
Literally, your handle "scarface_74" says it all. When PIP comes through the door, you raise your automatic rifle and shout: "Say hello to my little friend!"
Tough times. I feel like this is caused by massive capital misallocation over decades. The vast majority of tech companies should not exist, if not for the financial environment propping them up. Now with interest rates going up, there is less cheap money and companies are forced to lay people off and/or shut down themselves.
Reality is that there are too many software developers chasing a small number of value-creating opportunities in a sea of useless or highly inefficient tech companies.
In the meantime, there aren't enough people to produce food, build houses, collect garbage, etc... So costs of essentials keeps going up. It's hard for software devs to transition to physical jobs so it's going to be a tough one.
> I feel like this is caused by massive capital misallocation over decades
Absolutely a large misallocation. And this is not just about the number of engineers. It is also about number of managers, 2 pizza teams, entire management chains merely doing promotion/PIP management, entire sets of VPs and execs with no market experience or engineering experience. Even a large number of PE investors and angel investors who just landed on money but actually don't have any skills beyond betting far and wide.
Highly paid roles have been paying people who are just doing administrative work. This is misallocation. And all of a sudden, this misallocation has come to bare.
I think this gets to the heart of the current situation. The hard truth is that a lot of office workers are actually unskilled labor hidden behind the right kind of social conditioning and "professionalism".
Yeah, it feels like the system created all these jobs because it could afford to support all that deadweight, but most of those people were not creating value; they were not contributing to the company's success so much as merely mooching off of it.
Also, the centralization of media put this effect into hyperdrive. Successful, high exposure companies were drowning in money and so they could just throw 100 engineers at each tiny problem and it wouldn't materially affect their bottom line. They also didn't care much whether an employee was doing their job efficiently, so long as they met basic objectives... Which wasn't hard to do when you have so many people in the team and each person is responsible for a tiny piece.
Many people could be counter-productive in the long run, they were productive enough to meet their short-term OKRs and so they were left alone but their rushed work set the project up for long term pain... Often it's impossible to trace back issues to specific individuals... In software development, it's trivial to introduce massive technical debt while meeting or even blowing past short-term objectives. Someone who is literally killing the project might appear to be a top performer... They may be promoted before any problems become apparent... Kind of like a bad civil engineer who builds an amazing looking bridge and is celebrated for years until the bridge suddenly collapses because the foundations turned out to be poorly designed. By that point they've already been promoted several times, maybe already retired and they can claim that the collapse was caused by incorrect construction practices or bad maintenance work performed later. However, in software, it's much worse because you can't just point to a single incorrect formula or calculation. Failure is usually the result of many bad decisions.
u guys are getting interviews?
2 years of experience and it's hard.
seems the old markers of dev competence are no longer there, some github projects, a degree were enough nowadays it's a lot harder even here in europe where the salaries are on the low end.
One little tip I learned the hard way: an applicant tracking system (ATS) can claim to have imported your fine-looking Word or PDF resume, but that does not mean that it has correctly parsed it and populated the key fields (eg skills) that it shows to the hiring manager.
The problem seems to be that ATSes struggle with the "modern" style of resume, much beloved of Word template authors, where you might have a left column with your contact details, github, and maybe some skills and then a borderless table on the right side with your positioning statement and job history.
I went from zero callbacks to 80% after I junked Word and rewrote my resume in a much more old fashioned, linear format. I used Overleaf (LaTeX) like it was 1999 and exported to PDF.
I have seen one behavior with ATS that was actually tracked down and might hit fellow HN readers. A recruiter I worked with at a company asked me why I didn’t have any experience with artificial intelligence. I said it was all over my resume - I’ve been in the field for more than a decade. He said that it didn’t show up until that ATS.
It turned out the ATS didn’t properly parse ligatures like “ffi”, “fi”, etc. It rendered them as a blank space, so “artificial” became “arti cial”. I turned over ligature rendering in my resume and started to get more callbacks.
Upon further inspection, I discovered that a lot of LLMs also have problems with ligatures and just ignore them when fed a pdf.
So, maybe those annoying job apps where you upload a resume and still have to fill everything in an HTML form aren’t the worst thing.
Blaming the ATS is a popular myth.
There may be edge cases where some obscure software can't parse a weird resume format, but in general if you put anything remotely resembling a common resume format (Company name, dates worked there, optional description and/or bullet points) it will be parsed properly.
I'm in a big Slack where people ask and give career help. Several hiring managers have offered to test people's resumes on their company's ATS over the years. Nobody has ever found a combination that actually failed the ATS except when it was an obvious problem (like someone who made their resume in Illustrator) or an obvious user error (exporting a resume as an image).
I wouldn't say it's a "myth". My experience is a lot more like the OP's than what you describe.
A few job sites, like WorkDay, have mangled my PDF resume every time I upload it. Like the OP, I've had to massage the layout and formatting to make it more compatible.
Same experience from me. Most website will show you the result of the CV parsing and in the end I find it takes me less time to populate the different parts manually on the recruiter's website than to try to correct the mess those systems made with the risk of errors it introduces. I wish there was some kind of json/xml standard for CVs.
Same. Instantly got two hits back after reformatting. I also simplified my experience section by reducing technicals and focusing more on role responsibilities.
My sense is _most_ resumes are actually reviewed by a human. Most job postings aren't getting 1000s of applicants. If they are, 3 people can review 1000 applications in 2 hours (30s look).
Most companies are not Google. I did some hiring (3 or 4 positions) at a 10 year old stagnant growth “startup” and we got at most 10 applications per day to these engineering positions. This was 2022-2024 so not just the good years.
It's not a myth (I wrote ATS systems, and you usually just pay some third party to do the core parsing job as a library or a service and take your failures on the nose) but at the same time most recruiters are NOT going into past resumes and filtering through them, and most of the wide shot resume hits you get on linkedin are for the lowest tier of jobs.
Almost all recruiters are "most recent resume in" type of folks or "curated long term list" type of folks - they'll either circle you for years trying to get you hired for something or they'll forget your name in 25 minutes.
I've been applying to jobs for the last three months and many companies use systems that automatically parse your resume and then let you manually correct the parsed data. It's nearly always a mess, and I use a very straightforward linear resume template.
It's possible that there is some selection bias here, where mediocre parsing systems give you the option to manually correct everything because they know they are mediocre. I remain skeptical.
I make my resume in Figma, would that break it?
Would you yourself be able to write a Figma-generated PDF parser that reliably extracts necessary semantic content from rasterized text with random layout? If no, likely an average programmer that wrote the application tracking system wouldn't be able to do that either. If yes, then you are very good, and top companies are hunting for you already, you don't need a Figma resume.
Good point! I actually tried my figma pdf resume with the open parser tool mentioned in the thread and sure enough, complete garbage output.
Latex and git has been advantageous to authoring a resume for me. It separates the layout design ant content.
“Oh no it’s 2 pages with only education on p2.”
Quickly comment out a bullet and print off a fresh 1 page pdf. I don’t use dumb words or phrases now to fit layout, at least far fewer. And git makes me less worried about deleting when it isn’t working.
One pattern i use, that i think makes things simpler, is to have a layout/contact template with definitions, then different context specific main latex files inputting from a sub directory of section blocks: experience, skills, education, etc.
I’d thought I was slick with word table layouts for sections, until a counselor told me the table structures persist in the supposedly flat pdf.
I wish there were an standard optional JSON attachment with a ridiculous small kb size limit to upload along with a human readable resume to help out the user data AST parser.
Another option is Typst, which claims to simplify the workflow for producing similarly structured documents.
Here's an example of a simple resumé [0].
You can see in the "Quick Start" section how the resumé template is used, which is very similar to how you described yours.
[0]: https://typst.app/universe/package/basic-resume
> I wish there were an standard optional JSON attachment with a ridiculous small kb size limit to upload along with a human readable resume to help out the user data AST parser.
AFAIK one can embed arbitrary RDF into PDFs, and then one wouldn't need an extra field https://pdfa.org/wp-content/until2016_uploads/2011/08/pdfa_m...
When applying for jobs via LinkedIn it’s very important to use a PDF. A huge number of people submit Word documents, however, LinkedIn doesn’t render them in the browser. Given that most roles get hundreds of applications, unless someone’s previous roles really catch my eye, I am probably not going to download anything.
From my experience, if you are randomly applying via an ATS without a prior outreach , you’ve already lost.
Especially for remote positions, there are hundreds of people applying for every open req and it’s hard to stand out
How do you do the prior outreach without coming across as spammy though ?
That I don’t have a general answer for. Except for the year before last, it’s been responding to recruiters that reached out to me.
The year before last when I did do targeted outreach, it was because I both had relevant experience in a niche AWS service and I was a major contributor to an open source official “AWS Solution” while I was at AWS that was popular in that niche.
But that trick had a very small window.
So I guess the answer is do something that allows you to stand out from the crowd and then you can do prior outreach and tell them why they should hire you over someone else.
My biggest piece of advice is don’t be a “ticket taker”. Volunteer to lead larger initiatives.
> My biggest piece of advice is don’t be a “ticket taker”. Volunteer to lead larger initiatives.
Sure. But who’s going to do all those boring tickets? I know people need to work for themselves, but this just feels so wrong.
I'd recommend before others go too far down the ATS rabbit hole to checkout the wiki from /r/EngineeringResumes
https://www.reddit.com/r/EngineeringResumes/wiki/index/#wiki...
(In short, they might not be as important as you think they are)
And please do not pay anyone for "ATS compatible resume templates" or other ATS related services.
I don't think people realize how many of the ATS myths have been promulgated by people trying to sell services to job seekers. The ATS myth resonates with people for some reason, so desperate job seekers will often pay (unnecessarily) for various "ATS friendly" templates or ATS reviews.
Can you elaborate on the exact layout syntax these ML idiot savant agents want to read? Lack of an industry wide standard data interface makes this terrible.
Take your resume, select all, copy, paste into notepad. Does it still look how you expect? Then youre ok. Otherwise, fix it until it does.
That's it. That's all you need to do.
Even that can fail. I’ve had multiple cases now where my name (!) was auto-parsed wrong in a way human would never do, not even after copy-pasting into Notepad.
The reason? My resume lists my name as follows, where I means the initial for my middle name:
Firstname I. (Nickname) Lastname
And yes, even professionally I do use my nickname and my last name, except for things which must match my government ID, such as offer letters and payroll/tax records, where of course I omit Nickname and use the legal Firstname as well as sometimes the middle initial or full middle name.
With this format, how does Personio parse my name? It thinks I’m called Firstname Nickname. No human would make this mistake, nor would a copy-paste into Notepad cause a human to do that.
And if it has any LLM intelligence at all, it should know that this is unlikely, because Nickname is actually a very common nickname for Firstname, so it should suspect a disperse and have a human double-check its conclusion. Alas.
I’ve also had other issues with these systems misparsing my employment history, since they don’t always properly parse jobs that span corporate acquisitions (changing title and employer at that point but being the same job) and are accurately reflected as such on the resume.
I think mashing up of names happens a lot, since they are not common words. Personally I don't see what the problem is of your name being mangled in a parsed resume, other than when it would look offensive. The name mangling can get easily cleared up after first contact with a real person.
I’ve indeed cleared it up quickly every time it’s happened, but in my opinion, it makes the company look unprofessional in an easily avoidable way. (And yes, I’ve been in the hiring manager role myself - I’d feel the same way if this happened to one of my candidates.)
I call this easily avoidable because name is usually a separate field in the application or referral forms, so this is the bad auto-parsing overriding accurate manual input.
Parsing names is like writing a time library. Sounds easy until you learn the hard way that it definitely isnt.
Some examples that come to mind from my experience are applicants with Chinese names that also use a western name professionally ("Yu-Chen Liew, but I go by Janet"), Spanish names that include patronymics ("Penelope Cruz Sanchez") and cultures that place the family name first ("Park Lee"). Maybe (f,l) = split(name, " ") works in some very homogeneous country like Iceland, but it sure doesnt work in the US.
>Even that can fail. I’ve had multiple cases now where my name (!) was auto-parsed wrong in a way human would never do, not even after copy-pasting into Notepad. [...]
sounds like they did something like:
which is an issue, but unrelated to what everyone else is talking about, which seems to be how text data is being parsed/encoded inside pdfs. Pasting into notepad would check for that issue, but obviously wouldn't do anything for bad first name/last name extraction logic.I felt that the general topic was "software failing to do the right thing parsing the text in PDF resumes in ways a human would get right", which includes all of these types of problems, not specific to encoding issues. But, sure.
Gah. Once again I notice an autocorrect typo beyond the edit window: “disperse” should of course read “misparse”. Thank you iPhone keyboard.
This depends on the PDF viewer. I recommend trying a couple different ones (at least Acrobat and macOS Preview).
I can only speak for what worked for me. A shorthand heuristic might be that if the resume can be read in linear fashion by a screenreader without any weirdness or non sequiturs, it's probably pretty good (another argument in favor of paying attention to accessibility!)
In my case, I had a simple layout with sections clearly delineated and very simple formatting (bulleted lists). Dates were spelled out eg September 2024 rather than 9/24. UTF-8 throughout. No difficult latex packages, just classic ones like enumitem and fancyhdr.
Word/Google Docs -> PDF conversion is perfectly fine, and every system will understand it. Just don't try to get fancy with layouts and stick to headings, subheadings and bullets. People reading the resume will appreciate this as well.
This is how I formatted my resume using Pandoc to generate a word document from a Markdown file. Having everything in Markdown also made it easy to quickly create customized resumes by reordering specific sections or lists in a section as well as tracking changes in Git.
There is an industry standard - HR-XML[0] (disclaimer: I was on the committee for a little while). But I would be surprised if any of the job boards let you import it directly.
Frankly, plain text rendered to PDF is probably going to be the most easily parsed by their systems. If they let you add attachments separate from your resume, then stick your "beautified" resume there.
[0] For the curious: https://www.hropenstandards.org/
Get a boring LaTeX template like "Jake's Resume"
I've spoken with two technical recruiters who say they prefer reading templates instead of hand-crafted Resumes on top of them also parsing better in the ATS system ):
Can confirm a similar attitude from an HR person - they prefer a single-column, easy to scan resume that follows a tried and trusted standard structure and layout.
I wish I could just send JSON…
Please see the job history array.
What happens when companies come up with competing json schemas and you need to massage your data into 15 different schemas?
https://xkcd.com/927/
The other approach is to apply to smaller companies that will actually have human read your CV. Depends on where you want to work of course.
They don’t read your resume either, it goes into Greenhouse or some other ATS. Either gotta work with the parser or have a personal referral.
I've used LaTeX, online resume generators and Google Docs templates, but they were unfruitful. I've applied to 350 jobs and only got one screening recruiter call (then was ghosted). Despite having 2+ YoE and published research as well as having worked as a contractor for FAANG (I even made one loads of money in stock after they applied my recommendations)!
If you've applied 350 times with that kind of success, then it might time to revise your approach, your CV or both.
I've never found good leads with cold approaches. Even when getting contacted and receiving an offer, it was always low salaries on that method. What worked best was going to related events, talking to people hosting the booths, talk to presenters of topics where I'm an expert and this way get warm introductions.
Yeah, it's probably because I took a non-tech job (stock broker) for the health insurance. Also I went back to college after I quit my last FT cybersecurity job. I also used ApplyAll which may of messed up parsing my resume in Workday.
If you're into tech development nowadays, it goes a long to list a portfolio of things you've built. That goes a long way to tell an employer if you have the skills to build what they need.
Yeah, I just have a text file and convert it to HTML for people that want to view it on the web. Has never been a problem. I'm not a graphic designer and if that's a skill you want, you got the wrong girl.
I have done two different types of resumes; long and sort. When I was learning about resumes in high school and college, they said to just list your jobs and maybe some key skills. I have been told this is useless to recruiters. So I rewrote things to have a couple paragraphs about major projects at this jobs. I have been told this is too long and nobody has time to read it. So now I have both and you can pick the one you want.
I got laid off recently so this is fresh in my mind, but I got a job through my network instead which did not involve a resume or interviews. That's really how it should be. (I'm kind of just waiting for the founders from my last startup to start something new... they didn't survive the reorg either, which was a "sort by salary descending and only keep the last 3". The joys of having your software startup bought by an indecisive large company that doesn't do software ;)
> I got laid off recently so this is fresh in my mind, but I got a job through my network instead which did not involve a resume or interviews. That's really how it should be.
Not sure about the 'should', but I think it is. Over the years I had the pleasure to work with quite a few good people, but there were also some buffoons (not counting those in marketing). I can only imagine, that the resume of the latter will look more appealing.
+1 here. I have two resumes. One looks nice/modern and its what I send recruiters/managers once I have an interview scheduled. One is an ugly, to me, plain looking word doc that application tracking systems can gronk.
> much beloved of Word template authors, where you might have a left column with your contact details, github, and maybe some skills and then a borderless table on the right side with your positioning statement and job history
The design always struck me as a clumsy attempt to take up space.
For me, a similar approach is actually the exact opposite. It's always a struggle to fit a good summary of your professional life on a single page and being able to put some short stuff in multiple columns can help you save space. For example I usually have certifications, trainings, etc in two columns since they're often fairly short entries.
I wonder if there's an open(-source) ATS system out there against which we might test such simpler templates?
I would try with https://www.open-resume.com/resume-parser
they offer the option to parse your cv and see what "comes out on the other side"
I am not sure whether the idea of the parser is to be a starting point to then use the editor, or a test.
Openresume really butchers mine despite using a pretty standard latex template. I wonder if my resume is really that bad?
It parses "Jake's Resume" well
https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/jakes-resume/syzfjb...
I wonder what the origin of that template is, because it looks almost identical to mine, and I yoinked my template from somewhere back in 2012-2013. It says it's based on sb2nov/resume [0], but that only goes back to 2017. They must've based it on something as well.
[0] https://github.com/sb2nov/resume/
It would be useless to test against a system that companies weren't using. I wouldn't count on anything open source in the HR space, to be honest.
I remember seeing a list of companies you could "apply" to with your resume that would then show the ATS-parsed version back to you. Every single person who used it got a reasonable result back, which is usually enough to put an end to all of the ATS myths out there.
Yep, you are quite right. Curious about that list of companies, if you are keeping it?
Thanks for posting this!
[dead]
The biggest pain / fear related to layoffs for me isn't the immediate actual loss of income...
It was that I have to go job hunting and how demoralizing and toil heavy that process is. Heck I'd likely go job hunting just out of curiosity, the idea of exploring other options should be interesting at the least, but naw it's too much of a pain.
>Recruiters. Don’t discount or blow them off.
That's all they do for me ... I suspect there's a subset of people who are very attractive to recruiters and they actually do things for those people and I am not in that group. The advice surrounding recruiters is always so disconnected from my experience that it seems strange.
The leetcode grind is my biggest dread. I can do it and I do well, but I'll be damned if it isn't a lot of mindless rote memorization that immediately leaves my brain the second I land the job, never to be used again (even in my job) until the next time I apply around.
At least you can do it well, imagine the grind when you can't.
Remember when fizzbuzz was the gold standard in trick interview questions? And Joel was a revolutionary for advocating it? Things have certainly changed.
In some sense, leetcode is fizzbuzz on steriods. As I recall, the "trick" to fizzbuzz is knowing about the modulo operator. Most leetcode problems have a similar trick that you need to know/learn to complete them correctly.
Fizzbuzz wasn't about seeing if a candidate knew the 'tricks', it was to test if you knew how to code at all. If you know about loops and if statements you can do fizzbuzz even you've never heard about modulo operators. Fizzbuzz was designed to catch the complete bullshitters who literally could not code. Apparently that was a real problem people were having at the time.
At the time? It's still happening today!
Lots of jobs don't require Leetcode. I haven't done it in years yet I still get jobs consistently.
Too many folks in this industry think any job other than FAANG/startups is not serious.
Look at this way: It's just something you do for money.
I wonder what’s the value of even doing leetcode when AI can solve it in 10 seconds…
It’s not about testing ability to solve those problems, it’s about testing conformity, determination, and IQ (while being job-specific and thus legal).
It's about conformity.
Every place that tested leetcode in my interview (easy/mediums) never impressed me with their work culture. Usually it's a proxy test for obedience and/or accepting bureaucracy.
Also forget about career advancement. (Why would we promote you when we can replace you with another code puzzle solver?)
IQ tests aren't illegal. Several big companies overtly use them.
AFAIK Hasn’t been legal unless the test is closely related to the job since Griggs v. Duke Power Company, a 1971 SCOTUS case.
You can just go look this up with IQ test vendors; you don't have to derive it axiomatically. They proudly list their (large) clients.
You need to ensure that the test doesn't discriminate on the basis of a protected characteristic though.
These are just completely bog-standard cognitive aptitude tests; in fact, they are if anything less rigorous than a modern IQ test. They're generally not specialized to specific jobs. You can read Reddit threads about people taking (and studying for) them.
Don't get me wrong: I think this is an incredibly dumb practice. But there's a mythology that IQ testing is a super-effective tool for recruiting that has been suppressed by anti-discrimination law. That is not the case. Most companies don't use IQ tests, because they're not fit for purpose.
It really really depends. If you're gonna train junior people then IQ tests are great, otherwise work sample tests are better.
It definitely is true that IQ tests are used less in the US because of prior case law though.
You mean they're selecting for lower IQ? (higher candidates will avoid the leetcode jobs)
The highly specific/specialized problems leetcode has presented have never held value, outside of a very small set of companies (i.e. MOFAANG).
What's the O in the acronym?
Oracle
While the actual implementation isn't particularly good having a decent understanding of algorithms is useful in a lot of contexts.
Honestly I just stopped interviewing at leetcode places and those that expect you to "prepare" for their interview, especially those that are dumb no-name SaaS companies.
It's less about me being stubborn as it is those places are hiring based on the wrong skills, and those end up not being good places to work.
Simply don't, lean on your network if you can. It ends up bottlenecking your search anyway.
Except at smaller companies, your network just gets you a referral and interview. You still have to go through the same interview process.
The two exceptions I have had were when a former coworker who is now the director of an f500 non tech company was going to create a strategic position for me. He needed someone he could trust.
The other time was when a CTO and the director of application development were both former coworkers from another company and it was just a matter of me saying yes.
The first job would have been more stress than I was willing to deal with and I don’t do large companies (I was suffering from PTSD from my time at AWS). The second didn’t have the budget to meet my compensation target.
Oh totally! My aim is to avoid leetcode as a 10y+ developer with real track record delivering $XM projects. To me it is a game breaker to have to study up on leetcode problems, as it keeps me from juggling multiple interview in the pipeline.
Every network job I've gotten (two) has been a walk on interview, I'm fine with this as long as I don't have to do circus problems.
Sure you can avoid leetCode if you’re okay with not maximizing your compensation by working at one of the FAANG or adjacent companies that pay at top of market.
But you aren’t going to have a walk on non leetcode interview at one of the companies that pay a quarter million+ for a mid level developer based on a referral. I’m not saying you are a mid level developer just giving an example of comp.
The amount a returning intern I mentored when I was at BigTech had a return offer that was the same as I made two years prior at 60 person startup.
Now that I’m out of BigTech, I had to get a job as a “staff software architect” at a 3rd party consulting company to come close to what I was making in 2020 as mid level consultant at AWS and I’m making over $80K less than I would make as a senior doing the same thing at AWS or GCP.
I’m 50, an empty nester and I’m good with making that trade off. I would rather get an anal probe with a cactus than ever work at any large company again.
But if I were 30 in 2024 instead of in 2004, yeah I would grind leetCode to make a 300K+ a year.
And yeah I got into BigTech without a coding interview and could probably weasel my way into Google/GCP in the consulting department without one. But that needle would be hard to thread for the vast majority of prople
That’s why I always advise anyone in CS to practice for coding interviews
good advice - I do hard disagree with Sure you can avoid leetCode if you’re okay with not maximizing your compensation by working at one of the FAANG or adjacent companies that pay at top of market.
I think the BIGGEST misconception in our industry is that it is only FAANG that pays TOP dollar. No one teaches CS grads coming out of college the hardest truth of it all - you will get paid what you are worth to the company and your career should be geared towards figuring out how to make yourself more valuable to a company that company is to you - this is where REAL money is and this can be had in A LOT of places. there are maybe 10 people at FAANG that have this - 99.76% of people at FAANG are expendable. too many bodies - most of the people are no ones. on the flip side there are 1,000’s of companies that have been in business for decades - there, with proper planning (much better time spent than fucking leetcode), you can become more valuable to the company than company is to you and your salary will reflect that - even higher than highest of salaries at FAANG…
I don’t care how much I’m “worth” that 60 person startup I worked for pre-AWS wasn’t going to pay me $225K and I went in as a mid level consultant. That was fair, I only had 2 years of AWS experience at the time.
The 600 person company I work for now isn’t going to match what I could make at Google. On the other hand, Google would require me to be in an office and I would not have unlimited PTO.
Everyone is expendable. No matter where you work.
I don’t think you know the salary ranges at BigTech and how they compare to the rest of the market. Those thousands of companies aren’t going to pay FAANG salaries.
That grad I mentioned coming out of college is making $160K their first year and that was working in Professional Services not development. An SDE was starting out at $175K - $190K
I definitely agree with you: Looking for a job (or "keeping your doors & windows open to new opportunities") while having a job is much, much easier -- mentally. In my industry, most connections with head hunters are made through LinkedIn. You can set a special flag in your profile that says "I'm looking for work", but this is only visible to professional head hunters (they pay a lot of money for an account with these special privileges). It works very well. Normally, the calls start with: "Them: Are you looking at the moment? Me: No, but I am open to new and exciting opportunities. Them: Oh, great. I have something for you." Do that enough, and eventually something very good lands on your doorstep.
> At my level (middle manager), as soon as I start my new job, I start looking for my next job." He was exaggerating, but the point stayed with me.
That’s no exaggeration at all. I’m not always looking for a job. But everything I do I do with one eye toward how will this look when I get ready to interview? Am I working on tech that is demand? Am I working at the correct “scope, impact, and ambiguity” or am I just being a “ticket taker”?
I have 3 rock-bottom criteria for responding to a recruiter:
1) They use the correct email address, the one I used on my resume and to apply for jobs, and didn't dig out my personal one somewhere.
2) They don't say something stupid that reveals they didn't even look at my resume. ("I see you have C# experience", uh no I don't)
3) They include anything at all that's supposed to interest me, even if it actually doesn't.
The vast majority fail at step 1. I've only ever had one email from a recruiter that passed all these criteria.
You're saying that the "vast majority" of recruiters receive your CV (from wherever) and instead of contacting you on the email address on your CV they will Google around for your personal email address? I don't believe you. Why would anyone do that extra step when they already have your email address?
I’ve had recruiters find my work email after a phone call. They proceeded to send a bunch of emails while I was screen sharing. I was able to hide it but it was almost a disaster.
Next to no recruiters out there are doing things by hand. Everything is automated. They’re not googling for you.
More than half of recruiters will ghost me after I've jumped through the hoops (phone call, CV, filling grid, security clearance forms, etc).
Might depend on the niche you're in, or your location. My experience with recruiters (on the hiring side) mirrored what I heard from friends who got hired through recruiters: they're basically match-makers.
If you're not a well-known name, you can have your job-postings but you won't get any applications. Either you spend time on advertising and try to convince people that you're really real and actually really want to hire, or you just get yourself someone who introduces you to people who might be a good fit. That's a recruiter.
Out of the 10 jobs I have had since 1996, 6 came from external recruiters. I met five of them in person over lunch or in their office when I was looking for local jobs in Atlanta until 2022.
The one I didn’t meet in person was a specialized recruiter for my niche.
Two came from me reaching out to them and two were from internal recruiters
Yeah -- the best recruiters have been "let's meet in person and chat about what you're looking for" people who would send me jobs when I was looking. The worst ones open the conversation by asking for my social over the phone.
> I really wish companies would start giving honest feedback even if it’s hard for the candidates to heard at first. It would be a much better way for candidates to improve themselves and we’re all adults here and can take the feedback.
I’ve said it before, and I say it again. This isn’t true. When companies try to be helpful and give you well meaning feedback, you find out that their reasons for rejecting you are absolutely banal, and you’d have been better off not hearing anything.
When I first become a hiring manager I thought I'd be the exception and provide everyone with detailed and honest feedback.
I didn't last very long. Candidates would see the feedback as an invitation to prove me wrong or argue with my assessment. I got a few very angry e-mails from people who took their rejection very personally and made it clear that I was their enemy. One person (who was actually very unqualified) even went on a mini rampage across the internet, trying to "name and shame" my company and even my personally for the rejection. There were even threats of a discrimination lawsuit.
So I stopped. It's back to something like "We've decided to proceed with other candidates"
I once interviewed for a job where they admitted I was the only person in the pipeline. I was then rejected with a canned "This was a highly competitive process and we've decided to proceed with other candidates" email. Did not feel great.
Do you think you would feel even worse if they explained, in detail, why you were rejected? I guess that you would feel even worse.
That surely depends on things the company knows and sadly also on things the company doesn't know. Are the reasons things that the applicant can change (e.g. lack of relevant experience or poor presentation skill?) or things they can't change (too old, wrong gender), but also how sensitized is the applicant to rejection (due to recent experiences)?
It is better to ask your internal recruiter / HR department to inform the candidate of your feedback (if you work for a big enough company). It is also good practice to always have a panel, not just the hiring manager, doing interviews.
So the candidate gets feedback along the lines of: "Thank you for participating in our interview process. Unfortunately, our panel decided you weren't the best fit for position X at this time, because ...reasons.... Under company policy, we won't accept further applications from you for one year from today, but we would encourage you to apply for a role with us in the future".
There is a chance they will reply back to HR arguing, but it is their job to be polite but firm that the decision is already made, and that they can apply again in one year (and not pass anything back to the hiring manager).
The key is to think long term and about the company as a whole - the candidate who gets helpful feedback and is treated fairly is more likely to apply again in the future (after the mandatory cooling off period), when they might have more skills and experience working somewhere else. There is a finite qualified labour pool no matter where you are based, and having the good will even of rejected candidates is a competitive advantage. The message should be "not now", rather than "not ever" (although of course, if they do go on some kind of rampage, they could turn the not now into not ever - that's a bridge burning move). If a tiny percentage go on a rampage, but the company protects the individuals from it, and has lots of counteracting positive sentiment from prospective and actual staff, then it's still a net positive.
Many (larger) companies have a strict (defensive) policy against providing honest feedback for exactly these reasons.
This happened to me when I had to reject a doctor from my research study due to his site manager being unprofessional and his site being an audit risk. I sent a brief professional two-sentence vague rejection note thanking him for his time and wishing the best in his future research and he responded with an absolutely unhinged 17-paragraph rant, threatening lawsuits, calling my vendor CRO a crazy cat lady, saying she was too old to find happiness in life, ranting about San Francisco liberals (his clinic was in NYC), threatening to sue me, threatening to sue my vendor, threatening to turn us all into the FDA for fraud and wasting his time, and on, and on. It was completely shocking to read and really opened my eyes to how viciously and crazily people can lash out when they feel rejected. I was really glad I kept my rejection brief I can't imagine what he would have latched onto and ranted about if I'd given any specifics about why we didn't select his site. The weirdest part is he came to us very highly recommended from another doc!
If I gave the last candidate I interviewed candid feedback it would be “You need to bump up your technical skills (obvious during interview) and the photos on your photography site which you added to your resume for me to click on makes me question if you are a serial killer.”
Instead I sent something akin to “we decided on another candidate”
> The weirdest part is he came to us very highly recommended from another doc!
Some people are fantastic on the happy path but horrible on the sad path.
>>>we’re all adults here and can take the feedback
yeah - I don't know why OP makes that sorta assumption. I'd expect angry replies with no benefits to the time wasted on my part.
The online world has indeed become more hostile over time.
It's not about online world, I think. When I was younger, I used to call each candidate with interview results — I've heard some of the rudest words directed at me ever. Stopped forever after a few rude calls.
Here's another issue, the interviewer is sometimes wrong. Or, there was a miscommunication. At least twice in my career I missed an offer because the interviewer didn't think I had experience in something, but turns out I had decades of it. But, I don't brag. Heard thru the grapevine, "oh they said you didn't have database experience," hears me using databases since the late 80s. WTF?
So I could imagine debating a point while being in the right.
Good luck getting an interviewer to look at you again once they’ve written you off. Never happened in my career.
Going the other direction.. most of the time I've seen feedback given to a candidate, they freaked out about it and got defensive. Not worth the risk.
And even in the case where the candidate is right to push back on the feedback, the process has usually moved on with another candidate already, so it's just awkward for everyone.
It’s banal because nobody is going to share the truth for fear of retaliation unless they’ve never done this before
True that. I just got some "honest feedback" that I didn't agree with at all. I'm all for criticizing myself, but this feedback totally missed the mark. I didn't have deep enough experience with "object oriented programming". What does that even mean? I've been creating and using objects every day since 2007. I literally... don't know what to do with that feedback. It's like the carpenter interview, "Have you ever built brown houses? Our client is very interested in brown houses."
> didn't have deep enough experience with "object oriented programming". What does that even mean?
This could mean two things. "You aren't knowledgeable about OOP" or "you couldn't show us that you are knowledgeable in OOP". If it isn't the former, maybe it's the latter? Maybe the real+underlying feedback is that you couldn't convey your breadth of knowledge in your interview?
We just talked about my development experience and management style. Gang of Four never came up, so the OOP thing was unexpected and confusing.
Being from both sides, I would say it depends.
But especially after a take home assignment, feedback should be given 100% and face to face. It's almost embarrassing to spend X hours/days of your (spare) time only to be rejected with an email and usually some random reasons, without having the chance to explain why you built this toy project that way, how much time you spent and what would you do with more time or in production or even showcase some live coding on top of what you did.
But everything has become really inhumane, no-one cares. That's why AI is dominating and ruining the field.
Got rejected after a take home, and the feedback from the recruiter was 1. a reviewer thought I used a library incorrectly (they actually misunderstood how the library worked) and 2. I didn’t implement something that the instructions had explicitly said not to implement.
I didn’t argue with 1 because I figured it was pointless and it sounded like the recruiter was having a rough day. I politely pointed out 2 as a courtesy and he said “huh, the other guy yelled at me about that”.
Although honestly, I left the process thinking “lol” instead of “I’m a dumbass” like I might have absent the feedback.
> and he said “huh, the other guy yelled at me about that”.
If this was SASR recruitment that'd be the pysch portion of the test, reject a candidate for a reason that makes no sense and watch their reaction ...
The assessment never stops, everything's a meta test, and they push until you quit the recruitment merry go round.
In the relatively normal world of software engineering .. that's a recruiter landed with a poor testing pachage and procedures.
Another issue is that positions which are advertised are often already filled by some acquaintance, but we need to go thru the motions of posting the job, sifting thru resumes, interview questions, leetcodes, etc. and interview theatre before we go and hire the acquaintance.
Sometimes, HR doesnt know and the interview panel may not know.
> their reasons for rejecting you are absolutely banal, and you’d have been better off not hearing anything.
If it's banal, I'd like to know. Otherwise you're still left wondering whether it's anything that hinders you in the longrun.
If it's not BS it's stuff that should have been obvious from the interview.
They were looking for a network engineer who could program a little and you're a programmer who knows a little about networks or something like that.
I have a spreadsheet of my job hunts since 2008 across 8 times I was looking for a job. I was working at my first two jobs between 1996-2008
I’ve been rejected three times once I started the interview process. I have also always gotten interviews from companies where external or internal recruiters reached out to me and I submitted my resume.
All three times I’ve gotten rejected was post mid 2023.
It was clear from one within 10 minutes that I wasn’t what they were looking for. I’m not sure why I didn’t get hired for the second one after going through the rounds even though I have my suspicions.
The third I got ghosted after the HR screen where the representative from the target company’s investor interviewed me.
Only three interview misses in 15 years?
A little background for context:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42622893
So by 2008, I was 34, starting over and applying for enterprise CRUD jobs where I was competing against people with a lot less experience and maturity. I was cheap labor. That held true in 2008 and 2012 and I was digging my way out of the “expert beginner” years.
It wasn’t until 2014 when I was actually starting to be recruited for strategic positions. In 2014, 2016 and 2018 I was an early strategic hire by a then new director/manager/CTO to lead major initiatives.
My interviews were two adults talking about strategy. By 2014, I was 40 years old.
2020, a remote position at AWS Professional Services fell into my lap. I was 46 then.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38474212
Now looking for a job in 2023 and 2024 targeting full time roles at cloud consulting companies, can you imagine how easy it is for a 50 year old who knows how to communicate decently, with 25+ years of development experience, 6 years of AWS experience including 3 at AWS to get a job at those companies?
Now when you take AWS away from me, I am just another enterprise Dev with above average communication and project management skills.
Two of my three rejections were at product companies even then the interviews were behavioral. It does concern me a little that I got rejected from product companies that were looking for “architects”.
My title right now is “staff software architect” at a consulting company.
With regards to what they're saying, the first thing to do is reverse the perspective. The applicant is hearing a yes or no, so if it's a no they want to know what they did wrong to improve themselves.
From the interviewer's perspective - we get someone who is average, then another person who is average, then someone who has trouble with basic questions, then we get this person who may be as average as the first two, then we get someone who answers every question correctly, and has a deep knowledge of the domain if you drill down, then you get an average person again.
There's nothing really wrong with the person, they did as well as four other people. It's just that someone else came in who was a standard deviation above the majority of the people in the bell in the normally distributed Gaussian curve.
> More than 150,000 layoffs were reported in 2024 and a whopping 264,000 in 2023.
I switched careers in my 30s to get into tech. It was big, difficult pivot. At the moment, I do not regret it and really like what I do.
But the job market is shockingly bad. I do not have an optimistic outlook, so I am looking to pivot again, likely a small business. All the extra cash I have after expenses, I put towards various side hustles. One big upside to being a SWE is that I can make whatever app I want and put it on the internet publicly.
The job market is bad because a lot of people joined tech when there was a lot of open roles (and a lot of SV money). The money has returned to its pre-bubble level, so there's fewer jobs. But the same number of people looking for work as during the bubble when they switched careers. Most of those new workers lack deep skills, so the existing jobs are going unfilled. Most of the listings I see now are for senior and above.
I agree with you, mostly.
Another problem is management attitudes towards hiring. They are switching their capricious attention and investment towards AI [1] and off shore to save costs [2, 3].
The combination of all this is making for an ugly combo of negativity. Tech used to be a lot more fun, even before the SV ZIRP hysteria.
[1] https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-will-hire-no-more-s...
[2] https://www.turing.com/blog/top-us-companies-choosing-offsho...
[3] I work at a large bank. Almost all our new roles are exclusively in India and the Philippines.
Ahh I wonder how bootcamps are doing these days..
Well, PG's beloved Austen Allred (of Lambda School, now BloomTech), has started a different company... So, bootcamps are probably doing pretty bad
Been programming since I was 14, pursued a career in another field so that I could program for fun. I have considered pivoting my career to software development many times. Seeing people far more qualified than me have nightmarish job hunting experiences always makes me think twice. When people with 10+ years of experience can't find a job, there's no reason to believe self-taught programmers without degrees ever will.
Starting a business seems like the only real answer. Struggling only makes sense when it's for your own company.
You and the other million of devs think the same, that's why the indie dev market is exploding and twitter is full of influencers posting their app revenue..
This is so true, and I'm in fact going through this right now. One of my semi-technical friends followed an online tutorial and created a stock tracker web app, almost entirely using ChatGPT. It is a pretty good achievement (in the context of someone who isn't a programmer and started from scratch), and I'm encouraging him to keep going down this path and developing his skills. He is however convinced that he can launch this app and make millions, and is even considering quitting his job to do it full time. There is zero chance it is going to get any kind of traction, and I keep telling him that, but he is too enamored by all the "influencers" on LinkedIn/X telling him that he is basically a 10x engineer now.
man, launching and leaving your job is definitely not the way to sustainably, or successfully work for yourself.
I encourage others who want to work for themselves to reduce their core work hours if possible, and spend the new free time working on their projects.
Otherwise you will burn out
I think we will see a small business "renaissance" of sorts:
- many local small business owners are aging baby boomers, they will be exiting + retiring; that's opportunity to back-fill
- the culture among younger people (millennial and younger) seems to be more focused on employment over entrepreneurship; they seem to prefer the safety of stable employment over taking risk on their own (I have no data backing this, just anecdotal experience...but I think its bc of student loans)
- stable employment with a big company is not so stable anymore, most of human history leans entrepreneurial, big corps are recent phenomenon
I could keep going but I will stop there.
At one point, one has to be either 'life smart' and look around at all the life lessons from other people, or end up repeating many of those.
Yup, I've been calling this out as the other side of the coin of LLMs for a while now. If dev skill is no longer a barrier to entry and you can spin up an application using chatGPT over the weekend, then so can literally EVERYBODY else on the face of the planet.
You think it was hard competing against 10 other similar apps? Try 1000 or 10,000 competitors.
If you code, you should be building a business on the side.
Especially if you are early in your career and its becoming harder to land a stable job.
you need to learn how to market your skills, get clients and deliver.
No more excuses to sit in a job and do nothing. This is going to be critical to survive.
Eventually I think companies are going to be much smaller entities than they once were which means your have to really buid your own biz.
Yes because it’s harder to land a stable job, it’s much more realistic to start a business that is going to convince enough people to pay you enough to support yourself.
Also you have to convince companies to do business with you instead of a well known company.
Oh and to be competitive you need to have some type of funding.
And you need to make enough to pay for health care.
>Yes because it’s harder to land a stable job, it’s much more realistic to start a business
In a slowed down market, both get difficult, the latter many times more than the first.
In general yes, but there are always extra opportunities to start a business when times are down, because some things will be more in demand then.
And you are also competing with everyone else thinking the same thing.
> it’s much more realistic to start a business that is going to convince enough people to pay you enough to support yourself.
I only have to convince one place - Google Ads. Plus bring in the "eyeballs" with my free app, but I have accomplished that more than once.
> Also you have to convince companies to do business with you instead of a well known company.
Just one company in my case (actually several, but 90+% of the money comes from Google)
> Oh and to be competitive you need to have some type of funding. I have to be competitive enough to make a few thousand a month, and with my programming (and database design, and UX, and SRE etc.) skills, I have achieved that.
> And you need to make enough to pay for health care. In the US you do.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/12/most-subscription-mobile-a...
> the top 5% of apps generate 200 times the revenue of the bottom quartile after their first year, while the median monthly revenue an app generates after 12 months is less than $50 USD.
https://medium.com/beyond-agile-leadership/the-difference-be....
>Success rate: According to Zippia, only 0.5% of mobile apps are successful, with 9,999 out of 10,000 apps failing. Fyresite estimates that 99.5% of consumer apps and 87% of business apps fail.
Now imagine what would happen if more people took that advice?
For context, a new grad working in a major city in the US not on the west coast - even an ordinary CRUD enterprise framework developer - can make $70k- $80K a year.
What exactly is a “few thousand a month”? That’s a good side hustle. But even that’s not enough to support yourself
the most importat skills to learn:
1. Sales = learn to knock on a 100 doors to get one sale.
2. Marketing = learn to communicate your value prop to specific companeis and hiring managers.
3. Delviery = learn to deliver products/projects end to end with all the management that goes in between.
If you know all 3 you'll never be in a position where you don't have income. It takes about 4 years to really get a grasp of all 3 so start now ... don't just do a 8 hour job and go home and watch tv.
Keep trying to sell your services to others ... at least 2-3 hours after work to other companies/startups/other industries. Its a big world - smeone needs your services - your survival depends on finding those people nad packaging your skilsl so that they buy.
Good advice if you don't have a family. Utterly impossible for someone with small kids and a wife who is also working.
Having a wife who is working takes some of the financial pressure off.
My children were four and eight when I started my business and it wasn't a problem at all. In fact I would say it made many things easier because I had a more flexible schedule.
This thread is about doing this on the side, while still keeping a full time job.
time-management and sleep deprivation, should write a book with that title 0600 - 0900 Your project 0900 - 1600 Corporate job 1700 - 2100 Family & free time (you need to learn how to make the most of it so that you can recharge as well) 2100 - 2300 The low-CPU low demanding part of managing a business paired with some interesting background content goes here
A certain amount of good quality sleep is not optional and sleep deprivation is not sustainable.
7 hours isn't sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation is..no sleep. Or incredibly little sleep.
Considering the schedule has you stopping one task and one time and starting another exactly seven hours later, that’s not seven hours of sleep. Most people don’t stop a task and immediately fall asleep, or wake up and can start working. That gap means less than seven hours of sleep. And for many people seven hours isn’t enough. Sleep deprivation means not having enough quality sleep, it’s not a single number which can be applied to everyone all the time equally.
It's a rough schedule. It's not work to the minute of 11:00pm then start unwinding. You might be pretty unwound by 10:30 and then answer a couple of emails before making a hot drink at 10:45 and calling it a night. It seems a bit silly to overly argue how that can't possibly describe a full night's sleep, when it clearly can.
> It's a rough schedule.
I agree, it is pretty rough, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone and don’t think anyone should follow it if they intend to live a full happy life.¹
¹ I know what you meant, I’m making a joke.
That's like saying a 500 calorie diet isn't starvation, because starvation is literally no food or incredibly little food.
4 hours in the evening, nicely compartmentalised. If only. Where are the wake ups, the pickups & drops, the tidying, the admin, etc.
Yeah it’s pretty simple. Just teach your kids to walk and the importance of no sleep interruptions, then they can get themselves to kindergarten and make their own food. /s
Some people will criticize but I follow a similar time management schedule.
It was only when I've built my first startup that many of those skills had to be learned and to be quite frank, I only wish to have started earlier rather than being throw into for making enough money.
Nowadays that schedule is accurate and I'm a family person with two young kids in the house. I just don't wake so early but that is mostly because I keep working on my personal projects until midnight~1 AM.
The good thing is that I'm no longer so attached with my employer company. Mismanagement, demotion or those issues don't affect me so personally because my professional value is no longer just defined by the company where I work. My work outside company hours is valued by many others, albeit not profit-driven it serves as a good backup whenever falling into unemployment situations.
My “backup” is not working 40 hours a week, then working on a side project and sacrificing time with my family and friends, not having time to exercise and travel and just relax.
My backup is an always up to date resume with an up to date skill set, and a longer career document, a years worth of expenses in a HYSA in addition to retirement savings, low fixed expenses, and a decent network.
I figure in a year someone , somewhere will give me a job or contract. While my wife hasn’t had to work since 2020 at 44 when I was 46, she has kept her CDL so if push comes to shove, she can get a job with the school system as a bus driver for the benefits while I build up an independent consulting clientele.
I found a job quickly both in 2023 and last year.
You probably don't have kids. Or if you do, that's really low amount of time and overall pretty horrible long term life quality setup, I guess then wife picks up most of family chores. Maybe your career is stellar, added value as a parent and (not only) emotional anchor for your kids... not so much.
Where is commute? Corporate jobs in IT are not 8 hours sharp and ciao, there is also lunch break to count in. Also 23-6 means 7 hours of sleep, too little for many. And so on.
> Corporate jobs in IT are not 8 hours sharp and ciao
He doesn't even have 8 hours there for the corporate job.
>2100 - 2300
Yeah, your kids are gonna love that quality 21:00-23:00 time...
The formatting is off, family time is 17:00-21:00 in GP's comment.
I think it's meant to be Family 17-21
Yes is just that easy. You don’t actually have to have anything to sell. If that’s all it takes, why do only 1 in 10 startups succeed and that isn’t even counting all of the people who are struggling in obscurity.
Start with ecommerece. Buy on Alibaba for $200 and sell it.
Anything easy to do margins tend toward $0.
...they didn't learn to sell well enough /s
This will not work if the status quo actually changes to a degree that a significant portion of developers have to do this. It'd very quickly saturate the people willing to give you a chance.
This was a good advice 10-2 yrs ago, but going forward? We'll have to see, but my gut says this will become just as likely to succeed as becoming a successful influencer... By which I mean that a few will occasionally make it/succeed, but it'll only be such a low fraction of the people trying for it that it rounds to 0.0%. and the ones succeeding will generally have been able to leverage an opportunity that most trying the same never had.
(Not to discourage people from trying - without an attempt you won't even have the chance to grasp such an opportunity. I'm just looking at it from the perspective of an observer)
> It takes about 4 years to really get a grasp of all 3 so start now
That 4 years number sounds like an ass pull. What’s your source? Everyone is different and some of those skills come naturally to some people, so I sincerely doubt that number is even close to universal.
Honestly, your whole suggestion seems straight out of one of those generic self-help scams that ignore the realities of life and always blame the user: “You gotta do the thing. If you’re not successful it’s because you didn’t want it enough, not because we’re dispelling the same dated advice to everyone”.
Note I don’t think that’s what you’re doing, you’re not selling anything. I’m just saying I question the helpfulness and quality of the advice.
Buy $200 of anything from Alibaba.
Sell online.
Max Cost of experiment: $200 + hours put in.
You'll learn to sell.
None of my advice is expensive in time or money. But it requires effort and ability to learn from failure.
The learning from failure is the key part. Everything else is just qualia.
> If you code, you should be building a business on the side.
This is incredibly far from being the universal claim you say it is. 99% of software developers work for someone else, not at their own business, and most are perfectly happy.
By all means, building a business is great for many reasons, sometimes including financial reasons, and you should do it if you want to. But not wanting to is not an "excuse" and you shouldn't feel pressured to do so.
100%. people wanna blame companies for laying people off, doing leetcode, having ATS systems that don't parse resumes correctly.
if people realized - aimed at software engineers - that the same company you're applying for - someone went through the pain of creating the initial product, marketing it, selling it. I'm sure you can do the same - maybe not at the same level but at 80%.
unlike in zero-sum games - real life you can have multiple winners - 80% will get you there.
I do wonder about that. If you had it in you to start a business then I doubt you would have been sitting around waiting for the next downturn to do it.
A lot of companies will frown upon such things.
Don't tell them. Buy on Alibaba - $200 of anything that you think would sell.
And then sell it.
Not rocket science but most people are their own biggest wall.
15 years of experience. Laid off twice last year. 10+ years at 2nd last role, 3 months at last.
Like the article mentions, it's an employers market.
The thing I struggle is the question to why you want to work at a place. Either I'm short and to the point, or it ends up written like I used to when working for one of the Big Three.
And coincidentally, that is exactly the kind of stuff that ChatGPT generates.
"I have a mortgage and a family" is fine. Those people are highly motivated.
I'll try that and I'll let you know!
It will end poorly. Even if it's objectively true, employers will not want to see such a reason, so you'll have to make something up, even if it's not true. It's just the name of the game.
Exactly. It’s mating dance. Nobody cares about one’s family. One must talk about good products, nice working culture, positive vibes, professional development on topic X, suitable experience in topic Y, similar finished project Z, interesting personalities of the interviewers. Motherload of well crafted lies. I learned a lot to lie during interviews. As a graduate I was absolute truth teller and every interview changed me a bit. After hundreds of them during a decade I am comfortable with any lie. So sad when I think about it.
"Money can be exchanged for goods and services."
I sincerely wish this chap luck. I suspect that he'll be OK.
> Keeping good connections with your coworkers and not burning bridges is one of the most important things I think you can do in your career.
Words to live by. I wish more folks internalized this phrase.
Related. But people should also keep in mind that layoffs throughout the industry are extensive. So don't make the mistake of only keeping good connections with your team and managers. Try, to the extent that it's possible, to keep good connections across whatever enterprise you work in. We could easily enter an era, especially in tech, where all of your team and managers are unemployed at the same time you are. Or they otherwise may not have the ability to help you. You should always have a plan for using connections in the event you find yourself in that situation. A prudent pillar of that contingency would be to expand your network as far as you can. Even the facilities guy or the guy in marketing may prove useful one day. No connection is too low or too high.
>No connection is too low or too high.
This is so true, one of my biggest corporate deals came from a guy I worked with a decade before, he was junior at the time.
After the dot-com crash, I was laid off when the company I worked for went under. They specialized in creating e-learning courses for large corporations.
That experience taught me a valuable lesson: there are some industries you just don’t want to be involved with when the economy takes a downturn. Companies tighten their budgets, and the first cuts often come from areas like training and marketing. On the consumer side, people quickly drop non-essential luxuries like streaming services or food delivery.
If you work in industries that provide those kinds of services, they’re essentially “fair weather industries”—great during good times but highly vulnerable during tough ones.
Since then, I’ve made a point of only working in what I call “recession-proof” verticals. These include energy (avoiding risky sectors), insurance (because companies rarely skip paying premiums), and certain areas of banking (where money flows abundantly).
Another critical strategy is diversifying your skill set and building a strong internal network within your company. The more indispensable you become, the more secure your position. In more technical terms, this is akin to “obligate mutualistic symbiosis”—a relationship where both parties thrive because they rely on each other.
How are people searching for programming jobs? LinkedIn is garbage because it keeps showing jobs that don't even contain the word I searched for. I go directly to the big company's career pages, but it is hard to discover new jobs or new companies.
Using Google site search is a great way! For example - site:lever.co “Software Engineer, Machine Learning” OR “Machine Learning Engineer”. This is helped me search for a lot of jobs that weren’t advertised.
You can do this similarly for greenhouse.io, ashbyhq.com, myworkdayjobs.com, breezy.hr, workable.com, dover.io, ats.rippling.com, icims.com and other popular ATS websites.
In the last 12 years of employment I've pretty much received all my jobs through the friends, friends of friends, and former colleagues network. There was one job which I actually applied for on their website and had a standard interview process for, but I had former colleagues already working there, so I include that.
I am in Game Development so it is a much smaller community than the overall tech industry and you're more likely to know people in different companies as people slowly disperse after completing a project.
I think as you get older you kind of have to find jobs in this way, relying on your network and reputation, rather than doing a fresh cold application each time.
Find a job you find interesting and have a compelling value add. Find that job’s hiring manager on LinkedIn/Other Social. DM the hiring manager and start a conversation. Has worked for me multiple times. You cut the line (or black box) and start to build rapport instantly.
If someone reaches out to me unless they have a very unique skillset - no “full stack developer” and “I got my last job because I can invert a btree on the white board” are not special skill sets.
I’m going to refer them to the ATS.
That’s why I said you need to have a distinct value add. If you’re a generic X-level engineer, going to be harder to stand out.
I miss StackOverflow jobs – it showed that jobs were probably published there because someone technical advocated for the platform.
LinkedIn is a place to show your social status.
I think its amazing that posts like this exist, and more should definitely be written so that people don't feel powerless after a layoff. Too often we tie our identity to institutions and it isn't doing anyone any good (well maybe it helps the shareholders).
This is the one I wrote about my lessons: https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2020/05/04/how-to-go-thro...
I also got laid off during parental leave. I had a strong feeling that it would happen but due to the stress of a medically dangerous pregnancy, I made the excuse that I didn't have the capacity to simultaneously focus on a preemptive job search. That was a bad decision.
"How to Tell a Layoff is Coming" another tip from personal experience, a manager and key people always know. Be in the inner circle. Also I was once laid off on my Hawaii vacation, talk about perfect timing.
Not true. Often managers are caught unawares of layoffs until they are executed.
i knew someone who was QA his boss approved his PTO to go to the dentist. however that day turned out to be the layoff day so HR threated him to come to the office. was hilarious. god i hate HR. anyways if you ever go on PTO turn your phone off completely.
Threatened him with what? Being laid off?
I assume at the point he didn't know, so yeah, that could have worked (and was probably basically it).
Similar to the article's author, I also once got laid off shortly after being hired; three months in my case. I was promised they were on a growth track to nine-figure revenue. One month of down subscription growth, the CEO panicked, and I was gone.
I still get mad thinking about it.
Random thought
I used to reject 6mo contract offers but after being a laborer the 2.5X pay increase even for 6mo made sense. So I accepted one and now I'm here typing this on a 16" mac at a new job. I am now thinking about making better choices financially.
how do you even get those?
Luck mostly. You have to sift through tons of listings because companies which run such projects just throw it all in with the rest.
Fill out your linked in, turn it on
Have a GitHub, resume, luck
I wrote extensions to through LinkedIn's jobs and other boards but ultimately luck (some company person finds you). It's even harder for me no degree but I have 5yoe.
My job though was niche my robotics/hardware projects stuck out to the interviewer.
I worked labor for a year it sucked. But yeah I turned down a few 6mo roles thinking they were not secure but I was like f it I need change and will just pour my higher income into my debts.
Misalignment of interests is the core error of reasoning the traditional employee makes in offering up unquestioning faith and loyalty to a random corporation run by strangers; that greedy incompetence will somehow give them enduring security. This is decidedly not the case. Instead, more sensible employees should form worker-owned co-ops to both share in the treasure of livable earnings with potential immense profits and structure themselves for the maximum security of those who "sail on that ship" together rather than optimizing short-term profits of someone else.
>> If you haven’t searched for a job since then it will surprise you how much more of an employers market it is now.
Could you clarify further? Front what I hear on the news, there are hundreds of thousands of open engineering/ai positions in the US and we cannot find workers to fill them. You mention ZIRP, so I'm assuming you're probably in the US.
Practically every news show in the past two weeks has noted the importance of having a concerted US policy to help fill these open positions. They also mention the existential risk to the US caused by the massive shortage of engineers.
How does this square with you saying " If you haven’t searched for a job since then it will surprise you how much more of an employers market it is now." Where is the disconnect?
The disconnect is that the news is completely wrong. I can confirm that it’s an employer’s market from personal experience as well.
My guesses:
Fake job postings to give the appearance of growth for funded companies who are struggling to grow to meet investor expectations.
Posturing to distract from the actual practice of hiring less-expensive talent overseas while pretending to be on Team America.
Political spin to avoid losing face/clout during an election year.
In short: some form of lying (or at best, twisting) to avoid the shame of not being as successful as one might look on their <insert social media here> profile.
And even more cynical take: They are marketing for AI hype cycle. That is there to drive up the stock prices, not actually hire. Spread out effort to make companies and AI overall look more popular.
> Could you clarify further? Front what I hear on the news, there are hundreds of thousands of open engineering/ai positions in the US and we cannot find workers to fill them.
The only thing that matters is the ratio of job seekers to open positions.
There are always a lot of open positions because there are a lot of companies. Even during recessions most companies will be opening to hiring the right candidates.
When there are more candidates than positions combined with a lot of layoffs, companies get more selective. Companies are hiring, but they're being more careful about who gets hired.
The other disconnect is that the employers are trying to fill positions at a certain price point which is usually much lower than most people will accept. Asking why we can't just take those positions when desperate is basically asking why you can't work for significantly less than you have been making for the past 10 years. People have houses and families to support. In some places those jobs pay so little that you can barely make rent with roommates. They exist solely to prove there aren't any qualified US workers for H1B purposes.
A lot of really good people can be had in certain US states if you're willing to pay them a lot of money relative to their local market. I've gotten several applications from some pretty overqualified people simply because the pay for the associate position is higher than their local employers are offering for mid-level people. If you then turn that around, it suggests that some of these employers struggle to fill positions because they actually have to compete on the nation-wide market for people.
Lots of job postings are fake
> engineering/ai
Most software engineers lack credentials to get hired to build ai, unless you view conventional software engineering as ai.
The time to build out ai tracks in universities was back in the Obama administration. It’s ridiculous that all of a sudden the whip is being so harshly cracked for everyone to re-skill. I applied to CS grad programs for two straight cycles, with strong GRE scores and a solid CS undergrad degree, and not a single non-remote university program offered me admission, seemingly due to enrollment caps as bottlenecks.
I ended up joining a well-known online MS program, and I feel that it is teaching me so little for the effort I put in that I don’t think my ai skill has improved over what I had from outside of the program, but hey, if the system is broken, what can you do? I can learn nothing, remotely, and use that degree to get an ai job where I do genuinely valuable work, but I’m definitely not allowed to make those genuinely valuable work contributions in a remote role.
The opportunities available are extremely limited or they don’t make sense/aren’t very good. Just smile and play the game… or is it the game that’s playing with candidates?
These stories are bought and paid for, to pressure lawmakers to make it easer to hire H1Bs and/or offshore to lower wages. Much like recent stories about the shortage of engineers or workers in general. Shortage of suckers willing to work below market, that is. None of these companies will consider training existing engineers for a month either.
https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
I agree. H1Bs are akin to indentured servants who do not have the ability to vote. Meanwhile, employers make large payments to politicians to keep the status quo.
What I dislike most is the cheating from H1Bs though. My friend in an AZ university described how foreigners were known to cheat on their exams based the clique of the country they came from. Similarly, I met an H1Bs who sends his work to Indian cheaper workers even though it is supposed to be confidential. They also collude to get their family and friends into the U.S.
Bloomberg news covered it recently, https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-cognizant-h1b-visas-...
Just because a position is advertised does not mean the position is going to be filled - a lot of companies advertise a job that doesn't really exist. They do this for several reasons - to look like they are more successful than they are (if they are hiring they are expanding), and some just collect resumes. They might even do a few interviews, which helps their team practice doing interviews even if the company isn't going to hire. I'm sure there are other reasons.
I've been in the tech job market about 30 years, and this might be the second worst time for people in tech, the dot-com bubble of the early 2000s being the worst. My boss knows it too, he knows I can't leave and find another job that pays as well right now. A couple of years ago I was still getting about 20 recruiter contacts per week, and now I'm lucky if I get 1 per month.
If you haven't noticed how bad it is, I have to wonder why?
I started working in 1996. The dot com bust wasn’t bad if you were in a market with profitable enterprise companies like banks, insurance companies, etc.
I could throw my resume up in the air and find plenty of commodity Windows programming jobs.
It’s much worse now. I found a job quickly both last year and the year before. But that was only because I have a combination of skills and experience that puts me at the top of the pile of resumes in my niche.
I mostly hire and dont actively code for work, so I never got 20 recruiter contacts per week before or now.
Agree on not all postings are real (we do some because we're mandated to do a proper search when filling positions with people we know)
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Hey I got laid off too. It actually has worked out as a positive over-all.
Job searching is a shit process though. I applied for ~40-50 jobs, only got 1 offer. Small country too, so thats basically all the jobs I could find. But landed in a really good company, and have a bit of a break before I start.
So I've been using all my spare time to learn Graphics programming, C, and Audio Engineering.
I've made a little Wolfenstein3D-type raycasting engine [0] that I'm proud of, as I'm just a frontend coder for work.
[0] - https://github.com/con-dog/2.5D-raycasting-engine/blob/maste...
I really, really wish the industry would give the fuck up on resumes. It's such a stupid way to hire. Huge waste of time for all involved, inaccurate, lengthy, difficult.
As a hiring manager, I want:
As a candidate, I want: We can't we just agree as an industry that we should all pitch in and make this? There's enough capital here, and it's not like we don't know how to build these things. Certainly there's enough people here motivated to work on it.All of these signals are problematic.
Your references are already vetted and testimonials left on a public profile,
No one is going to give you a negative reference on LinkedIn. That doesn’t provide any meaningful signal.
Actual qualifications, like job training and certifications. Even Scrum Training.
Certifications don’t prove competence. Anyone can memorize enough to pass a multiple choice test and there have been brain dumps for them for decades.
I went through the 6 certification .Net “Architect” path back in 2010 basically as a guided learning path with a goal at the end. I knew even back then they were worthless as far as competence and never put them on my resume.
More recently, at one point I had 9 of the then 12 AWS certs as late as 2021. I have 6 of the 9 current ones now and I’m working on the other 3 by the end of the year.
I got my first one without ever opening the console in 2018. They also served as a guided learning path so I would know what I didn’t know and I could talk the talk. But I don’t consider myself knowing a service until I’ve used them.
They are all very shallow marketing certs except I’ve heard good things about the Kubernetes certifications and that they require hands on problem solving.
I want to know you were actually taught the right way at least once, by a reputable source
How would you know that? I have a degree in CS. I graduated in 1996. Is the source I was taught COBOL and FORTRAN from “reputable” or “relevant”?
A written contract that what you say is your experience is true, and that I can use arbitration to seek damages if you lied
Arbitration is biased toward the client and the clients industry. The judges don’t get hired if they consistently make judgments that are against the industry that hires them.
A standard set of tests administered by experts chosen at random.
What I am looking for when hiring is specific to the company. But they have that already - leetCode style interviews that don’t give a signal to whether they are “smart and gets thing done”.
K8s certs are not any better, it's just a slightly more practical test (but it falls well short on how most companies use k8s)
This whole post feels like a elaborate troll. Still, I cannot resist replying.
As a future candidate, what will you do if someone leaves a very negative testimonial about you? LOL. Then, it is basically impossible to hire most good programmers, because none of them will have "actual qualifications". To make a joke: Linus Torvalds applies for your latest CRUD role. Has no certifications. "Linus Torvalds? Who is this guy thinking he can apply with no certifications? What a silly git. Next!" Likewise: You will be personally liable if the candidate wishes to seek damages via arbitration because you oversold (read: lied about) the role during the interview.Forget about tech for a moment: You can re-write it for hiring people in oil and gas field operations, and it seems just as absurd. Re-write it again for a hospital trying to hire nurses. Still absurd. I picked both of those industries because they are very much learn on the job. Yes, certs exist, but there are many people who work most of their career in those industries with few-to-no certs.
Linked in and Glassdoor already exist, though I don't trust Microsoft to administer. Needs an open alternative.
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Actual title says "for the First Time in My Career". Edited title is kind of weird.
Actual title is weird. How is it both the first and second time?
There's just two songs in me, and I just wrote the third
Wait this header doesn’t make sense. Laid off for the first time? Twice?
This thread has a lot of interesting anecdata so I’ll add mine.
Over 25 years experience in frontend web, searching since July, and the water is as ice cold as I’ve ever felt it. Low response rates, low interview rates, zero offers. Wondering if the backend grass is slightly greener at the moment or that’s just my perception from the other side of the fence.
Also doing frontend, but my friends from the other side of the stack fence tell me that employers have been piling up responsibilities, so when you apply for a backend position, you're automatically assumed to fit a DevOps role as well.
Anyway, I've found that back in our field it's largely React roles which were affected. Angular jobs are fewer and typically lowballed, but not nearly as much as the rest.
If someone (I don’t know if it is true in your case or not) has a generic set of skills like - “full stack developer” or “front end developer”, there are hundreds of people applying for the same job and it’s hard to stand out.
You have to lean on your network.
Firing someone during their parental leave is a special kind of messed up. The fact that it's not completely illegal in any reasonable country is horrifying.
It's illegal in my state in the US. Also if you do FMLA in the US it would be illegal if you're the parent who gave birth. Outside of a few states here in the US you're basically expected back at work as soon as you get out of the hospital unless you have a doctor's note.
I have been let go three times in almost 30 years and I’m on my 10th job.
The first time was at a struggling startup. We all knew they were struggling and the company was very honest with us and kept us abreast of all the companies that our VC backers were pursuing. I was in some of the interviews with potential acquirers.
Our backers promised all of us that “we would get paid for every hour we worked”. Of course they couldn’t promise us we would not get laid off.
All of us stayed until the bitter end. That day we all got laid off after being acquired for scraps, we went to lunch together and hung out in the office just joking around until the end of the day.
We all had something in our back pocket anyway and from looking at LinkedIn, everyone found a job that was either as good or better within a month. This was 2011.
Our largest customer arranged for me to get contract with them to finish out a project, the acquiring company gave the customer access to all of their code and gave me permission to keep my work laptop and waived my non compete.
They gave everyone a month severance. I was treated fairly and have no ill will toward anyone there.
The second time it was Amazon in 2023:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38474212
The third time it was a shit show of a company last year. But this is where I have problems with the author
> How do you succinctly summarize and highlight all you’ve done there?
I keep my resume and longer form career document up to date at least once per quarter. I list out the details of major accomplishments in STAR format while it’s still fresh. I have both a technical summary and a business oriented summary for non technical people.
It looks like he learned that lesson too.
> I was being selective and only applying for places I’d realistically want to work
He has a newborn baby. His first priority is to work for any company that will allow him to exchange labor for money to support his family. Even if you do have savings, no need to use it unnecessarily.
I got a 3.5 months severance from Amazon the year before last and my stretch goal was to get an offer before my paid out PTO of 9 days was over let alone dip into my severance.
Of course I reached out to my network first and targeted outreach to companies specializing in my niche (strategic cloud consulting emphasizing app dev). I also spammed my resume to any CRUD enterprise app dev job as a Plan B.
I could always keep interviewing while working. I was working remotely.
I did end up getting a Plan A job offer within 9 days of leaving AWS. But I knew three months in that it wasn’t going to be a long term job.
When the end did come, I was already in the early stages of interviewing for my current job and had an offer three weeks later. But again, I wasn’t going to let the perfect be the enemy of getting any job and I kept applying for Enterprise CRUD jobs until the offer was finalized.
I did work on a side project in 2023. But I got paid for it. A former CTO had some work he needed done.
> I keep my resume and longer form career document up to date at least once per quarter. I list out the details of major accomplishments in STAR format while it’s still fresh. I have both a technical summary and a business oriented summary for non technical people.
I have a bookmarklet that opens a new gmail compose window, with the recipient being "me+journal@employer.com", and the subject being today's date. As I'm working throughout the day, I jot down what I'm working on.
I also used to review these every Friday, and type up a summary, and every few months - or as I'd remember to - update a "hype doc" that's basically like an internal resume that my manager can use to help argue for a raise for me, or whatever.
I also copy this data, without any stuff that might be considered company property, to someplace local I can access if I'm fired.
As a consultant working full time for a consulting company, I usually can’t mention the client. It’s always “a healthcare startup”, “a state government”, etc
These posts are so badass. Thank you to share. Please keep writing. We need more of these.
Literally, your handle "scarface_74" says it all. When PIP comes through the door, you raise your automatic rifle and shout: "Say hello to my little friend!"
Funny enough, I’ve used this handle since the late 90s on various forums - including Yahoo Games.
It’s a reference to my favorite obscure Batman villain.
https://batman.fandom.com/wiki/Scarface
Thank you for introducing me to the Ventriloquist and Scarface. Absolutely bizarre characters. I love it.
Tough times. I feel like this is caused by massive capital misallocation over decades. The vast majority of tech companies should not exist, if not for the financial environment propping them up. Now with interest rates going up, there is less cheap money and companies are forced to lay people off and/or shut down themselves.
Reality is that there are too many software developers chasing a small number of value-creating opportunities in a sea of useless or highly inefficient tech companies.
In the meantime, there aren't enough people to produce food, build houses, collect garbage, etc... So costs of essentials keeps going up. It's hard for software devs to transition to physical jobs so it's going to be a tough one.
> I feel like this is caused by massive capital misallocation over decades
Absolutely a large misallocation. And this is not just about the number of engineers. It is also about number of managers, 2 pizza teams, entire management chains merely doing promotion/PIP management, entire sets of VPs and execs with no market experience or engineering experience. Even a large number of PE investors and angel investors who just landed on money but actually don't have any skills beyond betting far and wide.
Highly paid roles have been paying people who are just doing administrative work. This is misallocation. And all of a sudden, this misallocation has come to bare.
I think this gets to the heart of the current situation. The hard truth is that a lot of office workers are actually unskilled labor hidden behind the right kind of social conditioning and "professionalism".
Fake job theory.
Essentially broken window theory with humans.
Yeah, it feels like the system created all these jobs because it could afford to support all that deadweight, but most of those people were not creating value; they were not contributing to the company's success so much as merely mooching off of it.
Also, the centralization of media put this effect into hyperdrive. Successful, high exposure companies were drowning in money and so they could just throw 100 engineers at each tiny problem and it wouldn't materially affect their bottom line. They also didn't care much whether an employee was doing their job efficiently, so long as they met basic objectives... Which wasn't hard to do when you have so many people in the team and each person is responsible for a tiny piece.
Many people could be counter-productive in the long run, they were productive enough to meet their short-term OKRs and so they were left alone but their rushed work set the project up for long term pain... Often it's impossible to trace back issues to specific individuals... In software development, it's trivial to introduce massive technical debt while meeting or even blowing past short-term objectives. Someone who is literally killing the project might appear to be a top performer... They may be promoted before any problems become apparent... Kind of like a bad civil engineer who builds an amazing looking bridge and is celebrated for years until the bridge suddenly collapses because the foundations turned out to be poorly designed. By that point they've already been promoted several times, maybe already retired and they can claim that the collapse was caused by incorrect construction practices or bad maintenance work performed later. However, in software, it's much worse because you can't just point to a single incorrect formula or calculation. Failure is usually the result of many bad decisions.
u guys are getting interviews? 2 years of experience and it's hard.
seems the old markers of dev competence are no longer there, some github projects, a degree were enough nowadays it's a lot harder even here in europe where the salaries are on the low end.
Typo: "Your pay your taxes into the system"
Sorry to be this way.
>Recruiters. Don’t discount or blow them off. They have a vested interest in getting you hired and 3 of my jobs have been found through them.
Recruiters are often and perform a valuable service. Agree that it can be invaluable to find one you want to work with.