As someone who's recently been hiring (sorry folks, position was filled just a few days ago), it's wild to me how distorted things have become.
We had 1200 applications for an extremely niche role. A huge amount were clearly faked resumes that far too closely matched the job description to be realistic. Another huge portion were just unqualified.
The irony is that there actually _are_ a ton of exceptionally qualified candidates right now due to the various layoffs at government labs. We actually _do_ want folks with an academic research background. I am quite certain that the applicant pool contained a lot of those folks and others that we really wanted to interview.
However, in practice, we couldn't find folks we didn't already know because various keyword-focused searches and AI filtering tend to filter out the most qualified candidates. We got a ton of spam applications, so we couldn't manually filter. The filtering HR does doesn't help. All of the various attempts to meaningfully review the full candidate pool in the time we had just failed. (Edit: "Just failed" is a bit unfair. There was a lot of effort put in and some good folks found that way, but certainly not every resume was actually reviewed.)
What finally happened is that we mostly interviewed the candidates we knew about through other channels. E.g. folks who had applied before and e-mailed one of us they were applying again. Former co-workers from other companies. Folks we knew through professional networks. That was a great pool of applicants, but I am certain we missed a ton of exceptional folks whose applications no actual person even saw.
The process is so broken right now that we're 100% back to nepotism. If you don't already know someone working at the company, your resume will probably never be seen.
I really feel hiring is in a much worse state than it was about 5 years ago. I don't know how to fix it. We're just back to what it was 20+ years ago. It's 100% who you know.
> The process is so broken right now that we're 100% back to nepotism
Just want to comment on this, because I think think favoring unknown candidates is a mistake we make too often, and in fact the "normal" process is a disaster on both sides for this reason. Nepotism or Cronyism is granting resources, patronage, jobs to someone you know instead of a qualified candidate. In many industries this is how they function because qualifications and skill provide little to no differentiation (Think knowing Microsoft word and having a comms degree with no work experience).
In high skill industries where experience is hard fought... people know the who the "people" are because they stick out like sore thumbs. If your hiring process at work is throw up a job on indeed and see what resumes come through, your company likely isn't worth working at anyway because the best candidates aren't randos.
Think of it this way if you were putting together the Manhattan project again would you recruit the people with a stellar reputation in physics, engineering, manufacturing, etc OR would you throw up a job on a job board or your corporate site and see what comes back? The difference is active vs passive, good reputation vs no reputation (or a bad reputation).
Not trying to make a big semantic argument... I just want to say that things like reputation and network matter... and thats not really "nepotism"
I think you’re just arguing for nepotism in a roundabout way.
My senior staff engineer can’t code at all. He got hired because he was friends with our engineering manager. You might say “well that’s nepotism then since he’s under qualified”, but I’m sure he would make the argument that he got the job because of his “stellar reputation and extensive network”.
It’s an abhorrent situation to be in. Everyone knows he can’t code but because he got hired at such a senior level he’s making high level decisions that make no sense. Give me a qualified rando any time of the day.
I agree, some of the worst employees I've seen were hired that way.
I haven't hired anyone recently but btwn 10-20 years ago I did hire a lot. Of course we reached out via our network of connections but that gets tapped out fast, so you have to rely on job postings. It was always hundreds of applicants per opening. Back then it wasn't 1000's but it might as well have been because I didn't have enough time to sift through them all. That's ok, you can just approach it like "the dowry problem" (also known as the secretary problem [1]).
But the job market and hiring is way worse now, and it's pretty horrible for job seekers atm.
This situation is very weird to me. In my experience, referrals got your foot in the door, but you still always had to pass the same hiring screen/interview process as everyone else.
I recommended an engineer once who I thought was great - he was a total "get shit done" kind of guy. But he did poorly in the interviews (I won't say they were leetcode-type problems, but you did have to have some algorithmic skills - I warned him beforehand to brush up on some of those types of programs.) As much as I liked the working with the guy, we couldn't hire him because he was a pretty solid "no" from the other interviewers.
I've never worked in a company that hired people based on the referral of one person, and honestly that sounds like a pretty f'd up company.
> I just want to say that things like reputation and network matter... and thats not really "nepotism"
I strongly agree with this, and I'm glad you put it so clearly. If you've been in your industry say 10 years or more, you should have built a reputation by that point that makes people say "I want to work with that person again, or I'd recommend that person to a friend who has a job opening". (Important thing to clarify, though, I'm not denigrating anyone who has been out of work a long time. I've seen many categories of jobs in the tech industry where there are simply a lot fewer jobs to go around - it's musical chairs and a lot of chairs got taken away all at once).
I would put in an important caveat, though, and that's for people who are early in their careers. The hiring process really is truly shitty for people just entering the workforce and for people with only one or two jobs under their belt.
> As someone who's recently been hiring (sorry folks, position was filled just a few days ago), it's wild to me how distorted things have become.
Same here. I have been hiring and it is a shit show. We advertise one position and get inundated with resumes. Many of these resume are complete fabrications, so we cannot rely on them at all. So we implemented a filter by asking candidates to do a small project. Candidates do not have to hand-code it. We encourage candidates to just use AI for the simple project. Only about 10% actually do the required work that typically takes 15-20 minutes to complete with AI assistance. Some get offended that we even dared ask them to take the assessment test and start using profanity to let their displeasure be known. Quite strange.
When you're applying to hundreds of positions, 99% if which will auto reject you, it can be quite annoying if you're asked to do extra work before you've gotten any further in the process
The number of fake resumes is insane. During reviews I ended up passing a number of fake profiles through because their CVs looked real. None of them showed up to the initial screening call.
There are now AI CVs mimicking real people, so the CVs point to real Linkedin profiles, Github profiles.
Not sure what their end game is unless it's to continually test CV creation or find woefully inept companies that will hire them with limited vetting.
> I ended up passing a number of fake profiles through because their CVs looked real. None of them showed up to the initial screening call.
That's just crazy. Probably those were for collecting data to analyze what makes a CV pass. Mass apply everywhere, combine the results, and analyze the results manually or using LLMs. Selling these data can be profitable
> Not sure what their end game is unless it's to continually test CV creation or find woefully inept companies that will hire them with limited vetting.
I wonder about (and didn't immediately find) case-studies that lay out the strategy of Resume Of Total Lies Dude, their expected payout before they get fired, etc.
I don’t think it is crazy and I have suggested beforehand there needs to be some sort of proof of work on the candidate side to prevent resume spam.
I think your idea is very elegant as everyone has access to the mail system, an actual stamp is pretty cheap, but it is just enough hassle to mail an application that it will filter out some of the spam.
The other suggestion I have had is that candidates need to hand in the resume in person, but I guess you could accept resumes from both mail and in person drop offs.
> The other suggestion I have had is that candidates need to hand in the resume in person
This might be a bigger lift than asking for a take-home project; if I'm expected to drop off a resume in Manhattan that's a minimum of a two hour trip for me. I'd rather spend two hours banging together a CRUD app to show that I can actually write code.
The only time I had to hire somebody, the university I was working for in Switzerland made it mandatory for the candidates to send their application via mail, not email. That was back in 2014. I found this odd at the time, but I'm pretty sure it made my job way easier (less applications to review, motivated/serious candidates, etc.).
I must be missing something. 1200 real applications are hard to sort through. 1200 mostly fake applications are much easier. Hiring is a high-leverage activity, and it's absolutely worth spending a couple hours going through those by hand.
For 1200 applications, a couple hours translates to less than 10 seconds per application. In the age of LLMs, why do you think you'd be able to discern whether an application was fake in 10 seconds? Remember, it's not "obviously fake", it's "designed to con you" fake.
How about 50 per hour? That's just 24 hours of work and a reasonable first look at one minute for each application. Very little time to spend for an important company decision which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
That's a half week of work without breaks at one resume per minute-ish.
I agree that it is a very important decision, but that's also unreasonable for a manager to set time aside to look through. You've just set the other projects that you're already behind on (that's why you need to hire in the first place) back another half week or so.
It's like a reverse rocket equation here. You need time to make more time, so you take time, but that time needs time, so ...
The cost isn't really borne by the hiring manager though, it's just their budget (that they argued for) that they need to spend down. The decision makers really don't care that much about the numbers, just that they don't go over.
How can that be unreasonable? To work at least half a week for a decision which will cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even millions of dollars in the long run. What else is the manager doing which is more important monetary wise? And if managers are really too busy with raking in the millions to the company, then it's a fine time to hire somebody who's only job will be to hire more people (not a HR person of course).
The manager is responsible for $X but only gets paid their salary.
I'm their day to day, hiring is a pain. They need the extra hands, but they have to go through more work to get that person onboard. The activation energy is high, higher now with AI and automated job applications clogging things up.
Then you have onboarding and the continued costs of management of that person. Honestly, most managers would want the smallest team possible in terms of day to day workload.
This is also why AI is appealing. The promise of no sick days, no HR complaints, no chit chat. Just pure work done in plain language. Work done overnight, right, the first time. A middle managers dream worker.
The thing that is more important is the budget. It's always the budget. Nothing matters but the budget. That's the second iron law of beauraracy, of course.
As I see it, hiring people is the most important part of running any business - by a large margin. And if you have a lot of employees, then hiring people who are good at hiring becomes your highest priority.
> The manager is responsible for $X but only gets paid their salary.
That's why somebody higher in rank makes sure the manager gets the time he needs to make the best hires. Somewhere up the line there is somebody who cares about the basics of running a business right.
> I'm their day to day, hiring is a pain.
Of course it's a pain, that's why it's a job and why people get paid for it.
> This is also why AI is appealing. The promise of no sick days, no HR complaints, no chit chat. Just pure work done in plain language. Work done overnight, right, the first time. A middle managers dream worker.
Okay, but that means the company instantly lost all customers and all income and went bankrupt. Because why in the world would a client hire your company to use an AI, when they can just use the AI themselves? And don't say that there needs to be a human who is specialized in using the AI, because then you're back at hiring and having employees again.
I'm not trying to be glib here, but I'm not entirely certain that you have worked for a long time in a large corporation, right?
If you have not, I would like to introduce you to one of the best pieces of writing on corporate workings that I have ever come across: The Gervais Principle.
It is a very good lens, but a very cynical one, to look at the corporation.
In general, shows like The Office, though satire, are close, I feel, to reality than what you are espousing here.
Not that I disagree with you at all. There should be people that are all about hiring. There should be managers that see their paychecks as adequate compensation. There should be consumers that are that reactive to internal staffing decisions.
But in my limited experience, the things that should be there, typically are not.
I don't know which 1200 applications they saw, but IME they're a lot better at trying to con you than succeeding. LLMs aren't great for a lot of use cases (yet?), and this is one of those areas where reality doesn't match the dream:
1. ~10% of applications are over-tailored. Really? You did <hyper-specific thing> with <uber-specific details> exactly matching our job description at $BigCo 3 years before the language existed and 5 years before we pioneered it? The person might be qualified, but if they can't be arsed to write a resume that reflects _their_ experiences then I don't have enough evidence to move them forward in the interviewing process.
2. ~40% of applications have obvious, major inconsistencies -- the name on LinkedIn doesn't match the name on the resume, the LinkedIn link isn't real, the GitHub link isn't real, the last 3 major jobs on LinkedIn are different from the last 3 major jobs on the resume, etc. I don't require candidates to put those things on a resume, but if they do then I have a hard time imagining the candidate copy-pasting incorrectly being more likely than the LLM hallucinating a LinkedIn profile.
Those are quick scans, well under 4s each on average. We've used 80 minutes of our budget and are down to 600 applications. Of the remainder:
3. ~90% of remaining applications fail to meet basic qualifications. I don't know if they're LLM-generated or not, but a year of Python and SQL isn't going to cut it for a senior role doing low-level optimizations in a systems language. If there's a cover letter, a professional summary, mention of some side project, or if their GitHub exists and has anything in it other than ipynb files with titles indicating rudimentary data science then they still pass this filter. If they're fresh out of school then I also give them the benefit of the doubt and consider them for a junior role. Even with that leeway, 90% of those remaining applicants don't have a single thing in any of the submitted materials suggesting that they're qualified.
So...we're down to 60 applications. We spent another 40 minutes. In retrospect, that's already our full 2hr budget, so I did exaggerate the speediness a bit, but it's ballpark close. You can spend 2min fully reading and taking notes on each of the remaining applications, skimming the GitHub projects of anyone who bothered to post them, and still come out in 4hr for the lot.
It's probably worth noting, that isn't all to say that <5% of programmers with that skillset are qualified. I imagine the culprit is spray-and-pray LLM spam not even bothering to generate a plausible resume or managing to search for matching jobs. If bad resumes hit 99 jobs for every 1 job a good resume hits then you only expect a 1% success rate from the perspective of somebody reviewing applications.
Your take is very sensible and I agree with it 100%, but the reality is that (by my assessment) it is absolutely not present in the wall of ATS filters one's job application is up against. I've sent hundred of CV/cover letters over last ten months, none of them are touched by LLM. Most cover letters I manually tailored to re-frame in line with job ad - where I cared a lot, some I just made with my generic template - still manually - where I couldn't be bothered to care. Invariably I either received no response at all, or for remaining 10% I received a generic rejection email, identically worded and styled in almost all cases.
Here it is, if you are curious:
"Thank you for your interest in the <position> position at <company> in <country>. Unfortunately, we will not be moving forward with your application, but we appreciate your time and interest in <company>."
The Resume I am sending out is just an evolution of one that worked very well for me for 25+ years. The roles, as far as I am able to see, are 80%-95% keyword match, with the non-matched keywords being exceedingly superficial. Yes, I haven't listed "blob storage", but guess what else I have used but haven't listed: "semicolon", "variable declaration" and "for-loops". Yet in this day and age one seems to be punished for not doing so.
I am very principled in not letting any AI anywhere close to my CV, because I think the usefulness of signal it conveys rests solely on it being addressed to and read by human, hence it has to be fully authored and tailored by human too. But these days this idea has completely flipped. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Standing by principles could lead to literal dying. Personally, I made peace with dying, but I cannot allow my family to go homeless. As such, I don't see it below me to go down the path of mass-blasting heavily over-tailored Resumes. If it bumps my chances from 0.05% to 0.2%, that's a four-fold increase that may be the difference between, literally, life and death. The organic job search with my natural skills and authentic ways of presentation I relied on for twenty years is dead.
It's clear your org is looking specifically at coders/programmers. That's very different from the "academic research" background that the OP suggested. It takes a different type of analysis and vetting.
And different types of jobs require skillsets that aren't adequately conveyed in a traditional resume.
> Pat yourself on the back and mutter “you need to be skilled and lucky to work here”
It would be absolutely amazing if employers and recruiters finally were doing exactly this. We are in this dead end precisely because everyone is under false illusion that their pool of candidates has a hidden gem outshining everybody else in existence, and they absolutely need to sift through the whole pool to find this gem. As a result, all pools are never exhausted and only ever spreading, with more and more desperate people sucked into multiples of them.
I wonder if we are back to “who you know” because of a couple of factors:
1. The risk of a bad hire is great, and this de-risks that
2. It facilitates more natural and spontaneous conversations, which for better or worse short-circuits a well crafted and pre-planned anti-bias interview process which can be too rigid for both parties to explore detail
Would you have found it reasonable for interested candidates to have reached out directly instead of just submitting a resume to the ATS? With the AI spam etc. it feels like the usefulness of these automated systems is quickly diminishing. Hiring feels broken right now.
I assume that they mean sending either a direct Linkedin message or an email to the recruiter or hiring manager.
When I was recently unemployed I started doing that after months of getting ignored by most companies and, in my experience, the only difference is that I got far more acks ("Hi! Sure, I'll take a look at your resume and reach out!") but I got a similar rate of applications-to-interview compared to applying through the official platforms.
this means finding a way to directly reach out to the hiring manager. like sending an email, asking a colleague for an introduction, sending a linkedin message, etc
I haven't applied for a job since the 1990s so I'd be out of the loop, but what are the faked resumes trying to achieve? Just get in a role and get paid before being found out? Are they trying to find brief or lazy interviewing processes? Do they only target remote positions?
When the requirements of every single job are impossible, people will lie.
Several people have been recommending candidates to lie for IT-related jobs for a long time now, and honestly, I think the vast majority of positions have such a crazy set of requirements that they only get the lairs.
Amusing Idea: Advertise three vaguely-similar positions, only one of them real. Specify impossible-for-honest-humans requirements for the fake two. Then discard all applicants for the real position who also claimed to be qualified for a fake one.
Strict honesty here has always been a losing proposition. The "requirements" section of a job posting has almost never been accurate. It's more of an image they're painting. An honest applicant is one who reads the whole description to understand as best they can what the company is looking for, and sort of holistically matches their own expertise against that picture.
If the job posting lists requirements A-F and you have A, B, D, E, and F, then you'd do both yourself and the company a disservice by disqualifying yourself. Put it in your cover letter if you can't handle the discrepancy.
I'm not going to address either the morality or advisability of being "dishonest" by this standard. I've just seen too many people sell themselves short, when in fact they are exactly what the company is looking for, it's just that the recruiter wasn't able to spell that out in the job description. And it's not necessarily because they were stupid either; if they only put the true minimum necessary criteria into a job post, then (1) they'll get flooded with underqualified candidates who don't even come close to what they need, and (2) they may very well miss out on good candidates because the job looks lame.
Source: I've been on both ends. As a candidate, I mentioned during the interview that I actually had no experience in the required technology X but I had related experience. The interviewer just laughed; it was obvious to both of us that it didn't matter. As someone offering a job (not the hiring manager but sort of), I talked to a couple of people who were hired into other roles in the company and asked why they didn't apply for our position, they seemed perfect for it (to me). Several of them pointed to some specific line item under the requirements that disqualified them. Sometimes it was an item that we'd removed later because we weren't getting enough people in, even though strictly speaking it was part of the job. We would sometimes push the recruiter to add "experience with X, or willing to learn X", but they would push back and honestly I'm not sure I know better than them. They were the ones who had to be the front line filtering through the noise resumes, after all.
> If the job posting lists requirements A-F and you have A, B, D, E, and F, then you'd do both yourself and the company a disservice by disqualifying yourself. Put it in your cover letter if you can't handle the discrepancy.
I’m my experience the problem is that the missing “C” is deep level domain expertise outside of the technical end and that’s just so much more important than the other ones, and importantly, something you can’t really just learn on your own.
Sure, that happens, but that's also pretty clear to the job seeker. Don't try to BS your way past that one.
More commonly, that list of requirements comes from the recruiter quizzing the developers on what they need, and they throw out a bunch of stuff that could describe a person they'd be interested in hiring. But there are many other people who would work too, and the developers are likely to come up with stuff that they're familiar with and end up describing someone much like them with maybe 1 additional skill -- which is actually backwards, because they already have that expertise in the aggregate and what they really need is what they don't already have, but that stuff is harder to think of and value and therefore suggest to the recruiter because, well, it's stuff they're unfamiliar with.
A good recruiter will push back and make them figure out which are actual requirements. But getting it right requires a good recruiter + good developers who will make the time to think it through + good company culture. Most job posts are not coming from such a fortunate place.
On the flip side, the recruiter is hearing from management that they want someone who is perfectly carved out to accomplish a single task X, preferably someone who has already accomplished task X at another company so they can get hired and immediately do X here as well. Sure, they'll also be another body to shut up the whiny developers talking about how they have too much to do, but the position is open because they've been asking for X for months and the developers keep saying they don't have enough bandwidth. So they describe what they want to the recruiter in painful specificity. If their conception of X requires technologies and tools A, B, and C, then their requirements list is something like "Minimum 10 years experience doing X. Expert in A. Expert in B. Expert in C. Must have a PhD from my school or a school I'm envious of."
Maybe I've just had some bad experiences, but this is why I don't take requirements lists too seriously. Sure, if it wants "experience in medical imaging" and you have nothing related, don't apply. But if it gives a laundry list of specific technologies, it's either developers looking for clones or managers looking for someone to do a specific project.
Well, there are people who hate the idea of lying, and can't bring themselves to do it, even it's applying for a job where they don't meet one of the requirements.
Most likely this isn't an attribute that most employers actually want, though.
Similar idea: make a list of "required" and "optional but nice to have" skills for the position. Among the optional ones, include experience with a non-existent technology. Discard everyone who claims to have the experience.
I have no idea, but yes, I suspect remote positions are heavily targeted and folks are looking for lazy hiring processes.
But when the job description contains a lot of very general terms (e.g. "scientific computing") and every part of your job history is just parroting a specific term used in the job description with no details it doesn't pass the smell test.
I absolutely respect keyword-heavy job/project descriptions. You kind of have to do it to make it through filtering by most recruiters. But real descriptions are coherent and don't just parrot back terms in ways that makes it clear you don't understand what the are. You find a way to make a coherent keyword soup that still actually describes what you did. That's great! But it's really obvious folks are misrepresenting things when a resume uses all the terms in the job description in ways that don't make sense.
I kinda think we've reach this weird warfare stage of folks submitting uniquely LLM-generated resumes for each position to combat the aggressive LLM-based filtering that recruiting is starting to use. I assume people think they can do well in an interview if they can just get past the automated filtering. I'm sure some are trying to do 3 and 4 remote jobs at once with little real responsibilities, too, but I find it hard to believe that's the majority. I may be very wrong there, though...
On the hiring side too, and I really don’t understand the fake resume with AI trend. How can they possibly think they’ll pass the interview? Because when I’m hiring I find it very easy to spot someone lying when questioning to go into the details of past experiences. Maybe they are betting on a broken process? Maybe you can pass (dumb) HR filters with lies, but not real interviewers, at least from what I do and have seen.
The fact that even well-meaning hiring managers can't see great candidates because of filtering overload says a lot about how dysfunctional the current system is
My previous job ( somewhat well known brand) got > 500 resumes within hours for a mid level position. My manager decided to close that job posting and found someone internally
It’s pretty much always who you know… at least to get a showing. It’s rare in history to find counter examples. And in a LLM fueled world it’s going to be more important.
Companies can improve by ensuring they don’t hire _because_ of whom someone knows. It should only ever let you get in the room to interview.
So practical advice of what to do: be human. Get to know people. Care. Your time to do this is not when you’re looking for a job, but when you’re in a job.
This is my anecdotal experience too. There's a (non-sequential) human thread that connects all my work experience. Ironically the exception was my very first development job, which was a blind application.
I've never gotten a job from someone I know. I've heard it my whole life but I've always went in solo to a number of jobs big and small. In fact, I personally find it kind of not respectable in some weird way (leaning on others for something I naively still hold onto as a merit-based system. People that break this value break what makes the system good), but I'm obviously biased from having always gone into an interview knowing only myself and what I know.
Vetted resumes seem like a real solution here, the issue is incentives.
One possibility for a free and impartial services would be via government funding. Unemployment insurance is paying out a few hundred per week per person, cutting that time down even a little could pay for a decent background check. That doesn’t get you a job specific resume but it should be good enough for an initial screening for most jobs.
Been a couple of years since I last was an interviewer, but I’m always amazed at people who blatantly exaggerate in-depth experience while seeking a highly technical position.
Job Requirements: Senior Staff, Deep technical work in X, Y, Z
Resume: 10 years as tech lead in X, Y, Z
Reality: Once walked near someone with experience in X, Y, Z and heard them sneeze loudly. Can spell X correctly.
Usually you really don’t need that much experience. There are only a few percent of jobs will need very specialized folks, regardless of that description.
Because the job requirements on the position are likely to be real as the applicants accomplishments on their resume.
At every company I’ve done hiring at my job descriptions for positions on my team were edited by my boss or hr and read like what was 1-2 levels above the nominal title of the position or had shit like the well worn joke of asking for X years of experience in technology that hadn’t existed for that long.
The entire hiring market for tech at least has devolved into almost 100% noise over the last few years
Hiring doesn't work like that. It's not like you glance at resumes then hire someone because what the paper says matches your job description. You spend a lot of time, if you're doing it right. Some resumes have everything you want, but aren't honest. Some resumes don't have everything, but they're pretty close, and worth the conversation. Some people seem perfect on paper but once you talk with them you realize (for whatever reason) that they don't fit. Even just a few applicants can take many hours of work before you can pick the one that fits best what you're looking for.
If you're a team of 5, handling 1,200 resumes, how much money are you expected to invest in this process? Does everyone take a week off billable work so you can find someone? Can you afford that? With only a team of 5, probably not.
We all want to feel like we're being treated well, but scolding someone because they were overwhelmed by the massive amount of adversarial spam they received for their job posting is a failure to put yourself in their shoes. Let's all be better people, here.
I've lived through the recessions of 1990-91 (in my 20s, not tech), the Dotcom bust and the Great Financial Crisis. I can tell you that it's always been this way when its' a "buyer's market" and the employers can afford to be picky. I can also tell you that this is not some game-changing phenomenon[0]. The jobs will return when it is once again a "seller's market" -- which it surely will be. This applies to non-tech job markets as well.
During the DotCom bust I ended up getting a taxi license in NYC and driving yellow taxicabs on 12-hour (standard) shifts for over 18 months. During the GFC, I got trained in HazMat handling and joined contracting companies as an employee cleaning the beaches after the BP oil spill for a year. In both cases, I re-entered the software engineering market as a high-demand candidate and made even more in base and total comp than I had previously.
I am over 50 now. I never transitioned to a management position. Still, I do plan to re-enter the software engineering market when the current winter ends and spring next arrives.
[0] I work with agentic AI on my own projects. Due to limited context windows, even the best models like Claude Opus or Alibaba's Qwen-coder require much more expert handholding than people let on. Even with good context engineering and memory tools.
What could potentially put an end to the current hiring "winter"?
We have an increasing amount of immigrants coming over in hopes of getting a white-collar job, in combination with the tech sector shrinking, as well as companies as a whole being much more careful when hiring.
There would need to be some explosion in the amount of tech jobs, in order for everyone to be able to get one. However, I just cannot see what could cause something like this in the near future.
Presumably the end of such a winter would involve the tech sector growing.
According to wikipedia[0] there doesn't seem to be any significant uptick in H1Bs. Is that what you were referring to by "immigrants coming over in hopes of getting a white-collar job"?
I'm not American but I do find it quite annoying how majority of the economic trends present within the US, are subsequently reflected in Europe with a slight delay.
I think that a slight increase in autonomy of other western countries could go a long way
>You can't imagine the death of an elderly figure pushing questionable tariffs that undermine financial planning happening suddenly in the near future?
The masses are asses. People largely get the govt they deserve, Germans included . Directing your anger at politicians is really lame.
"But the truth — despite the unique challenges that accompany majority stakes in the world’s resources — is that most of the ultrarich seem to die bloodless, unperturbed deaths, and at advanced ages [...] The Dead Billionaires of 2022–23 enjoyed an average lifespan of almost 86 years, outperforming average Americans by more than ten years."
I'll admit it's tactless, but as a presumably European in your other comment what have I sacrileged against God? You asked an economical question it's hard to make economical decisions with repeated 90 day deadlines.
If companies are much more careful when hiring, they would not consider immigrants unless the candidate is exceptional, which doesn’t significantly change the number of opportunities for an average worker.
Contrary to the conspiracy theories, H1B requires the employer to pay market wage or higher, so hiring an immigrant for a white collar job is extra cost and risk, and only makes sense in a low-interest rate environment where finding a qualified candidate becomes a challenge.
The exceptional and even qualified immigrants that would take these jobs are coming at a significantly lower rate since Trump 1.0. And that includes international students that would eventually become exceptional/qualified candidates.
The 50 year old commenter has pointed out the root cause and showed examples of the cycle to explain when the jobs will come back.
> Contrary to the conspiracy theories, H1B requires the employer to pay market wage or higher [...] where finding a qualified candidate becomes a challenge.
Something doesn't add up here. If you are paying the market wage, you fundamentally cannot have challenges finding qualified candidates. The market wage isn't established until you already have someone agreeing to your terms...
H1B is built around the concept of past market wages. This is why the 'conspiracy theories' state that H1B drive down wages. Not because the H1B workers are paid less than other workers, but because they are paid the same.
Consider the scenario where yesterday it took $20 per hour to find a willing worker. Your competitor hired that person. Said worker isn't going to come work for you for $20 per hour. He is already positioned with that. He would come work for you for $30 per hour, though. You could offer him $30 per hour, or you could cry and say that you can't find anyone and then hire an H1B for $20 per hour. Technically, in this scenario, the market wage became $30 per hour, but since the H1B was introduced you were able to bring it back down to $20 per hour.
Which isn't much of a conspiracy theory. That's just basic economics. The macro effects are considerably more complicated, of course. H1Bs are granted on the understanding that having two workers being paid $20 per hour is more net beneficial to society than one worker making $30 per hour. Including economically over the long term — where businesses that are able to expand with more workers will eventually be able to pay all workers more, although the "trickle down" crowd will dismiss that idea.
The so-called conspiracy theories disagree with that notion, believing, no doubt because they are thinking of it from an individualistic point of view rather than a worldly point of view, that they would be better off making $30 per hour instead.
There was also a trend of outsourcing in tech after the DotCom bust, but that was reversed (and arguably not as much of a problem as it first seemed to be).
I think that was a pretty small trend. The trend I'm hearing today is 300k jobs are being offshore annually and that around 75% of those are in the tech sector. Assuming a company could only hire half as many people here due to peice differences, that would be about 9k more jobs per month.
I wonder if with AI it is possible for someone to be a productive entrepreneur easily than finding a job in today’s market. Specially for someone over 50.
The thing that bothers me so much about this post is that it reeks of privilege by treating unemployment as if it were mainly just a bad trigger that you talk to your expensive therapist about once a week.
For most people in the real world, psychological burn out is NOT the problem with unemployment. The problem is becoming homeless.
The median household net worth in the US is $193,000. The rate of home ownership is 65%. I don’t think the median American is at risk of becoming homeless during normal unemployment. Maybe you mean that the article isn’t as relevant for a global audience which is fine, but I would think that the median American lives in “the real world”.
It doesn't say liquid assets though, it mentions multiple options which vary in how easily you can/should use one to pay an unexpected bill or period of unemployment.
For example, if one is using their life-insurance payouts to pay their rent... well, something has gone very wrong somewhere.
Specifically, this part:
> financial asset—which includes transaction accounts, certificates of deposit, savings bonds, other bonds, stocks, pooled investment funds, retirement accounts, cash value life insurance, and other managed assets
For the highly-liquid "transaction accounts" (checking, savings, money-market) the conditional [0] median is just $8k.
[0] AFAICT "conditional" here means "we don't include $0 data points in the median." That explains why the subcategory of "stocks" has a higher conditional median value than the more-general category of financial assets.
Sure, I couldn’t find a better data source than that. If you find a better source that includes liquid assets specifically that would be helpful. I am skeptical that of the 39k in assets listed there, there isn’t a substantial amount that can be used to pay the bills (i.e. who has $39k in their 401k but $0 anywhere else?).
Again I don’t think that means what you think it means. It says “value of all financial assets” which includes banking accounts, cds, stocks, bonds etc. that is not liquid.
The next exact line it calls out those bank accounts and the mean at $8,000. That is not a lot of liquid emergency savings for a household let’s say of 3.
Again that number is inclusive of retirement accounts, hard to say much without knowing the breakdown but we do know $8k is the closet cash number. I would suspect the majority of the rest are in retirement accounts. Sure bonds and stocks are liquid but not like cash is. Using Fred is not that useful for these type of exercises as I don’t think those datapoints do a great job on topics like this.
So I don’t see what you are trying to point out. Most surveys I have seen put something like a quarter of Americans without any emergency savings.
Good luck accessing any of your home equity if you don’t have a job. I guess you could just sell your house of many years and move your family into an apartment.
Until you factor in maintenance, utilities, taxes, etc…
Depending on where you live, renting is often cheaper than owning, but real estate agents who make money off selling houses will never tell you the full cost of owning a home.
I think "most people in the real world" have at least a few rungs between their current situation and true homelessness. Many people have some sort of family or other community that they could lean on, even in America where family ties are weaker than any other place I know.
I have a couple friends who haven't had steady work in years, and they still eke out a pretty reasonable existence living with friends and family because they are kind and considerate and people don't mind having them around. A lot of street homeless have mental or substance issues that make it hard for them to coexist with other people.
"Homeless" is not the same as "living on the street". People living in hotels, temporary trailers (in some places even tiny homes count), living with a friend temporarily, etc are all homeless. Plenty of Americans are much closer than this than you might think working in tech. 50-60% of Americans currently live 'paycheck-to-paycheck' which means the second work stops they're on a timer for missing bills to start coming in.
I've had the luxury, working in tech, to have lost a job and had the opportunity to take a few months off before searching. Even this was incredibly stressful in practice, but I never had to worry about losing my place of living.
> People living in hotels, temporary trailers (in some places even tiny homes count), living with a friend temporarily, etc are all homeless.
You're right. But is a 30-year-old who moves back in with their parents "homeless"?
And yeah, the paycheck-to-paycheck stat blows my mind. Somehow the standard American experience has become the latest model iPhone (financed), a new car (financed), a rented home, 4-5 meals out weekly, and almost zero money in the bank. And all this in a country with some of the weakest social security in the developed world. I'm sure the half-trillion dollars spent on advertising every year has something to do with this.
> You're right. But is a 30-year-old who moves back in with their parents "homeless"?
No, but this is also not ideal for many reasons
I have a friend going through this right now, actually. The biggest challenge is that her parents don't live anywhere near a strong job market. So the decision for her is "be homeless in a place where jobs are available" or "have a home but no access to employers"
I have been applying since March 2020 out of New Orleans and I have come up with nothing (5-6 first round interviews) so I think that this is a much bigger problem than people think.
Probably. The iPhone users I know mostly replace their phones once every 3 to 5 years, and they don't all buy brand new replacements even then (although some do.)
I'd be surprised if you had no one around you that didn't have an old android laying around collecting dust. I'm still on an old A52s and it works fine.
You might need to get out more, I've lived it, I've been around people who live it every day. I met someone for the first time in like 15 years (old school semi-acquaintance), something like the second thing we started talking about was how rough it was just finding and paying for an apartment in the remote super "LCOL" place we found ourselves.
Think about it, I'm guessing the guy welding the beams in your kid's school isn't making a quarter of what you make a year. Yet he has to be reminded every day that he's an economic failure vs what do you do, javascript? Early stage startup ideas? I bet it was pretty good in 2006-8.
Getting out more won’t help in this case because I will be walking around SOMA. The fact of the matter is that the stat is made up by a payday loan company and has no bearing on reality.
People like to share it because they are LLM like and just repeat things without looking at the data. “Hallucinations” are the common way that humans experience the world. World models born of pure fiction.
Also wtf I know journeyman ironworkers. They own homes in Oakland. People act like this is some poverty mode existence. Their lives are fine.
Thanks for sharing the slowboring blog post. I didn't know that stat came from payday loan companies, which definitely makes it suspect. Encouraging to hear that 55% of Americans have enough cash on hand for 3 months of expenses, and most of them have less liquid resources they could draw on if they needed more.
However, saying that the median American household has ~$200k net worth doesn't necessarily mean that they're doing great. A lot of the burden of funding retirement falls on the individual in the US, meaning if you're 60 and only have $200k of net worth in a M/HCOL city you're still potentially kind of fucked.
whats making the confidence that you are correct, and other people are bots, vs you being the bot?
up until recently, you didnt know the definition of homelessness that is used in the data. how are you making claims about the data? which data? what does it say?
since you know journeymen, you might want to ask them to meet their apprentices. That way, you could visit the apprentices homes that theyve bought, and can definitely pay the mortgage on by themselves.
or, if they dont have any, you could try to meet some CNAs at the local hospital? or the person at the grocery til?
I made no claims about homelessness. Only about the paycheck to paycheck thing. Did you use Llama 3.2 1B to make this comment? Next time use a bigger model. Gemma 3n 4B is sort of the limit before it starts talking nonsense about “claims about the [homelessness] data”. Complete non sequitur.
I also remember seeing something a few years ago that this stat has always floated around 20-30%. It was in the context of reporting that living paycheck to paycheck "has reached 30%", but that the reporting never included historical averages, to make the news much more sensational than it actually was.
> Plenty of Americans are much closer than this than you might think working in tech. 50-60% of Americans currently live 'paycheck-to-paycheck' which means the second work stops they're on a timer for missing bills to start coming in.
How is that actually defined by whoever measured it?
The median American has $8000 in transaction accounts and a net worth of $192k. 50-60% of Americans self-report that they’re living paycheck to paycheck, but not everyone understands that to mean “I literally can’t pay the bills if my paycheck doesn’t come on time”.
(Is it deeply uncomfortable to get laid off with $8000 in your account? Without a doubt, especially in an increasingly weak labor market, even if you have home equity or retirement savings you could theoretically dip into to cover what unemployment benefits can’t.)
No, the people I'm thinking of are childless. They recognize that their level of stability and functioning is not currently high enough to support a family.
I didn't say that they're thriving and living their dream, just that they're still a couple rungs above homeless.
> I think "most people in the real world" have at least a few rungs between their current situation and true homelessness.
This is one of the most out-of-touch HN comments I've seen in a while. Most people are not nearly as privileged as the community on these forums. Not even all the people posting here are fully removed from the risk of being out on their ass. Some have moved from other parts of their home country (think people in the Bay Area who moved for a job and have no family in the same job market). Some have moved from other parts of the world to where they are and have no one upon whom they can impose. Plenty have huge student loans and are so fresh out of school that they're at the edge of the many rounds of layoffs affecting the tech industry in the last few years and lack enough experience on their resumés to land a new position before their finances run out.
I can't believe how tone deaf it is to suggest that most people have multiple rungs upon which to fall back. And I've only been talking about people on these forums, the "fortunate" types.
> think people in the Bay Area who moved for a job and have no family in the same job market
If they've failed to find a job for long enough that they're about to be homeless, does it really make sense to remain in the most expensive housing market in the country?
I think it's equally out of touch to imply that if you select a random person from across America (the richest country in the world) you will land on someone who is an inch from homelessness, with no close family or community, massive debt, and living in terror of the next layoff. Certainly there are people in that situation, but to imply that it's somehow the median American experience is to caricature the country.
All I said is that "most people" have rungs to fall back on, not "everyone".
> I can't believe how tone deaf it is to suggest that most people have multiple rungs upon which to fall back.
There are rungs which are available to the population at large, so all of us have those privileges. For example the armed forces are recruiting. They will put a roof over your head and food in your belly, as well as give you medical coverage.
This is going to upset some, but the tech industry is full of delusional people that are completely out of touch with reality and the needs and struggles of everyday Americans.
I recently stumbled upon a YouTuber grousing about losing her six-figure tech job. She was in full freakout mode about budgeting etc. but something didn't seem quite right. Then she disclosed she's married, financially stable, husband still has a great job, etc.
It made me stop and think how there's people out there delivering groceries, putting on an apron, all so they don't have to switch to eating cat food by the end of the week.
OTOH ex-Googlers are worried they might be forced to switch to store-brand mineral water within weeks.
Blog posts are aimed at an audience, HN is an audience, and in both cases the audience in question is a technical one with an above-average number of well-paid professionals. The whole framing that the blog post "reeks of privilege" to "most people" is a bit strange. If I were to read a Yachting Monthly article about The Five Most Attention-Grabbing Mega Yachts For The Conspicuous Consumer Billionaire it would probably reek of privilege to me, too, but that's an entirely self inflicted problem: nobody is making me read a specific article from a yacht magazine.
I think people would be shocked at HN demographics. I'm quite confident it's more representative of the average population in terms of things like income than some people seem to realize.
I suppose if you are including European and Indian salaries and American students? But upper middle class students are literally temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
>The median annual wage for software developers was $133,080 in May 2024. The median wage is the wage at which half the workers in an occupation earned more than that amount and half earned less. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $79,850, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $211,450.
I don't think one has to live in a country to be able to look up and read statistics, or talk to people who work there, or read job postings from there, or have worked for companies in that country, or...
Anyway I'm not really sure why you're so insistent on this focus of America. HN (and the Internet in general) is a pretty diverse crowd... which was sort of my point
Sure, but none of us have to read all the way through every article that hits the front page, or take it to heart when the article is about a rich person.
One of my friends has given up on finding a software job and become a handyman to make ends meet. I get that not everyone in tech is loaded. I just don't think holding your nose and gagging at the "reek" when you deliberately read about someone who has six months of savings is a productive or useful reaction.
> I just don't think holding your nose and gagging at the "reek" when you read about someone who has six months of savings is a productive or useful reaction.
Interesting way to characterize GP's response when all they did was use a word in a very common way.
Burnout is real, and it’s worth talking about, but it’s a luxury to be able to even think about rest when your bank account is at zero and you're juggling survival
I've been thinking about job searching lately, maybe a bit too much. I'm employed, so it is not any immediate concern for me, but one has to think ahead.
Between age discrimination that starts after 50, and how difficult the job search seemingly is...some people will have to work at least until they're 70. That's a solid 15-20 years more, after the job hunting is an uphill battle.
If the work search is hard while you're at your peak, professionally speaking, how are you supposed to be stay positive after that?
Me and my partner are doing everything we can to achieve some minimum level of FIRE, just in case.
I've also accepted that sooner or later, probably the next 10-15 years or so, I'll have to accept the fact that I'm going to end up in a lifer position. If FIRE can't save my ass, I simply can't afford to hop around.
This is one of my main concerns. A lot of countries are talking about raising their retirement age, and I just think to myself, which tech company is going to hire a 68-year-old? Sure, I could transition into management, but my company just laid off a number of middle-managers and the ones left are expected to do more than just manage (code, design, etc.). So I'm not sure that's all that safe either.
I like learning new things, and I hope to continue that into my 60s (and beyond), but I have to imagine picking up new skills will get harder as I age.
> A lot of countries are talking about raising their retirement age
This is solely done to reduce/delay pension payments by pushing the old unemployed into lower social security / forcing them to live off of their savings.
No one in any industry is looking for geratric 70 year olds.
I didn't have problems with age discrimination — I don't think — but I think because I countered it with energy and eagerness. "I'm ready to hit the ground running. Availability? Leave a laptop on my desk and I'll be there tomorrow. I'm not yet an expert in your line of business, but I've worked through 8 different industries and succeeded in each, and learning as I go is my favorite thing in the world. Let's go!"
I feel like the underlying issue is less with age and more with ossification. If you're a world expert in Visual Basic but don't want to learn that "fad" TypeScript, well, get used to being unemployed.
That’s the thing about age discrimination, they don’t care that you’re eager, they care that you’re over 50. How are you supposed to demonstrate you’re not just another ossified old fart if your résumé goes straight in the bin?
Don't put anything on your resume that allows them to guess your age. Don't include dates on your education. Leave out everything except your last 10 years of work experience. Leave out your COBOL skills. And so on...
Hard agree. I used to be really good at Perl, but you won't find that on my LinkedIn anymore. Old certs for obsolete skills? Gone. The job I had 18 years ago? I'd be happy to tell you about it if it comes up, but you'll have to hear about it in person because I'm not advertising it on my resume.
It was always my understanding that software careers are shorter than other technical careers, and the higher wages compensate for this. More than compensate, if you invest early.
If by FIRE you mean retire in your 50s, I don't think that's an aspiration. That should be an expectation. You might be able to work a full career in this industry, but I wouldn't plan on it.
Most people don't have the temperament for FIRE. You have to live below your means, save a double digit percentage consistently, and invest.
And you have to do it for decades. You need to be able to tough it out through the worst of times (like the dot-com bubble, financial crisis, covid, and random political chaos like tariffs.)
You have to tune out the noise and always remember that on a long enough timeline, the market only goes up. And if you think it's "different" this time, it won't be for long.
I wouldn't say that at all. When I think back to all the store I set by ephemeral status things like worrying what was cool or if girls liked me in my twenties .. life is definitely a lot easier now I get to just be myself.
It's not that things get easier, they don't and I realize I can't do what I could at 28 but my attitude about life has changed. Less chasing sex, less impulsive actions, less neuroticism. More contentment and acceptance. Also I have seen a lot of ways to be screwed over by now and zillion personality types and I can smell potential problems a mile away.
On the downside I took what would have been a very minor fall in my 20's a few weeks ago and my shoulder still hurts. I'm not "old" like fallen and broke a hip but I would have been fully recovered after a few days 20 years ago I think.
One piece of advice for young whippersnappers: Age comes up on you a lot faster than you think when you are young. Take good care of your body, your teeth, your gut and your mind and don't put off eating and sleeping right and losing those extra pounds. Solid, lasting relationships are worth more than possessions and status too in my opinion. Those are easier to build when you are young.
HAHAHA. I have so much more "fu" money now, it really takes a lot of pressure off. Something goes wrong? I can solve it with money. Stranded somewhere? Just pay. Friend in trouble? Help out.
We need to forgo unions and straight up legislate forms of workplace democracy. People do not have meaningful control over a massive part of their lives and if democracy is good enough for state governments, it's good enough for private enterprise.
Unions drive wages down in the electronic vehicle sector by forcing pensions and dissuading RSUs. Most Tesla workers make far more than their unionized GM counterparts
Also unions are mostly there to allow the lazy low performers to coast. We already have a serious problem of this but making it hard to fire them will make everyone’s life worse.
Unions don't make it impossible to fire people. As long as management does their job and documents correctly there's zero issue firing workers who aren't doing their job.
Oh how I would love to just stop looking for jobs for a bit and leave it on rest.
Unfortunately I am selling things off right now to not go homeless and refusing to apply to jobs is an admission of defeat to me. Said as a (former?) tech worker.
Read through your comment history and it sounds gnarly. I hope you find something soon. I was unemployed for 6 months in 2022-2023 and it was horrible. I guess I learned something from it, but I hated it. That said, I became employed after applying to a role by emailing the CTO after they posted on the monthly Who's Hiring thread. I've had 2 jobs from HN since.
HN has been huge for my career personally, so I made this site to help make it easier to find stuff that's good for you: https://hnresumetojobs.com/
Just for clarification, you've had 3 jobs in the past 2 years? Were some of these contracts?
Otherwise oof, that sounds like volatility only worth dealing with if one really needs an income, esp. considering the signal for prospective employers.
> only worth dealing with if one really needs an income, esp. considering the signal for prospective employers.
Is this not the purpose of a job? I've had 3 long-term jobs/contracts since the pandemic, for a total of 2.5/5 years, and that's a better rate of the prior 6 years before that. Idk what their story is, but I think it's pretty typical for people who've had stable careers for one reason or another to assume it's within someone's control how often or how long they're able to work for. Sure, sometimes you're just job hopping or intentionally taking risks on early startups, but if the job goes away—depending on many factors—the ability to turn around and get another one can take a laughable amount of time, and the awareness of the perception of "the signal for prospective employers" compounding that difficulty makes it harder the longer it takes.
I try not to think about it, but there's been numerous times where I've been a year or more out from losing a job due to layoffs or financials or whatever, and getting rejected by even the least desirable place in the 4th+ round of interviews, usually by that point shifting my energy from applying/interviewing to looking at trade school. Imo it's always been brutal out there if you don't know someone running a startup who'll hook it up right away.
In my personal experience, as of the start of my current job and every time prior, in 10 years I'd accumulated no savings, always draining it to nearly zero by the time I'd get the next one. Ain't pretty.
I was laid off in Aug 2022, found a new role in March 2023, then found another role in March 2024. So basically 2 roles in 2.5 years. It's fairly common in the bay area, especially since I'm in the startup space.
Sounds awful. You're articulate and it sounds like you have a decent amount of experience, I hope you find some employment commensurate to that.
I've had some extended periods of unemployment. Only advice I can offer is to strengthen existing social connections and put yourself in situations where you can meet new people. I've gotten work before from people I met in random social contexts. I guess you could call this "networking", but I hate that word. It's good to reduce your isolation, whether or not it directly lands you a job.
Email in bio if you want to chat. Maybe I can help.
This hurts. As someone who's been unemployed, struggling with mental health issues, for far longer than I'd care to admit in such a forum, I struggle with the question of when it's just been too long to realistically get back into it.
Was at your place two weeks ago. Was selling things. Found a job finally by a sheer stroke of luck within my network (cold applying never worked for 7 months).
I wish you all the best and hope you find a job too.
This past year, I noticed people reaching out to me whenever my employer is hiring. These seem to be new graduates, and there is a pattern in the way ask for a reference or a job:
- "Hey, I applied, could you hire me?"
- "I have a compsci, I'm qualified, I sent a resume"
- "can I use you as a reference?"
These are people I've never met, yet they are so direct to the point of being rude. But to the best of my knowledge, they are real people. And what it looks like is that I'm contact #258 in a spreadsheet, because they have to cast an extremely wide net to hope for a single response. When I respond, they are lost because they don't even remember which of the job I was a contact for.
I'm guessing it is due to the advice that getting a job is a "numbers game".
When I was hiring somewhat recently, I talked to a worryingly high number of people that didn't know what role they're applying to, had perfect resumes and were taking the fake-it-till-you-make-it attitude to its limit. I mean I get there's a sales aspect to an interview, in a way, but this was pushing it way too far. It was a very frustrating experience.
A lot of the recent advice has pretty much destroyed the hiring process, in my humble opinion. It swings from solving hard computer science problems to testing trivia to being a political round-table. I keep on wondering how much worse can it get before a reset is needed.
It is a generational difference. Zoomers have a tendency to communicate like Jordan Belfort. Oftentimes it seems scammy but it is prevalent because it sometimes leads to new opportunities.
This is why I honestly think it would be better if the popular job boards limited the number of applications you could submit per day. The game theory of the job market incentivizes spray and pray.
That wouldn't work. Candidates would just create multiple accounts, and apply from multiple job boards. Or they would use the job board to find the employer's own careers web page and apply directly there.
Apps like tinder already deal with the multiple account problem - not an unknown challenge.
I’ll admit the second issue is harder, and would require some kind of common application standard framework.
I still maintain that the status quo of noise drowning out signal is horrifically bad, and I don’t think job boards making things even more frictionless is helping.
In my recent experience (20 yrs experience so ymmv)
- basically all jobs you see posted on LinkedIn or on big sites are either fake or might as well be because they are being run through HR
- everything is optimized for engagement, not outcomes, so there are lots or meaningless things to do (basically anything on linkedin). You might as well do some of them to stay sane but they'll never get you a job
- what's valuable is networking and getting the opportunity to speak to a real person who might want to work with you. There are always lots of jobs, even when there are no jobs, but there are trust problems, process and bureaucratic issues, and incompetence (all of HR/talent) that need to be navigated
- sort of redundant, anything that's easy (like Easy Applying to a job) is useless. Hard, uncomfortable prospecting, involving real people, increases your chance of success
> - basically all jobs you see posted on LinkedIn or on big sites are either fake or might as well be because they are being run through HR
When I was looking (a while back), my experience was that the big sites are a dozen or so of consultancies and head hunters reposting all the jobs as "an opportunity for a client."
FooCorp (a real company) would post a position. Then headhunters and contract to perm style consultancies would repost it. This way, you'd get 1 + 12 job postings for the same position (assuming that the company even posted it there in the first place).
Next, applying to a position (other than the real one) on that set would get you ghosted (they're collecting resumes to send on and will pick 100 that they feel have the best chance of getting hired before contacting back). Sometimes, they'd call you back with a different position that "you'd be perfect for". Often, the resume that they send on to the actual position is significantly doctored from the original (to the point where its "this person isn't the one on the resume"). In today's world, the "this is an AI fake" is sometimes the transformation that the head hunter does to your resume.
So its not so much run through the company's HR, but run through the head hunter's filter trying to find the "best" ones to send on and for that filter, even though you applied it might not get to the hiring company to consider.
(Anecdote: when I was unemployed looking for a job a number of years ago, I tried some headhunters. One interview that I got they were asking me really odd questions about technologies that I knew nothing about. When it was pointed out that "I should know about these things, its on your resume" they showed me the one that they got that had my name on it... and it didn't match the copy that I brought with the exception of when I got my degree and what university it was from. They thanked me for my honesty and we both agreed that I was not a good technical fit for the position.)
This disaster is why I've built a whole side project automating the act of doomscrolling through job boards, so I can focus on actually talking to people when I find something that does interest me. (And can track the results in one place without repeatedly running into duplicates.)
"Sometimes the best way to search is… not to search." Last line of the article and man... it hits! All while applying and going through multiple interview processes, I was taking a break: traveling, fishing, and reading.
I was in the job search after leaving the GOV for about 3-4 months. I had received offers but they were all less pay or less flexibility than before and I wasn't willing to compromise. All the "big and sexy" start-ups required 3+ interviews, most I had was 7, and they still ended up deciding I wasn't a fit.
I reflected often that I was in the wrong line of work... not being able to get what I had wanted. With some rationalization and imposter syndrome gone, it ended up being LinkedIn and my connections that had saved me. Living proof that network and connections out last technical prowess unless you're the best-of-the-best at something.
And unfortunately if you don't have a network for whatever reason, you're essentially screwed. Networking is basically the only way to get there, but I don't think most of society can handle the networking requirements to be stable.
I don't understand why LinkedIn haven't stepped in to this market more strongly.
They can verify if people are real. They have the information on what experience people have. If I was them then I'd be saying that your LinkedIn profile was your CV, and persuading companies to make LinkedIn be their route to applying for jobs.
(Not a shareholder, don't really use LinkedIn myself, just feels like such an obvious step for them to take.)
This is an interesting take. I think they are heading down this path, especially with the 'Easy Apply' button which is essentially what you're talking about.
If I have to guess, the current business model is likely profitable & any deviations too far from that could hurt their bottom line. Incrementing slowly overtime to LinkedIn replacing the CV seems to be the play, mainly to keep the current cashflow going.
She graduated with a computer science degree in January, and then her dad passed away. The estate was a mess so she ended up spending time figuring that out. Then, we found and fixed a medical issue that had been draining her energy. She's doing a lot better now, but as a result she has an 8 month gap on her resume. She also never took an internship so that she could finish a semester earlier with summer classes. So now she's absolutely screwed for phase 1.
She switched to phase 2 recently. She got a hit for software support. She got rejected, but the person was like "Why aren't you applying for programming jobs, since you like programming?" They set her up for an interview for an actual programming job, and said her lack of experience wasn't an issue because they had a lot of pull, and that they would offer her a test where she could prove herself. She spent the next several days preparing non-stop for the interview, only for the same guy to be angry at her for not having multiple significant projects on Github and refused to even give her the test.
After that we thought about continuing phase 2, but we both felt like it was just a waste of time, especially after the last experience. She's had previous experience tutoring and I've written some instructional books, so we've now just decided to ignore the job market and form an LLC related to teaching. She'd be a great programmer, and it's really stupid that no one wants to give her a chance, but at some point you just figure the job market is so irrational that we should be able to beat it by doing it ourselves.
Four months? Six months? Is that supposed to be a long time? I know people that have been in this situation for nearly two years now. Forget hopeless, it's a bottomless pit of despair. I don't know how to help them, and neither does anyone else. But they keep trying and doing whatever they can.
The argument of "have hope, almost everyone picks themselves up eventually!" doesn't work when you're the one who is actually homeless.
I've had about six or seven months of temp work in the last four years. It's uncanny when people talk about having a couple months of unemployment being rough. The article points this out.
> Tell them you’re unemployed, what do you get? “Oh yeah I was unemployed one month ten years ago boy that sucked.” Yes, friend, yes it does suck right now six months in, and unlike your little story there I don’t know when or if it will ever stop.
This is on point, but then the author completely misses the mark a following paragraph.
> How often have you known somebody whose life was really, finally wrecked by unemployment?
I don't know anybody in my situation. The people I know send one job application, get an interview, and get an offer. I don't know how they do it. They don't know how they do it.
People look at me like I must not be trying very hard because it's trivial for them to get a job and infer that it must be for me as well.
The author says
> It won’t turn out as bad as you fear.
And continues by asking how many people does the reader know go homeless from being unemployed?
> I’m talking about who do you personally know who’s had it go that badly?
Homelessness is just a weird way to frame that. A family friend is the only other person I can think of in a similar situation to me - mid 30s, university educated, very unemployed - and they're living with their parents.
That doesn't mean they're not having a really bad time. Or that its not bad for society in general when we waste human capitol like this. She had motivation enough to travel out of country to get her degree. She is educated, but had no place in society, no career or family of her own now. That isn't fine just because she isn't homeless.
My savings are gone and even when I lose my home this year I will have social support structures, like living with family. I won't go homeless but that doesn't mean my career isn't over or that things aren't that bad.
I'm not even worried about being homeless.
I'd sleep in a tent if every day I woke up to doing what I loved.
I am worried that every day for the rest of my life will be worse than the day before it because nobody will work with me and nobody wants me on this earth.
My most recent job search had 30 interviews with 21 companies (you read that right) in 24 days. Rent was due and there were mouths to feed. Unemployment simply was not an option.
I consider myself exceptionally lucky to land where I did, and yet still would not care to do that process again.
I'm not a PM, but I PMed it very aggressively. I made a Notes.app personal wiki tracking every company I spoke to, with a timeline in reverse chronological order of every contact I'd had with them, like:
Foo Corp
Recruiter: [Jane Smith]
* 2025-09-15 On-site prep call with [Joe Brown]
* 2025-09-13 Coding screen with [Pat Doe]
I kept a "pipeline" note with companies in each stage, like:
# Leads
* [Adam Albert] at [Bar Corp]
# Initial Contact
* [Brenda Baker] at [Qux, Inc.]
# Recruiter call
...
# Phone Screen
# Tech screen
# Onsite
# Rejected
* [Shifty Corp] (they gave me the heebie-jeebies)
And then there was a separate Interviews note, which was a lot of the content from the Pipeline doc, but ordered chronologically and with more detail:
# 2025-09-15
* On-site prep call with [Joe Brown] from [Foo Corp]
* Recruiter screen with [Chris Carter] at [Deluxe Pinkies]
# 2025-09-14
* Reference check with [Arctic Drilling and Waste]
And I replied to every recruiter I talked to, even if just to say "thanks for reaching out, but I'm looking for something more like ... right now", which often led to followups like "ooh, I have another client looking for that! Want to talk to them?"
Hyperorganization is one of my superpowers, and I leaned into it. Every morning I'd review the pipeline and timeline docs and ping every recruiter or company who I should've heard from but hadn't yet: "hey, it's me! Thanks for the chat the other day. Hope your Maltese, Mr. Pickles, feels better! Here's a picture of my cat waving to Mr. Pickles!" A lot of times that'd nudge them to respond and move things along.
I'm looking at my timeline right now and seeing the day where I had 2 recruiter screens, a tech screen, and an onsite. It was busy. But I was ready and willing to work, and at the end I turned down 3 pending offers to accept the one I most wanted.
Again, I count myself as exceptionally lucky. That said, half of "luck" is putting yourself in the right place, in the right condition, to jump on a good opportunity.
There are a lot of things to track all this. I personally didn't want to spend more than the minimum time setting up and using the system, because last think I wanted was to get nerdsniped into inventing a job application tracking systems instead of, like, applying for jobs. That would've been a real risk to me.
Thanks! I treated it as my full-time job and spent hours scrambling nearly every day. If things had worked out a little differently and I didn’t get a job in a reasonable time frame, I wanted to know it wasn’t from lack of trying.
Is this because you were talking to recruiters and they would respond? Because I've only been able to talk to ~three hiring managers this entire year. So the idea of lining up thirty interviews sounds preposterous, and not because it's hard work.
I followed up with the three of course, but was ghosted after one reply or so.
It's a little of that, and almost my particular job skills are still in demand right now. Just putting "looking for work" on my LinkedIn profile got the contacts flowing.
BTW, I did not, never, not once, apply to any jobs listed through LinkedIn this time around. I did that before and it was utterly demoralizing. Their ads were like "subscribe to LinkedIn Ultra and move to the top of the list of 9,000 people applying for this role!" I've never gotten a single hit from applying for a tech job through LinkedIn. I don't think that's actually a thing.
This essay just makes me feel so hopeless about our society. I don’t feel it’s right that employment has such weight in people’s lives that the search causes psychological damage.
I think a lot of people simply don't know what to do with themselves when they don't have a job.
There are many psychological needs that jobs often provide for you that you have to sort out yourself when you don't have traditional employement. This is a problem you face through unemployement, but also self-employment and early retirement.
At least in part, it's not so much not having a job as not having daily structure, not having a social context, and lacking a sense of belonging. Lacking these factors will absolutely ruin your mental well-being.
These aren't things that are impossible to find when unemployed (or otherwise not working), but if you've spent most of your life being told what to do, first in school and then at work, you've got some figuring out to do.
Most people don't have the financial resources to be out of work for a month or two, much less indefinitely. For most people it has nothing to do with the factors you listed.
I've been laid off twice in the past and each time I was fortunate to have enough savings to take several months off of work to relax and unwind. I'd quite happily do it forever if I could afford it. I loved being able to set my own routine, tell myself what to do, and find my own social context and sense of belonging while doing activities that I enjoyed, usually having nothing to do with work, like biking, skiing, creating open source projects, etc.
But watching your bank accounts slowly tick downwards is incredibly stressful, even when you have a long runway, and each time I ended up job hunting sooner than I had planned.
Agreed. I have can think of about a dozen things I'd love to do if I didn't have a full-time job. Unfortunately, most cost at least some amount of money (not to mention food, a roof over my head, etc.).
"I don't know if UBI would take people out of the workforce, but it would probably take me out of the workforce."
A realistic UBI would be $10-15k/year, which means a crappy apartment and/or roommates and no luxuries. There's probably a margin where some people who want to do FIRE would be able to retire slightly earlier, but I can't see many people abandoning median or better paying jobs.
UBI sadly is purely a fantasy. We don't have money even for retirement funding, which shows cracks in every country. And UBI is basically a lifetime pension.
We only don't have it because we refuse to collect it. There is enough wealth in the world to end hunger, poverty and allow people to age to death in dignity, but we lack the political will to achieve any of these things.
In countries without sovereign currencies it's more complicated, but in the US money wouldn't even need to be collected (technically it would need to be collected/added as debt, but that's entirely due to the Constitution and not some kind of natural law). The only real considerations needed to spend are whether or not adding more debt is politically viable and whether or not percepetions of and expectations for inflation are manageable. A UBI would be way too big to be able to avoid triggering inflation expectations and opportunism. Ending hunger would be much more manageable as the costs are very low relative to the impact and so it could be more easily hidden from financial doom-speakers.
Nominal wealth is useless if supply of products and services is in decline. The population histogram of pretty much all developed societies has passed the curve where the supply of labor is decreasing so that “wealth” will be competing to buy less and less labor.
US federal government alone spends trillions of dollars on wealth transfers from workers to non workers via Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, along with a few other program. And even that doesn’t guarantee you will be able to see a doctor in a timely manner.
I don't have a job right now. I've been applying about 100 places a month. I just graduated with a phd in a quantitative field and have all the skills of an ml data scientist + my own domain expertise. And, it sucks. I am so broke. I have no money in my bank account now, maybe $7. Family helps me with rent but until then I can't bear to ask them for more money. I've been waiting on unemployment claims to process for a month now, even then the projection is around $150 a week out of that based on my former teaching income. I generally eat 1-2 meals a day these days. Some meals are things like a pile of peanuts or toast with butter. I go to bed hungry many nights. I haven't engaged in any of my hobbies since my teaching contract ended, hiking takes too much time and makes me too hungry and I can't afford to golf right now. Trying to fix my bike so I can start doing postmates with it and bring in some money to not be so dependent on other people while I am in this limbo during the job hunt. I don't have any health insurance right now. Haven't been able to see my therapist due to out of pocket costs. Routine panic attacks and anxiety. Three credit cards maxed out. Falling behind on other bills. Yeah, I'm in bad shape. Hoping things turn around for me soon. The silver lining is the jobs I'm qualified for would pay me at least 10k a month if I manage to land one. Four months of that I'll have all my debt paid off and be out of this hole.
>I think a lot of people simply don't know what to do with themselves when they don't have a job.
Partly true. But today there is no way to live off the land either, as people used to in the past by raising cattle and pigs. Either it's illegal or you owe the govt taxes.
What are you talking about? That's not the issue for most people. For most people the issue is that if you don't have a job for long enough, the government will send people to throw you out on the streets to suffer and die.
I have tried various forms of non-work (including unemployment while unqualified for government aid), and the by far most mentally devastating thing I've done was to take an extended sabbatical where I really just did nothing but sit on my ass, play video games, watch netflix, and scroll social media for 8 months. Took me years to get my brain sorted again.
It's tough to watch the change when not too long ago a software developer with decent skills could literally submit 5 resumes and end up with 3 good offers.
I'm not sure, but that's still happening. At least it happened to me this year. I consider myself a decent developer (in every job I have landed, I was always considered the "best" in the team after not much time in the job). I'm not faang-silicon-valley level, though. I haven't written a compiler or an OS, or contributed to the linux kernel. I have read all the popular tech books out there, I do more or less know what companies (and interviewers) want to hear, and I'm easy to work with.
I'm in western europe. I think the situation in the US is way different, though. Also, for juniors (or people with less than 8-10 years of experience) is much harder, that's true.
The only way for anybody to have any good jobs at all is for millions to have none, and/or have nothing resembling formerly respectable pay.
And it's got to last years or there will be no recovery for shareholders from what they've already suffered with a stagnant economy.
In the 1970's it ended up 10x this bad or worse, in most technical fields at the time as well as non-tech.
There was nothing else that could be done except recognize it was a crap shoot.
There will be plenty of millions who do not lose their jobs, some will not even lose much momentum. There will be nowhere else for the "new normal" to coalesce around, after nothing else resembles the old normal for so long.
As before, only the relatively unscathed will write the economic history of these years, and many less-fortunate millions are slated to be forgotten.
The only other alternative is for everybody to take a steep pay cut, and all upwardly-mobile climbers to halt all momentum. What are the odds that could happen this time?
And that still wouldn't allow hiring as many early-career professionals as there will be available for quite some time to come.
Don't worry, employment is not where all the negative outcomes will affect future generations . . .
In the recent UAP hearing, whistleblower Borland talked about how financial ruin is the real fear holding whistleblowers back:
> Are you scared for your safety?
> … I am not scared for my physical safety in the sense of an agency or company coming to kill me, but I have no job. My career has been tarnished. I'm unemployed. Living off of unemployment for the next three, four weeks until that's gone. So it's a complicated question.
There is something fundamentally broken about this entire user journey and industry. There are lots of jobs to fill. But hiring managers don't find people reading through resumes submitted in a form. People don't get jobs by submitting resumes into a form.
The opportunities happen from talking on the phone, meeting someone for coffee. I feel like this entire resume submission industry should just be deleted.
It's just an abstracted and bureaucratic repackaging of the difficulty with searching for prey and forage during a succession of harsh seasons that some of our unluckier ancestors experienced, such as those who lived at the time of the Pleistocene Toba eruption.
To the brainstem, employment is the process of hunting for food. No employment means there's no hunting going on.
I know it's going to be deeply unpopular -- it always is -- but I never understood how reasonable people don't find bringing children into this world to be an act of abject cruelty.
My kids are happy, thriving and optimistic about the future. For me, they bring more joy than I thought existed. Having kids is the best thing that happened to me ever and pretty they’re glad I did too. What world are you talking about?
I mean, if it's so cruel, then why wouldn't you just commit suicide?
The reason why it's not cruel (IMO) is that there's hope for a better future, if you don't have kids, you will never be able to know. That's choosing to just not play the game, total darkness. There isn't an alternative universe to choose from.
Agreed, but I would say talking to someone isn't a magical fix here.
OP, I would be interested in knowing if that's the case, why are you posting here on HN, getting up in the morning, doing the things you do etc?
Are you depressed (if so) in a physiological or psychological kind of way (because of something external?)
I will say I am not doing too well, but still, if I look at things objectively right now, I'd still rather wait and see what happens in this world rather than choosing nothingness. My rock bottom is someone's heaven
This is good advice, but needs to be bookended with through research about your rights, and the consequences of discussing this with a medical professional, and all the various ways in which you can be fucked over.
Because there are some incredibly serious consequences to it.
I started working on shipping a game to Steam after I realized how broken the market was. I realize this might sound even more stressful than a job search for something like a backend role, but I feel like I have a better chance than average based upon cattle-like, low-effort trends in the space and my willingness to endure certain kinds of suffering that most indie game developers aren't even aware of.
Worst case scenario, this provides something interesting to talk about in subsequent job interviews. You can often delete large portions of a resume when you have a fully published product live on a platform like Steam, even if it's very mediocre and selling like trash.
In any reality, this is way better than working in the domain of boring bullshit banking and suffering the miserable personalities that inhabit the space. I feel like I might cross the "never going back" threshold with that entire industry within the next few months. If I reframe this, it is really stressful but it's also quite liberating. If I hadn't walked away from that job last year, I would have had zero time to think about these alternative paths.
Last time I was unemployed for an extended period I thought I would put my skills to good use by hunting for bugs and contributing fixes to open source projects.
Only to mostly be ignored, bugs closed as WONTFIX, or finding out many open source developers aren't really interested in fixing bugs, rather some self-aggrandizing labor of love.
I'm sorry you had that experience, I can certainly empathize.
Open source isn't working for free, it's working for connections instead of money. I find this way of thinking about it useful: my first order goal is not to fix a bug in the project, it is to do a favor for the human being(s) behind it.
If you're really contributing and aren't getting the reward, by all means, walk away and hack on something else. But it's also important to have some humility, and recognize that most of the time you don't get that reward, it is because you simply aren't being helpful.
The hard truth is that nobody is going to help you figure out how to be useful. They're just going to say no.
If you don't like how an open-source project is run then you can fork it, or start your own competing project from scratch. That's the beauty of open source.
We were looking to employ someone with experience in server experience in the field of High Performance Computing. We got a resume for a bartender with server experience. I so wanted to interview them.
Also, the number of junk resumes, where I take a resume block and post it into a search engine and it comes back with an exact match of the text. I write up a caustic response as to why not to hire the person… and they still slipped in!
Sometimes you just need to look locally. Chances are there are positions available close enough to your home that its worth the following effort. I have personally walked into places I was interested in working at and asked for an engineering manager. About 50% of the time, a manager comes out to meet me. I show interest, they show interest (generally, and even if they are not hiring). This has lead to much improved chances of getting an interview over just filling an application or email through a network. People like to see and get a feel for the people they might end up hiring. Face to face puts you ahead of the pack. This technique is critically underutilized. Obviously, if your only interested in remote positions, this won't work very well. If the org is big enough, you can try to locate a nearby satellite branch or office to find a person who can tap you in.
> I have personally walked into places I was interested in working at and asked for an engineering manager. About 50% of the time, a manager comes out to meet me.
This is surprising to me. Unless you last tried this long enough ago that the manager said, "I like the cut of your jib, young man, you've got grit" in a transatlantic accent.
Reminds me of Netflix in Hollywood. Can't get inside the gate outside without a notarized electronic certificate prepared beforehand. There is no front door, only a security post at the parking garage entrance.
I met many programmers during the boom years of software that straight out refused to develop any type of soft or managerial skills. Forget that, they even refused to maintain good relationships with decision makers (and I did this too, but only once in my carrier), left jobs in bad ways, focused on chasing salary increases every 6 months.
And here is the problem. If you have been chasing "easy" salary increases, working only on the comfortable stuff like developing tech skills, you should have seen this coming. It's very, very, very hard to maintain sharp coding skills decade after decade. Even if the job market was good, the reality is that you will eventually end up with a set of tech skills that a kid 20 years younger than you, with no family and so being able to live on lower salary, probably has too.
> you will eventually end up with a set of tech skills that a kid 20 years younger than you, with no family and so being able to live on lower salary, probably has too.
I was this young hotshot 20 years ago. In hindsight, the skills I had at the time were commodity or even irrelevant compared to the wisdom, life experience, and maturity that took me 20 years to develop and determine how effective I am now. You can't fake or rush those 20 years. (Even though the me of 15 or even 10 years ago wouldn't believe that statement.)
So I agree, although it wasn't really managerial skills that became important for me. It feels more intangible. I got sort of lucky that I didn't have to transition into management as I got older.
But that's not to say that many workplaces won't value the young hotshot anyway. I'm retired but if I was job searching I wouldn't really consider myself in competition with them, I'm not looking for the positions that can be done as effectively by a 28 year old. That's not a matter of job title or seniority, it's matter of finding people and positions that value or need the more subtle strengths that I find most valuable and important and interesting about myself.
> It's very, very, very hard to maintain sharp coding skills decade after decade.
I am at the end of the third decade, soon entering the 4th. I find it easier with the time. This is because with the experience, I can directly zero on the fundamentals of the new technology popping up and quickly see if this is just marketing or more a breakthrough.
Also, we have less diversity now, every new tech getting momentum is quickly defacto standardizing. Look at the way we run LLMs now, tons of models, 5 lines of Python, within 2 years, everything kind of standardized. You can now quickly pick up the subject (ironically, the LLM will help you there) and run with it.
It is way harder for young people, because of this FOMO, they try everything and nothing, they copy/paste what "God" GPT told them and have no understanding of how things are working in the background. For them to learn "through the stack", without experience, with the new big thing coming out every week but without the ability to judge, it is very hard. I am happy that my first website was static and cgi-bin was still a thing, happy that I learnt how to get my Fortran code to run fast on an multi-core system (yes, Sun stuff), that I was able to build relatively slowly my experience.
>I met many programmers during the boom years of software that straight out refused to develop any type of soft or managerial skills. [If you’ve been] working only on the comfortable stuff like developing tech skills, you should have seen this coming. It's very, very, very hard to maintain sharp coding skills decade after decade.
It’s funny you say this. I’ve observed the opposite: even basic coding skills can atrophy extremely quickly in previously sharp developers who quit coding to go onto a management track. The devs who never quit coding are the ones who stay sharp into old age; the ones who have problems getting hired in their 50s are the managers who quit coding in their 30s, worked the same middle-management position for 15+ years, and as a result have a skill/knowledge set that’s 15+ years out of date and can't answer FizzBuzz-level questions in first-round pulse-check interviews.
My experience has been just the opposite. While I developed solid technical skills, my focus was on developing soft skills. However, all the management jobs I've seen hire based on programming rather than management skills.
The pool of young kids that can challenge the technical ability of someone with 20 years more experience is small enough that I don't mind competing with them for employment.
> the reality is that you will eventually end up with a set of tech skills that a kid 20 years younger than you, with no family and so being able to live on lower salary, probably has too
I agree.
But if they only solution is to go into management, how is the career not a pyramid scheme? For each former engineer to go into management, 5 more must take his original place. That’s clearly unsustainable.
>I met many programmers during the boom years of software that straight out refused to develop any type of soft or managerial skills.
Let me stop you right there. Not everyone can be a manager, mathematically speaking, especially in a downturn.
>Even if the job market was good, the reality is that you will eventually end up with a set of tech skills that a kid 20 years younger than you, with no family and so being able to live on lower salary, probably has too.
You say this as if a kid with no family has the same skills as a person 20 years older. This is not the case. Generally old workers have seen a lot more and make wiser use of their time, on top of having superior skills.
A kid twenty years younger than me is in their early twenties and they would have to be some kind of Wunderkind to have spent decades learning operating systems, networking, programming languages, business and law to the degree I have.
When I'm sixty I'll have transitioned from software on commodity hardware and clusters to electronic things but I expect people in their forties to still come to me for advice.
Would you say, broadly, concepts you disagree with or find uncomfortable should be banned? Do you think that's sufficient, or should they be criminalized as well?
A colleague, who is very accomplished in tech industry (but not rich, for good reasons), said he would be in town, and asked to meet.
He strangely didn't say why (not even "to catch up"), so I thought it was probably that he had a new startup or executive role, and he was going to pitch recruiting me again.
But immediately after sitting down in the cafe, he said he was looking for work, and asked for my advice.
I hope I didn't laugh. Since I was in a similar boat, after a startup got disrupted. I wasn't seeing hardly any good job opportunities, so I wasn't feeling like someone who should be asked for advice on job-hunting, except as a cautionary tale.
Quickly moving forward from there, we had a good talk, exchanging thoughts and ideas, but neither of us had direct opportunities to give.
What's really dumb is that the world has capable people who spend huge amounts of time and downtime, simply getting permission to apply their hard-earned valuable skillsets.
It's grossly inefficient and unpleasant. We know some of the reasons, but it's still dumb.
> simply getting permission to apply their hard-earned valuable skillets
I dont think its this. I think its just brutally hard to earn a return on investment right now. For whatever reason, innovation has disappeared from the market. There's a lot of things changing with generative AI right now but very few actually valuable ideas have come out.
The real challenge today is finding problems to solve that people will pay money for.
[self promotion alert] the "you are not alone" point really resonated with me. When I lost my job, I was alone, helpless and not sure what the next steps were. This is why I tried to create a community of people willing to support and be a listening ear for people going through job loss and this tough job market. It's at layoff.supprt. honestly I have not been supporting it for a while but of you find this helpful and would like more features then do let me know!
I think the benefit of the “weird path” need not be monetary but instead a way to stay afloat of the burnout and find motivation to keep going. While I agree with many things in the article, I found in my experience that these feelings are not responsive to rational arguments, and rest doesn’t help after 6+ months when recruiters’ first questions to you are “what have you been doing since your last position?” That’s why I think the “weird” route can be a good way to answer by keeping up with new projects, etc.
Worth to mention is do reach to your friends and network telling them you were let go of / looking for a job. There's no shame in that, and in fact, it can help a lot.
Another small points: reduce your expenses. Basically plan for the worst in terms of budgeting.
Widen your search space. There are other younger markets in global south you can also approach.
Theres this expression i couldn't exactly translate to English. It goes along the lines of loosen up your body (literal translation), but it's more about yielding to the flow and less about physically doing so.
> OR maybe you have what experts call saying nothing while typing many things (SNWTMT) High and low you search for the words but lo and behold you're served nothing from the highest plateaus of the your top mind
Throw into the mix any immigration concerns and you have a perfect cocktail for stress :)
Something seems really off about this system. At least in tech, I see a lot of open recs and hiring. Im even seeing some teams struggle to fill open recs. It should be possible to build a system that matches workers to jobs without going through this dumb and stressful process.
Really appreciated the honesty around rest, not as laziness or avoidance, but as an actual, necessary part of healing from burnout. Feels like we don't talk enough about that
I've been working in a non-tech role the past couple years hoping things would improve. Reading stuff like this, doesn't seem to be happening and makes it difficult to plan long term (but I haven't been actively applying).
So for an (employed) developer like me, who is dreading the next job search, what's a "hot" profession I could train myself on so my experience in the job market over the next 15 years could be like it was in the salad days of 1996-2022?
(I'm making a pass at "learning AI" but don't feel 100% certain that demand for that will be sustainable at a high level over the next decade ...)
Well, I'm currently having a hard time finding a good electrician, and the ones who I have employed in the past earn pretty generous hourly rates.
(I say this half-joking, but also I know a DBA who retrained as an electrician and was happier than ever. It's the fact he retired - early - which has put me in my current predicament.)
Jobs are aggregated into gigantic boards like Indeed and LinkedIn, and the market is national or international. You can choose among thousands of companies, but you're also just one potential applicant among millions. The cost of applying tends to zero -> number of applications increases. The only way to succeed is by sending out an absurd number of CVs. Numbers that would have seemed inconceivable a generation ago before everything moved online and globalized. It's normal to send out hundreds or thousands before getting hired.
Economists look at this and see only an improvement in market efficiency, but they're ignoring the emotional toll. Reject, reject, reject, reject, drip drip drip every day like water torture. It's the same thing on dating apps. No wonder people give up.
That’s before getting into the jobs that are functionally not real, even if the employer in question believes they are honestly looking.
Seeing bog standard senior engineer positions still advertising for the places that ghosted me 5 months ago means the job posting is fake for one of the n-teen reasons companies paste fake postings or the company has gotten unreasonably picky with how much labor is on the market
To your point: You could make a fake company with a fake job posting in probably 15 minutes, and use it to easily waste hundreds of hours of time in people's lives.
Edit: Maybe it could be used to start some sort of unemployed software engineer fight club?
And the analogue of the exceptionally good-looking STD super-spreaders would be... the resume-driven-development self-proclaimed "10x devs" who job-hop every 6 months, leaving a wake of disasters?
Dating is unbelievably easy in some ways though. I'd argue the problem with dating today is that people don't do the hard things and instead look for love on apps and other bad places.
Dating is just a numbers game. Roughly speaking it's about maximising interactions with potential partners and taking a shot in as many of these interactions which go positively as possible.
You can game dating in your favour with a bit of strategy. Unfortunately job searches are much harder to game since you can exhaust the number of active positions for your preferred role quite rapidly. The only advice I can give on job searches is to keep your skillset as broad as possible. Specialising is good if when you find work you want to be paid well. Being well-rounded is good if you want to find work as easily as possible.
I honestly don't know what I would do if I was fresh out of school today or over 40.
That said, grinding through middling startup jobs also sucks.
The ability to get vc attention seems incredibly cliquey - not a game I really want to play again. On top of just wanting a normal / decent salary as a founder.
What nonsense. Does he really think his friends are sharing the full extent of their difficulties? There is an exquisite feeling of shame, guilt, fear, and anger that goes with being jobless for the first time and making zero progress with the job search. When your savings is gone, when your credit cards are maxed and in collections, when you're selling your stuff to pay for food and electricity, when you're about to be evicted (and have no idea what to do with your stuff because you can't afford storage) - and you have to keep trying. Keep a smile on your face, act confident and happy because no-one wants to hire you if you're a drag. You revise your resume, you apply to tangential jobs - but you don't get any response, no interviews and no offers. The one you do get is a disinterested indian guy at a bank who is clearly not even hiring right now.
Then you think, oh well I can find some sort of job, right? Even if it's a service job. Wrong. They won't hire you with your resume. I applied to Trader Joes and was ghosted. The only people who'll 'hire' me are day labor places that pay $13/hour for digging ditches - you just have to show up at 4:45am and hope you get called on. Then there is also substitute teaching, $109/day and you have to shell out the $85 for a background check on yourself to even get started.
Long before all this starts you cancel everything that can be cancelled. You might keep internet thinking it is necessary to find work and work remotely, but eventually that goes. You even let your car insurance expire, playing the odds. You sell everything you can. You keep looking. You go through periods of terror and sanguine acceptance. No-one really knows what you're going through - the people you do tell don't know how to process it, or what it really means, and some of them get offended that you'd burden them with this when more important things are happening in the world, like Gaza or Trump.
There is something perverse about starving in the middle of such wealth. When you have always been one of the smartest people in the room, you have a ton of real-world software engineering experience and have built real systems that service millions of people, and you are discarded like you are nothing for apparently no reason. You wonder if it's you, but you hear growing rumbles of it happening to others. Honestly, I hope its just me because if this happens to us in any great numbers you WILL start knowing people who couldn't get back on their feet. I find it easy to imagine the two kinds of reactions: he must have had some problem to not get a job, or if only he had reached out I could have helped! Both useless, both avoid responsibility for your "friend" in need.
This is very well said. It's horrifying, but very well said and very true. Sometimes the situation is just plain bleak. I have been unemployed for more than a year twice; I've been unemployed or underemployed for about 5 years in total. This despite accomplishing great things while employed and being well-regarded at past jobs. For me, each time the cloud has eventually passed and new work has come along, but that doesn't help until it actually happens.
The worst part of this demoralization caused by the struggle to find a job is that it demoralizes your colleagues whilst putting a lot of pressure on them to 'appear' extra hard-working.
The tech industry has turned into some kind of beauty contest of who appears to be doing the most work. I suspect the reason why it's more about 'appearance' is because deep down, they are demoralized - They are only pretending to be motivated, they are not actually motivated to improve anything. They're motivated only to keep their job. They are laser focused on that goal. The rewards are small, the punishments are big.
It makes the work more competitive and stressful, especially for those who aren't used to keeping up appearances and actually want to get stuff done. You kind of have to play the game.
It feels like the current job crisis is artificial and specifically intended to lower people's salary expectations and increase their work output but I feel like it's mostly backfiring. People are burned out. I was shocked to realize that even immigrants from developing countries who come to my country are feeling demoralized in the tech sector. 10 year ago, they felt they were on a career fast-track, now even they don't really see the light at the end of the tunnel. I've met some of them with master degrees who feel like they walked into a trap by leaving their home countries. They're feeling the high cost of living. The cost of living (and salaries) also went up in their home countries, the remittances aren't what they used to be. Meanwhile, cost of living here is sky-high. Doesn't feel like success anymore, for anyone.
I'm very good at software development and I enjoy coding but even I've had thoughts of changing career to something more essential like plumbing or construction, to stop the feeling of powerlessness and systemic manipulation which seems to be the core of this industry. I need more control over my destiny. I'd like a career where skill determines outcomes with high reliability and doesn't require permission from gatekeepers. Unfortunately, the country I live in is not very good for bootstrapped software developers and raising money is impossible unless you have a certain pedigree.
"It feels like the current job crisis is artificial and specifically intended to lower people's salary expectations and increase their work output"... bingo.
It's awful when billionaire boomers say stuff like "The pie isn't shrinking, anyone can grow the pie." Meanwhile, on the ground, it feels like literal Hunger Games or Squid Game and young people have literally 0 self-esteem or hope left to squeeze out... So the politicians bring in starry-eyed immigrants who at least have 'hope' which can be juiced and help to further suppress wages... All while millennials are called 'snowflakes' for complaining about the situation.
The problem isn't that millennials are unwilling to support previous generations in their retirement, we are... but we are not allowed to because the game we play is a race to the bottom for our own survival, not one about value creation. The system is not letting us be efficient, it's forcing us into bureaucracy and politics; that's where the money is coming from.
From the comments here, now super tough to get a job. Much different when I started, and can draw a lesson:
Started my career as a "physicist" at the NIST in research on the "Lamb dip" in the wavelengths of He-Ne lasers, got into the numerical analysis of ill-conditioned matrices, and, thus, got a career in scientific computing.
For a job, just look in the 'Help Wanted' section of the Washington Post, send a few resume copies, get a few interviews, and get 1-3 offers, all in less than 2 weeks. No problem.
The DC area was awash in organizations trying to get into computing and were desperate for anyone who could type in code and have it run.
A guess is that there was a larger plan: Some Big Shots in US National Security were really big on getting the DC area really moving on computing so pumped in big bucks with the theme, "If they look like they have aptitude and interest, then make them an offer they won't refuse and have them learn on the job." I.e., the Big Shots tweaked the supply and demand curves -- considering the money they were spending on military hardware, getting young guys into computing was small potatoes with a big gain.
Soooo, from the posts here, now we are at the other extreme: Way too many people and way too few jobs.
Part of the problem is the concept "geographical barrier to entry". E.g., there around DC, the Big Shots wanted to hire people already in and around the local area of DC, Northern Virginia, and Maryland and, thus, the employees had for competition a "geographical barrier to entry" -- no one outside that local area would compete.
So, I got a good career going, Camaro with 396" engine, the best restaurants, fancy food cooking hobby, violin practice on a decently good, new violin, a sack full of Nikon camera equipment, self-study in math, furniture, clothes, wife in grad school, in computing with also, crucially, some math, Fourier theory, numerical analysis, Navier-Stokes equations, etc. With that success, to improve that career, got an applied math Ph.D. -- ruined my career, never recovered. My brother warned me, "Each year in your Ph.D. program will leave you 1 year behind in your career" -- CORRECT.
Now, with the Internet, often no barriers to entry.
Curiously, people mowing grass, removing trees, installing roofs, repairing driveways, installing HVAC, electricians, plumbers, painters, real estate agents, insurance agents, ..., do have a small geographical barrier to entry. E.g., in my neighborhood, a guy mowing grass has two, nice, new 4-door pickup trucks with some nice trailers for the equipment. They have useful tools, e.g., pickup trucks, riding mowers, leaf blowers, wrenches, saws, volt/amp meters, etc. and are good at using them.
Now there are computers, useful tools, with people who know how to use them. Sooo, find some uses with some barriers to entry.
Uh, can't not notice, that looks like it's time to move to the other side of the table, be an employer instead of an employee.
I have no idea why governments refuse to deal with matchmaking the unemployed and employers. It would be at least as productive as highways, but a hell of a lot cheaper.
Disclaimer: I've been navigating the job market for almost a year now, and have practically given up.
An acquaintance of mine—he was the owner's/CEO's deputy at a place I worked—now runs a team-coaching-turned-recruitment business. I saw a question from him on social media the other day, something along the lines of: "Some businesses in the industry are receiving over 5,000 applications for advertised roles. How do you effectively screen that many applications?" I didn’t respond, of course—I have neither credentials nor experience, nor any real relationship with this guy—but I formed an opinion nonetheless.
My intuition was simply: you don’t. If your candidate pool’s fitness function is normally distributed, you’d likely get approximately the same quality of candidates from a randomly selected 50 out of 5,000. The distribution will be practically the same, and the maximum will be indistinguishable from the true maximum in any practical sense. As I recently explored—prompted by some statistical curiosity—this, of course, is modulated by the mean and standard deviation of the distribution. A higher standard deviation calls for a larger subset, while a higher mean dramatically shrinks the number needed to screen.
But I also think nobody really knows their "true" fitness function, much less its distribution across the applicant pool—simply because businesses have no means or resources to actually measure or research this aspect. That doesn’t stop them from pretending they do.
I also felt the urge to respond with some snark: maybe they don’t really understand their own business, at least the placement/recruitment aspect of it. If they’re recruiting mid-echelon personnel—software devs, BAs, testers, other office roles—it makes sense to publish an ad and gather applications. But it doesn’t make sense to expect that pool to include extraordinary candidates from a fitness perspective. Sure, we’re all extraordinary in some sense, but in roles like these, businesses are simply not in a position to materially benefit from that extraordinarity. Nor are they able to detect it during hiring—and I don’t even mean that as snark; it’s just the nature of things.
In a natural distribution, the second-best candidate is not materially better than the top-best, and the third is almost like the second, and so on. Businesses that set their hiring threshold—whether explicitly calculated or intuition-based—too high will simply go out of business, because in this echelon you need to rely on mass hiring. Relatively speaking, of course, but you still need to be able to fill multiple positions with readily available candidates.
So, the question posed by my ex-coworker doesn’t make sense. But as I see it, it doesn’t make sense even for hiring in the top echelon—C-suites and so-called "rock stars." The strategy for top-echelon hiring is well established. It’s widely used in business, show business, and sports alike, where "fitness" follows a power-law distribution. It’s called "scouting" or "headhunting". You don’t throw a job ad over the fence and wait for a torrent of applications. You meticulously maintain a rolodex of potential candidates, watch their careers, court and dine them, and try to snatch them when they’re poised to make a move—or even just before it becomes obvious.
You don’t wait for them to apply to you—you apply to them. You don’t ask "Why do you want to work for our company?"—you shower them with perks and sign-on bonuses if they show even a hint of hesitation. The "agents" in this echelon work for candidates, often on retainer—not the other way around. It’s a completely different world, where you’re never in a position to screen a pool of 5,000 in hopes of finding an extraordinaire. In that world, hiring the second-best can have a humongous negative impact on company performance compared to hiring the top-best. For better or worse, that’s reality.
So I found my guy’s question quite unsettling—an indicator that yet another "recruiter" doesn’t really understand what they’re recruiting for.
I was able to fish out a useful metaphor from the LLM-generated word soup: "talent brokers vs gatekeepers." Over the last decade, recruitment agencies and internal departments have been universally rebranded as "talent acquisition." That rebranding feels disturbingly phony and hollow. Now I know why. Despite pretending to be "talent brokers"—scouting for talent—the reality hasn’t changed. They’re still the same old "gatekeepers", applying selectivity to boatloads of "talent" that come to them.
As industries and their associated keyword-spaces have grown dramatically—and AI tools have proliferated—such selectivity has become increasingly diluted. In my opinion, it’s now indistinguishable from random picks, yet still cloaked in the illusion of validity. For someone like me, swimming deep in the muck of the mid-echelon and with no ambition whatsoever to strive for oxygen-deprived heights of top echelon, it’s deeply disturbing.
Hate to say the obvious, but it's all about supply and demand. The field I was working in 30 years ago was "hot" and the hourly wage has dropped at least 5x since then.
Sure, in the last 20 years I did "development" work which was related but more advanced (24 hours a day stuff, it's always in your head) - but once those efforts were complete, so were the jobs.
My field was laboratory science and I still take solace in the fact that 200 years ago, only the rich (or minimally subsidized) ever got a chance to to touch this stuff. But solace doesn't pay the bills.
Maybe take on volunteer work? Once you get involved, it leads to stories and sharing and new perspectives. I've done a few thousand hours over the past 15 years. It feels good. You chose to do it. You see results and have new ideas. Maybe even a new business.
or a dual income household. My wife and I have taken turns on who has the jobs with the benefits. Maybe you're right, maybe we're an exception. But I know educated guys around here whose wives work, and stay home with the kids, run volunteer .org in their spare time.
There are no jobs. I'm being stalked and fucked with in San Francisco. Constantly. Everyone here is insane and most people are sick. Life is pointless. I'm just waking up and doing something and then going to sleep in a shelter again.
They give me sick to their kids as some sort of sick joke and wait for me to die. I had someone put fentanyl in the coffee they served at de haro church while I was lugging fifty pound bags of potatoes to give to the poor. Cool way to fuck up someone's back. Because they're insane and murderous. It's like that shit everywhere unless you have money and can hire private security or a group of you and your friends have a secret way to poison people.
I've asked construction workers if I can do shift labor for cash and they always say no. Fucking bonkers. I hurt all over more or less all of the time. There are people that have had their entire bodies melt from disease from being exposed to weaponized sick here.
There's absolutely no point in giving a shit about anything anymore. I'm just waiting to die truth be told.
@phoenixhaber, you're in a very dark place, no doubt about it, and it sounds like you've been there a long time. I've been in that dark place and I feel for you. Let me just assure you that dark times do give way, eventually, to light. If you need a rational basis for that claim, think of it as regression toward the mean: extremes, good or bad, move toward the non-extreme. Things will get better.
In the meantime, your task is to separate from the darkness and let it be on the outside, not the inside. It's bad enough when it's on the outside: that is, in the world around you or even in your own body. When it's on the inside—not just the body but the mind—then it destroys. Push the darkness out of the mind and into the outside world. That's pretty abstract advice but it's the best I know, and if it makes sense to you, I hope it helps.
No offense, but maybe they're narcan-ing you because you because you're nodding out in public?
I am not doubting you have been fucked with -- I once got into a 2v1 brawl on the Mission and 16th BART that only ended because I sent one flying into a pillar and told the other if he kept coming, he was going onto the fucking tracks.These guys kept going over to a homeless guy who was just... sitting there... trying to get a rise, hoping for an excuse to "defend" themselves. And when I told them to quit being bullies, they tried to jump me.
So trust me, I believe you, and I get that trauma can have an impact on your life.
But if you are using narcotics, it will impact your search.
If you want help getting clean, I could send some resources to the email on your profile -- on the technical side you sound like a better coder than me and if you had that part locked down I suspect you'd quickly find work.
Where did he say he was getting "narcan'd" ? I only saw something about his coffee getting spiked with fentanyl, which would be the opposite of getting narcan'd.
I'll be honest though, I had a lot of difficulty parsing that and some chunks of it are beyond my reading comprehension abilities.
I think it got edited? Or maybe my mind ran with the "poisoned" comment because there were reports of people involuntarily narcaning people in FiDi recently.
Anyways, his writing style reminds me more of people I knew with addiction issues than something like schizophrenia (which can make folks come off paranoid).
How do you reconcile your experience with the common narrative that there is a huge shortage of tech workers in the US and, hence, the H1B/H4 programs?
I don't think there's actually a shortage of tech workers in the US. I think there is probably a shortage of tech workers in the US that are willing to work for the wages that companies want to pay.
One of the "problems" companies have is that it's hard to find skilled workers in the US with good experience who are not demanding SF wages. And recent graduates aren't that useful so while they might technically be "tech workers" in the sense they would like to fill open roles, companies don't really want them.
So for most companies if you want to hire the most experienced and qualified for the role, and do that at a reasonable cost, you'll need to consider the H1B route.
h1b is not "reasonable cost". there is not a shortage of highly experienced tech workers. every big tech is shortchanging USA workers in favor of H1Bs to make a racket. what a joke
How do you reconcile that with developers over 45 finding it impossible to find jobs, are all of them asking for "unreasonable" pay?
I mean, if you are senior, you probably have a family and possibly kids. Even with a part-time RTO position that means more than a three-roommate setup, you need a house or 2b/3b in SF/SEA/NY. That works for industries where you dont need to be in the most expensive cities, but how does it work for tech workers with families?
> How do you reconcile that with developers over 45 finding it impossible to find jobs, are all of them asking for "unreasonable" pay?
What's "reasonable" depends on perspective. Truth is it makes relatively little sense hiring tech workers in the US today. I'm not saying I'm happy about that, but unlike a few decades ago, the majority of tech talent in the world today is overseas, and increasingly in low-labour cost countries like India which previously didn't have the internet access or education to compete.
Given this today a reasonable cost to a business for software development is lower in the same way a reasonable cost for manufacturing is lower because of low-cost manufacturing in places like China.
I'm just pointing out what's happening. For a while now people with an education thought the reason they could find good work and were doing okay relative to uneducated people was because of effort. And while this was somewhat true, it's probably better explained by much lower levels of international labour competition from low-wage countries. It takes skill to be good at manufacturing too, but that skill doesn't protect you from extremely low cost labour which doesn't quite have comparable skills, but can do the job almost just as well.
People should be thinking about this. Economists will argue (perhaps correctly) that allowing the free market to do its think will result in higher GDP growth. But if people are unemployed and struggling to find good work, what's the benefit of that GDP growth? There should be some effort to balance what's reasonable from an employers perspective with what's reasonable for employees.
> "You’ve spent several months sending out scores of carefully tailored resumes and cover letters for jobs you know you are fully qualified for and would excel at."
People should not do this. It is causing so much suffering. In my 6 jobs in my career from college internship to startups to Big Tech, I have never gotten a job from sending an application into a site. It's always been through (somehow) tracking down a person to speak to over phone or coffee, and get a referral.
A form is not going to a hire you, a person is. You need to ignore the form and talk to a person.
I wish I could put this on a billboard everywhere. It seems like many people are suffering from thousands of applications, and it makes me sad.
As other posters have said, this only really works if you have a network. Zeroth-order referrals (i.e. they call you) work best, first-order referrals (i.e. you know someone at the company) work decently well, and second-order referrals (you know someone who knows someone to refer you) are a guided shot in the dark.
People who have networks all know this. The issue is that a shocking number of people don't have any network at all. These tend to be the sorts of people who are either actively antisocial at work (the "coworkers aren't your friends" type) or job hop so frequently that they don't spend enough time at any single job to develop any meaningful professional, let alone personal connections.
or you are working for small companies with people who have no (useful) connections. i worked with one for 10 years. not a single referral. a few connections from the university. nothing. they all work in small companies that are not hiring or simply have no pull to provide a meaningful reference.
looking back, the best options i got was from active networking in tech and business communities. actually, all of my jobs and clients come through that. except the most current one, which is from reconnecting to an old client, but there too the initial connection and the reconnection happened through a tech community.
And juniors. I’m in a masters program right now and everyone’s got a network, it just happens to be filled with poor starving grad students instead of FAANG super stars :)
Give it time. Networks are a garden that grow over time, and moreso if you cater to them. Some of those starving grad students will be VPs in 10 years.
I job hop frequently, and have a large zeroth-order network because I did good work at each one.
When I am in a hiring role, I am not flipping through memories of good times with former coworkers that I had deep and meaningful time with -- I'm thinking back to who was the verb who got ish done and will make my project a success.
Unless you are a hermit, everyone has a network, even if it's small. Everyone has a few friends, a brother/sister/dad/mom/cousin, a few people in their town they know. All of those people know someone else, and that's your initial pool of job opportunities to look at.
This might not get you into your dream company. But it can get you a next job to grow from.
For one of my jobs I had no contacts in the industry so I emailed someone at the company who went to my school, mentioned we both went there, and could they meet for coffee. I then drove 2 hours to meet him. We discussed what was happening at his company, are there opportunities, and he referred me.
Yeah, it's not exactly that simple.. I worked ~15 years at an EDA company as a SW developer, got laid off in my 50s. I had a couple of people I connected with, but both of them had already retired and moved on by the time that happened.
I moved here (the Valley) because I met my wife online. Reached out to anyone I was vaguely connected to at the time. Got a few "send me your resume", none of them were a good fit.
All the interviews I got (some good, some bad) were either from headhunters, or through LinkedIn applications. In the end, a random, "don't know this company, but they want software people" ad on LinkedIn resulted in the GREAT job I've had for 1.5 years now (about a year after getting laid off) - way better pay, better work-life balance, etc.
I got my dream job by applying on their website. As a hiring manager, also interviewed many people who got theirs at other companies' websites. Networking is better but website applications used to work alright. This could have changed with AI resumes.
I know this is just anecdotal but just want to say I got my current job just applying to a job from a linkedin email. I admit I was surprised how easily and smoothly it all went actually...
I always got my jobs applying via linkedin. It's true that I usually find the recruiter and send them a message as well saying "hey I applied to X position. let me know if my profile fits". Perhaps this extra message makes the difference? I have around 12 years of experience (5 jobs in total).
I don't really have a good network, since I have worked in different countries.
This might work if you already have a network, but otherwise good luck getting through to people on the phone.
HR will answer the generic questions, but tell you to apply online. Cold "calling" people on LinkedIn is a shot in the dark. Some people don't mind you doing it, most will ignore you.
You can start building a network by reaching out to alumni, former colleagues, open-source contributors for projects you're contributing to [1], etc.
Hardly ideal, but it's a start.
[1] And if you're not contributing to an open-source project, please do it, it's a great way to learn stuff, improve your CV, network and of course give back.
I find this kind of advice underspecified. The people struggling the most to find work are juniors: what projects are big enough that the applicant would a) know and care about them and b) get a benefit out of the network but also c) have fruit low enough for a solo junior to reach?
I tried this way-back-when and ended up submitting fixes to projects that were open source but had no real path to accepting patches from people outside the cathedral.
If you just graduated college or have no network, you can reach out to alumni and mention that connection. Or, you can ask personal friends/family for contacts (will probably be local companies, which may be a first step job).
Or you can reach out over social media. "Hi there, I follow you on X and am just getting started in the industry. Do you mind if I ask a few research questions?" A friend of mine just used this technique to land a role in an industry where he had no contacts.
If the situation is "good luck getting through to people on the phone", then that probably means this person is not a real friend of yours, they are a stranger, and you shouldn't try. You should be reaching out to people who actually know your name, or you have a mutual friend.
> It's always been through (somehow) tracking down a person to speak to over phone or coffee, and get a referral.
Just be careful contacting recruiters directly. I know of at least one F100 that will blacklist you for pestering their recruiters. If you think ai-generated resumes are overwhelming recruiters, you should see their LinkedIn inboxes.
Referrals by hiring managers who I have previously worked with and want to hire me aren’t even getting me a phone screen from their recruiters.
The majority of employment in tech is with large, corporate firms, and unless you are in the executive tier they all have implemented a massive amount of process to prevent bias in hiring which means that even networking has low impact on getting a job, beyond letting you know the positions even exist
Yea, whenever someone says "Just network, bro!" they never actually fully connect the dots between networking and walking into the office on your first day of work:
Step 1: Just have coffee with a hiring manager
Step 2: Hiring manager says go check out job #41102, and submit your resume. Good luck, bro!
Step 3: [???]
Step 4: You've got an interview to ace!
Nobody ever explains the [???]. They just assume that by magic, your online submission rises to the top of the stack of 1,699 other online submissions, avoids all of HR's filters, gets to the right person in the right department on the right team, that person has the authority to pick you out of the pile, and so on... There's a lot still out of your control in this process. It's not just Networking --> Job.
Hardly an apt analogy. Hiring is asynchronous, there is no line? Sometimes I go to the bar and if the bartender knows me, they’ll give me a drink on the house. Is that messed up too?
Use the paths available to you to get a job. Exhaust them all. If you know someone that works there and THEY track you down, yes this is good advice, great way to get a job.
> You need to ignore the form and talk to a person.
Unless you're lucky, this is no longer going to happen. Getting a job is now becoming much more about luck, circumstances, and who you already know, much like getting your first starring role in a movie -- not about your abilities.
No form is going to extend a job offer autonomously. At some point in the chain, there will be a boss, a person, who talks to you and thinks, "I want to work with this person", and decides to make the offer.
So the goal is to figure out how to get in touch with that hiring manager as the first step. Even if the form or HR "rejects" you, this person can step in say, "that's silly, I want to work with them. Send them through"
I think this charade of sending in resumes to forms is causing people so much pain. It feels like rejection and is not moving them closer to a job.
> No form is going to extend a job offer autonomously.
Just wait... some time-pressed startup is going to find a killer LLM prompt that filters in exactly the people they want, and then post something on the benefits of "vibe hiring". Complete with large, well-spaced text, colored with one accent color, and several graphs of hiring spending vs. income or something.
> Getting a job is now becoming much more about luck, circumstances, and who you already know, much like getting your first starring role in a movie -- not about your abilities.
That's not a new thing. It's how it's always been.
> Getting a job is now becoming much more about luck, circumstances, and who you already know, much like getting your first starring role in a movie -- not about your abilities.
Getting a starring role in a movie has a lot to do with abilities, not just luck and who you know.
Many companies are looking for strong mission alignment, because when it's a buyer's job market, why not select someone who has intrinsic motivation for what you are doing? Are you passionate about the problem? That is a lot like auditioning for a starring role: do you understand the character you might be playing? Many jobs - especially desirable ones - use this sort of "mission alignment" as selection criterion.
The thing that's different in software is that because the equipment needed to demonstrate technical skills is so cheap (just a computer) and trust in representations of technical experience is so low, they can test for technical skills in a way that other industries can't.
I don't think that anyone asks a civil engineer to design a bridge or a surgeon to remove an appendix to get a job.
My first job in the industry was in a startup that went belly down. Most of us didn't get much opportunity to network.
Thankfully, I happened to contribute to two open-source projects. One of them was a (then) obscure language called Rust and another one was Firefox. Both contributions eventually turned into career-defining moments for which I'm still reaping benefits 15 years later.
Had I contributed to Vlang and Camino instead, my career would probably have been much less satisfying.
Agreed. It's next to impossible to actually connect with people about non-work topics. Way too many possible landmines, unless you really, REALLY click about a couple of topics.
I've gotten several jobs this way, including the best jobs of my career. It's insufferable the way so many commenters here assume their experience is representative of or applicable to others. It's like if main character syndrome was a web site comments section.
As someone who's recently been hiring (sorry folks, position was filled just a few days ago), it's wild to me how distorted things have become.
We had 1200 applications for an extremely niche role. A huge amount were clearly faked resumes that far too closely matched the job description to be realistic. Another huge portion were just unqualified.
The irony is that there actually _are_ a ton of exceptionally qualified candidates right now due to the various layoffs at government labs. We actually _do_ want folks with an academic research background. I am quite certain that the applicant pool contained a lot of those folks and others that we really wanted to interview.
However, in practice, we couldn't find folks we didn't already know because various keyword-focused searches and AI filtering tend to filter out the most qualified candidates. We got a ton of spam applications, so we couldn't manually filter. The filtering HR does doesn't help. All of the various attempts to meaningfully review the full candidate pool in the time we had just failed. (Edit: "Just failed" is a bit unfair. There was a lot of effort put in and some good folks found that way, but certainly not every resume was actually reviewed.)
What finally happened is that we mostly interviewed the candidates we knew about through other channels. E.g. folks who had applied before and e-mailed one of us they were applying again. Former co-workers from other companies. Folks we knew through professional networks. That was a great pool of applicants, but I am certain we missed a ton of exceptional folks whose applications no actual person even saw.
The process is so broken right now that we're 100% back to nepotism. If you don't already know someone working at the company, your resume will probably never be seen.
I really feel hiring is in a much worse state than it was about 5 years ago. I don't know how to fix it. We're just back to what it was 20+ years ago. It's 100% who you know.
> The process is so broken right now that we're 100% back to nepotism
Just want to comment on this, because I think think favoring unknown candidates is a mistake we make too often, and in fact the "normal" process is a disaster on both sides for this reason. Nepotism or Cronyism is granting resources, patronage, jobs to someone you know instead of a qualified candidate. In many industries this is how they function because qualifications and skill provide little to no differentiation (Think knowing Microsoft word and having a comms degree with no work experience).
In high skill industries where experience is hard fought... people know the who the "people" are because they stick out like sore thumbs. If your hiring process at work is throw up a job on indeed and see what resumes come through, your company likely isn't worth working at anyway because the best candidates aren't randos.
Think of it this way if you were putting together the Manhattan project again would you recruit the people with a stellar reputation in physics, engineering, manufacturing, etc OR would you throw up a job on a job board or your corporate site and see what comes back? The difference is active vs passive, good reputation vs no reputation (or a bad reputation).
Not trying to make a big semantic argument... I just want to say that things like reputation and network matter... and thats not really "nepotism"
I think you’re just arguing for nepotism in a roundabout way.
My senior staff engineer can’t code at all. He got hired because he was friends with our engineering manager. You might say “well that’s nepotism then since he’s under qualified”, but I’m sure he would make the argument that he got the job because of his “stellar reputation and extensive network”.
It’s an abhorrent situation to be in. Everyone knows he can’t code but because he got hired at such a senior level he’s making high level decisions that make no sense. Give me a qualified rando any time of the day.
I agree, some of the worst employees I've seen were hired that way.
I haven't hired anyone recently but btwn 10-20 years ago I did hire a lot. Of course we reached out via our network of connections but that gets tapped out fast, so you have to rely on job postings. It was always hundreds of applicants per opening. Back then it wasn't 1000's but it might as well have been because I didn't have enough time to sift through them all. That's ok, you can just approach it like "the dowry problem" (also known as the secretary problem [1]).
But the job market and hiring is way worse now, and it's pretty horrible for job seekers atm.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
This situation is very weird to me. In my experience, referrals got your foot in the door, but you still always had to pass the same hiring screen/interview process as everyone else.
I recommended an engineer once who I thought was great - he was a total "get shit done" kind of guy. But he did poorly in the interviews (I won't say they were leetcode-type problems, but you did have to have some algorithmic skills - I warned him beforehand to brush up on some of those types of programs.) As much as I liked the working with the guy, we couldn't hire him because he was a pretty solid "no" from the other interviewers.
I've never worked in a company that hired people based on the referral of one person, and honestly that sounds like a pretty f'd up company.
> My senior staff engineer can’t code at all. He got hired because he was friends with our engineering manager.
Well thats how it works everywhere. You have to suck up and pretent to be 'friends' with person with the power to get promoted too.
You don't have to pretend. You didn't even have to be friends. You can even be mortal enemies with the powerful person.
Faking it is pathetic behavior.
> I just want to say that things like reputation and network matter... and thats not really "nepotism"
I strongly agree with this, and I'm glad you put it so clearly. If you've been in your industry say 10 years or more, you should have built a reputation by that point that makes people say "I want to work with that person again, or I'd recommend that person to a friend who has a job opening". (Important thing to clarify, though, I'm not denigrating anyone who has been out of work a long time. I've seen many categories of jobs in the tech industry where there are simply a lot fewer jobs to go around - it's musical chairs and a lot of chairs got taken away all at once).
I would put in an important caveat, though, and that's for people who are early in their careers. The hiring process really is truly shitty for people just entering the workforce and for people with only one or two jobs under their belt.
> As someone who's recently been hiring (sorry folks, position was filled just a few days ago), it's wild to me how distorted things have become.
Same here. I have been hiring and it is a shit show. We advertise one position and get inundated with resumes. Many of these resume are complete fabrications, so we cannot rely on them at all. So we implemented a filter by asking candidates to do a small project. Candidates do not have to hand-code it. We encourage candidates to just use AI for the simple project. Only about 10% actually do the required work that typically takes 15-20 minutes to complete with AI assistance. Some get offended that we even dared ask them to take the assessment test and start using profanity to let their displeasure be known. Quite strange.
When you're applying to hundreds of positions, 99% if which will auto reject you, it can be quite annoying if you're asked to do extra work before you've gotten any further in the process
like captcha for resume
You'd think that many sites would already be using a captcha before accepting an application
The number of fake resumes is insane. During reviews I ended up passing a number of fake profiles through because their CVs looked real. None of them showed up to the initial screening call.
There are now AI CVs mimicking real people, so the CVs point to real Linkedin profiles, Github profiles.
Not sure what their end game is unless it's to continually test CV creation or find woefully inept companies that will hire them with limited vetting.
> I ended up passing a number of fake profiles through because their CVs looked real. None of them showed up to the initial screening call.
That's just crazy. Probably those were for collecting data to analyze what makes a CV pass. Mass apply everywhere, combine the results, and analyze the results manually or using LLMs. Selling these data can be profitable
It's also possible that they got a job elsewhere, and didn't follow up.
> Not sure what their end game is unless it's to continually test CV creation or find woefully inept companies that will hire them with limited vetting.
I wonder about (and didn't immediately find) case-studies that lay out the strategy of Resume Of Total Lies Dude, their expected payout before they get fired, etc.
This is probably crazy talk, but I have been wondering how requiring people to slap a stamp on an envelope and mail in a résumé would go.
I don’t think it is crazy and I have suggested beforehand there needs to be some sort of proof of work on the candidate side to prevent resume spam.
I think your idea is very elegant as everyone has access to the mail system, an actual stamp is pretty cheap, but it is just enough hassle to mail an application that it will filter out some of the spam.
The other suggestion I have had is that candidates need to hand in the resume in person, but I guess you could accept resumes from both mail and in person drop offs.
> The other suggestion I have had is that candidates need to hand in the resume in person
This might be a bigger lift than asking for a take-home project; if I'm expected to drop off a resume in Manhattan that's a minimum of a two hour trip for me. I'd rather spend two hours banging together a CRUD app to show that I can actually write code.
I read this as applying to in-office roles, If I were willing to commute, then it's a good chance to exercise the lift required.
The only time I had to hire somebody, the university I was working for in Switzerland made it mandatory for the candidates to send their application via mail, not email. That was back in 2014. I found this odd at the time, but I'm pretty sure it made my job way easier (less applications to review, motivated/serious candidates, etc.).
I must be missing something. 1200 real applications are hard to sort through. 1200 mostly fake applications are much easier. Hiring is a high-leverage activity, and it's absolutely worth spending a couple hours going through those by hand.
For 1200 applications, a couple hours translates to less than 10 seconds per application. In the age of LLMs, why do you think you'd be able to discern whether an application was fake in 10 seconds? Remember, it's not "obviously fake", it's "designed to con you" fake.
^ This. Exactly. Low value comment on my part, but as the OP in this case, I feel the need to say that this is the exact issue.
The "smell test" takes longer than you think and often involves an actual interview.
How about 50 per hour? That's just 24 hours of work and a reasonable first look at one minute for each application. Very little time to spend for an important company decision which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
That's a half week of work without breaks at one resume per minute-ish.
I agree that it is a very important decision, but that's also unreasonable for a manager to set time aside to look through. You've just set the other projects that you're already behind on (that's why you need to hire in the first place) back another half week or so.
It's like a reverse rocket equation here. You need time to make more time, so you take time, but that time needs time, so ...
The cost isn't really borne by the hiring manager though, it's just their budget (that they argued for) that they need to spend down. The decision makers really don't care that much about the numbers, just that they don't go over.
How can that be unreasonable? To work at least half a week for a decision which will cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even millions of dollars in the long run. What else is the manager doing which is more important monetary wise? And if managers are really too busy with raking in the millions to the company, then it's a fine time to hire somebody who's only job will be to hire more people (not a HR person of course).
The manager is responsible for $X but only gets paid their salary.
I'm their day to day, hiring is a pain. They need the extra hands, but they have to go through more work to get that person onboard. The activation energy is high, higher now with AI and automated job applications clogging things up.
Then you have onboarding and the continued costs of management of that person. Honestly, most managers would want the smallest team possible in terms of day to day workload.
This is also why AI is appealing. The promise of no sick days, no HR complaints, no chit chat. Just pure work done in plain language. Work done overnight, right, the first time. A middle managers dream worker.
The thing that is more important is the budget. It's always the budget. Nothing matters but the budget. That's the second iron law of beauraracy, of course.
As I see it, hiring people is the most important part of running any business - by a large margin. And if you have a lot of employees, then hiring people who are good at hiring becomes your highest priority.
> The manager is responsible for $X but only gets paid their salary.
That's why somebody higher in rank makes sure the manager gets the time he needs to make the best hires. Somewhere up the line there is somebody who cares about the basics of running a business right.
> I'm their day to day, hiring is a pain.
Of course it's a pain, that's why it's a job and why people get paid for it.
> This is also why AI is appealing. The promise of no sick days, no HR complaints, no chit chat. Just pure work done in plain language. Work done overnight, right, the first time. A middle managers dream worker.
Okay, but that means the company instantly lost all customers and all income and went bankrupt. Because why in the world would a client hire your company to use an AI, when they can just use the AI themselves? And don't say that there needs to be a human who is specialized in using the AI, because then you're back at hiring and having employees again.
I'm not trying to be glib here, but I'm not entirely certain that you have worked for a long time in a large corporation, right?
If you have not, I would like to introduce you to one of the best pieces of writing on corporate workings that I have ever come across: The Gervais Principle.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
It is a very good lens, but a very cynical one, to look at the corporation.
In general, shows like The Office, though satire, are close, I feel, to reality than what you are espousing here.
Not that I disagree with you at all. There should be people that are all about hiring. There should be managers that see their paychecks as adequate compensation. There should be consumers that are that reactive to internal staffing decisions.
But in my limited experience, the things that should be there, typically are not.
I don't know which 1200 applications they saw, but IME they're a lot better at trying to con you than succeeding. LLMs aren't great for a lot of use cases (yet?), and this is one of those areas where reality doesn't match the dream:
1. ~10% of applications are over-tailored. Really? You did <hyper-specific thing> with <uber-specific details> exactly matching our job description at $BigCo 3 years before the language existed and 5 years before we pioneered it? The person might be qualified, but if they can't be arsed to write a resume that reflects _their_ experiences then I don't have enough evidence to move them forward in the interviewing process.
2. ~40% of applications have obvious, major inconsistencies -- the name on LinkedIn doesn't match the name on the resume, the LinkedIn link isn't real, the GitHub link isn't real, the last 3 major jobs on LinkedIn are different from the last 3 major jobs on the resume, etc. I don't require candidates to put those things on a resume, but if they do then I have a hard time imagining the candidate copy-pasting incorrectly being more likely than the LLM hallucinating a LinkedIn profile.
Those are quick scans, well under 4s each on average. We've used 80 minutes of our budget and are down to 600 applications. Of the remainder:
3. ~90% of remaining applications fail to meet basic qualifications. I don't know if they're LLM-generated or not, but a year of Python and SQL isn't going to cut it for a senior role doing low-level optimizations in a systems language. If there's a cover letter, a professional summary, mention of some side project, or if their GitHub exists and has anything in it other than ipynb files with titles indicating rudimentary data science then they still pass this filter. If they're fresh out of school then I also give them the benefit of the doubt and consider them for a junior role. Even with that leeway, 90% of those remaining applicants don't have a single thing in any of the submitted materials suggesting that they're qualified.
So...we're down to 60 applications. We spent another 40 minutes. In retrospect, that's already our full 2hr budget, so I did exaggerate the speediness a bit, but it's ballpark close. You can spend 2min fully reading and taking notes on each of the remaining applications, skimming the GitHub projects of anyone who bothered to post them, and still come out in 4hr for the lot.
It's probably worth noting, that isn't all to say that <5% of programmers with that skillset are qualified. I imagine the culprit is spray-and-pray LLM spam not even bothering to generate a plausible resume or managing to search for matching jobs. If bad resumes hit 99 jobs for every 1 job a good resume hits then you only expect a 1% success rate from the perspective of somebody reviewing applications.
Your take is very sensible and I agree with it 100%, but the reality is that (by my assessment) it is absolutely not present in the wall of ATS filters one's job application is up against. I've sent hundred of CV/cover letters over last ten months, none of them are touched by LLM. Most cover letters I manually tailored to re-frame in line with job ad - where I cared a lot, some I just made with my generic template - still manually - where I couldn't be bothered to care. Invariably I either received no response at all, or for remaining 10% I received a generic rejection email, identically worded and styled in almost all cases.
Here it is, if you are curious:
"Thank you for your interest in the <position> position at <company> in <country>. Unfortunately, we will not be moving forward with your application, but we appreciate your time and interest in <company>."
The Resume I am sending out is just an evolution of one that worked very well for me for 25+ years. The roles, as far as I am able to see, are 80%-95% keyword match, with the non-matched keywords being exceedingly superficial. Yes, I haven't listed "blob storage", but guess what else I have used but haven't listed: "semicolon", "variable declaration" and "for-loops". Yet in this day and age one seems to be punished for not doing so.
I am very principled in not letting any AI anywhere close to my CV, because I think the usefulness of signal it conveys rests solely on it being addressed to and read by human, hence it has to be fully authored and tailored by human too. But these days this idea has completely flipped. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Standing by principles could lead to literal dying. Personally, I made peace with dying, but I cannot allow my family to go homeless. As such, I don't see it below me to go down the path of mass-blasting heavily over-tailored Resumes. If it bumps my chances from 0.05% to 0.2%, that's a four-fold increase that may be the difference between, literally, life and death. The organic job search with my natural skills and authentic ways of presentation I relied on for twenty years is dead.
It's clear your org is looking specifically at coders/programmers. That's very different from the "academic research" background that the OP suggested. It takes a different type of analysis and vetting.
And different types of jobs require skillsets that aren't adequately conveyed in a traditional resume.
> Those are quick scans, well under 4s each on average. We've used 80 minutes of our budget and are down to 600 applications. Of the remainder:
4 seconds each? You are... fast.
> 1200 real applications are hard to sort through.
Probably not much yield in going through more than a few hundred.
Shuffle them around, start skimming through and throw out the rest once you realize you’re just seeing more of the same.
Pat yourself on the back and mutter “you need to be skilled and lucky to work here”
> Pat yourself on the back and mutter “you need to be skilled and lucky to work here”
It would be absolutely amazing if employers and recruiters finally were doing exactly this. We are in this dead end precisely because everyone is under false illusion that their pool of candidates has a hidden gem outshining everybody else in existence, and they absolutely need to sift through the whole pool to find this gem. As a result, all pools are never exhausted and only ever spreading, with more and more desperate people sucked into multiples of them.
I wonder if we are back to “who you know” because of a couple of factors:
1. The risk of a bad hire is great, and this de-risks that
2. It facilitates more natural and spontaneous conversations, which for better or worse short-circuits a well crafted and pre-planned anti-bias interview process which can be too rigid for both parties to explore detail
Would you have found it reasonable for interested candidates to have reached out directly instead of just submitting a resume to the ATS? With the AI spam etc. it feels like the usefulness of these automated systems is quickly diminishing. Hiring feels broken right now.
> "Would you have found it reasonable for interested candidates to have reached out directly..."
If that worked, someone would automate a way to bulk spam that too.
What does "reaching out directly" mean?
I assume that they mean sending either a direct Linkedin message or an email to the recruiter or hiring manager.
When I was recently unemployed I started doing that after months of getting ignored by most companies and, in my experience, the only difference is that I got far more acks ("Hi! Sure, I'll take a look at your resume and reach out!") but I got a similar rate of applications-to-interview compared to applying through the official platforms.
At this point, probably forming a line on the door of the hiring manager.
this means finding a way to directly reach out to the hiring manager. like sending an email, asking a colleague for an introduction, sending a linkedin message, etc
I haven't applied for a job since the 1990s so I'd be out of the loop, but what are the faked resumes trying to achieve? Just get in a role and get paid before being found out? Are they trying to find brief or lazy interviewing processes? Do they only target remote positions?
When the requirements of every single job are impossible, people will lie.
Several people have been recommending candidates to lie for IT-related jobs for a long time now, and honestly, I think the vast majority of positions have such a crazy set of requirements that they only get the lairs.
Amusing Idea: Advertise three vaguely-similar positions, only one of them real. Specify impossible-for-honest-humans requirements for the fake two. Then discard all applicants for the real position who also claimed to be qualified for a fake one.
Strict honesty here has always been a losing proposition. The "requirements" section of a job posting has almost never been accurate. It's more of an image they're painting. An honest applicant is one who reads the whole description to understand as best they can what the company is looking for, and sort of holistically matches their own expertise against that picture.
If the job posting lists requirements A-F and you have A, B, D, E, and F, then you'd do both yourself and the company a disservice by disqualifying yourself. Put it in your cover letter if you can't handle the discrepancy.
I'm not going to address either the morality or advisability of being "dishonest" by this standard. I've just seen too many people sell themselves short, when in fact they are exactly what the company is looking for, it's just that the recruiter wasn't able to spell that out in the job description. And it's not necessarily because they were stupid either; if they only put the true minimum necessary criteria into a job post, then (1) they'll get flooded with underqualified candidates who don't even come close to what they need, and (2) they may very well miss out on good candidates because the job looks lame.
Source: I've been on both ends. As a candidate, I mentioned during the interview that I actually had no experience in the required technology X but I had related experience. The interviewer just laughed; it was obvious to both of us that it didn't matter. As someone offering a job (not the hiring manager but sort of), I talked to a couple of people who were hired into other roles in the company and asked why they didn't apply for our position, they seemed perfect for it (to me). Several of them pointed to some specific line item under the requirements that disqualified them. Sometimes it was an item that we'd removed later because we weren't getting enough people in, even though strictly speaking it was part of the job. We would sometimes push the recruiter to add "experience with X, or willing to learn X", but they would push back and honestly I'm not sure I know better than them. They were the ones who had to be the front line filtering through the noise resumes, after all.
I've seen a number of job posts that have a note near the end, encouraging people to apply even if they don't meet all the requirements.
There's also the job posts that distinguish between hard requirements and nice-to-haves, using various language (e.g., "bonus if you...").
> If the job posting lists requirements A-F and you have A, B, D, E, and F, then you'd do both yourself and the company a disservice by disqualifying yourself. Put it in your cover letter if you can't handle the discrepancy.
I’m my experience the problem is that the missing “C” is deep level domain expertise outside of the technical end and that’s just so much more important than the other ones, and importantly, something you can’t really just learn on your own.
Sure, that happens, but that's also pretty clear to the job seeker. Don't try to BS your way past that one.
More commonly, that list of requirements comes from the recruiter quizzing the developers on what they need, and they throw out a bunch of stuff that could describe a person they'd be interested in hiring. But there are many other people who would work too, and the developers are likely to come up with stuff that they're familiar with and end up describing someone much like them with maybe 1 additional skill -- which is actually backwards, because they already have that expertise in the aggregate and what they really need is what they don't already have, but that stuff is harder to think of and value and therefore suggest to the recruiter because, well, it's stuff they're unfamiliar with.
A good recruiter will push back and make them figure out which are actual requirements. But getting it right requires a good recruiter + good developers who will make the time to think it through + good company culture. Most job posts are not coming from such a fortunate place.
On the flip side, the recruiter is hearing from management that they want someone who is perfectly carved out to accomplish a single task X, preferably someone who has already accomplished task X at another company so they can get hired and immediately do X here as well. Sure, they'll also be another body to shut up the whiny developers talking about how they have too much to do, but the position is open because they've been asking for X for months and the developers keep saying they don't have enough bandwidth. So they describe what they want to the recruiter in painful specificity. If their conception of X requires technologies and tools A, B, and C, then their requirements list is something like "Minimum 10 years experience doing X. Expert in A. Expert in B. Expert in C. Must have a PhD from my school or a school I'm envious of."
Maybe I've just had some bad experiences, but this is why I don't take requirements lists too seriously. Sure, if it wants "experience in medical imaging" and you have nothing related, don't apply. But if it gives a laundry list of specific technologies, it's either developers looking for clones or managers looking for someone to do a specific project.
Well, there are people who hate the idea of lying, and can't bring themselves to do it, even it's applying for a job where they don't meet one of the requirements.
Most likely this isn't an attribute that most employers actually want, though.
I have seen several companies lie about the requirements they posted.
Similar idea: make a list of "required" and "optional but nice to have" skills for the position. Among the optional ones, include experience with a non-existent technology. Discard everyone who claims to have the experience.
I have no idea, but yes, I suspect remote positions are heavily targeted and folks are looking for lazy hiring processes.
But when the job description contains a lot of very general terms (e.g. "scientific computing") and every part of your job history is just parroting a specific term used in the job description with no details it doesn't pass the smell test.
I absolutely respect keyword-heavy job/project descriptions. You kind of have to do it to make it through filtering by most recruiters. But real descriptions are coherent and don't just parrot back terms in ways that makes it clear you don't understand what the are. You find a way to make a coherent keyword soup that still actually describes what you did. That's great! But it's really obvious folks are misrepresenting things when a resume uses all the terms in the job description in ways that don't make sense.
I kinda think we've reach this weird warfare stage of folks submitting uniquely LLM-generated resumes for each position to combat the aggressive LLM-based filtering that recruiting is starting to use. I assume people think they can do well in an interview if they can just get past the automated filtering. I'm sure some are trying to do 3 and 4 remote jobs at once with little real responsibilities, too, but I find it hard to believe that's the majority. I may be very wrong there, though...
This was the problem recruiters were invented to fix, but somehow recruiters have moved on to fixing every problem BUT this one.
Your use of nepotism is actually reputation.
>> clearly faked resumes that far too closely matched the job description to be realistic
Can you elaborate on why you consider a close match to the job description to be unrealistic?
On the hiring side too, and I really don’t understand the fake resume with AI trend. How can they possibly think they’ll pass the interview? Because when I’m hiring I find it very easy to spot someone lying when questioning to go into the details of past experiences. Maybe they are betting on a broken process? Maybe you can pass (dumb) HR filters with lies, but not real interviewers, at least from what I do and have seen.
It's because they're using AI for the interviews, too.
> Because when I’m hiring I find it very easy to spot someone lying when questioning to go into the details of past experiences
ain't nobody gonna get past the interview sheriff
The fact that even well-meaning hiring managers can't see great candidates because of filtering overload says a lot about how dysfunctional the current system is
My previous job ( somewhat well known brand) got > 500 resumes within hours for a mid level position. My manager decided to close that job posting and found someone internally
> clearly faked resumes that far too closely matched the job description to be realistic.
Then why would have unrealistic expectations in the ad?
It’s pretty much always who you know… at least to get a showing. It’s rare in history to find counter examples. And in a LLM fueled world it’s going to be more important.
Companies can improve by ensuring they don’t hire _because_ of whom someone knows. It should only ever let you get in the room to interview.
So practical advice of what to do: be human. Get to know people. Care. Your time to do this is not when you’re looking for a job, but when you’re in a job.
This is my anecdotal experience too. There's a (non-sequential) human thread that connects all my work experience. Ironically the exception was my very first development job, which was a blind application.
I've never gotten a job from someone I know. I've heard it my whole life but I've always went in solo to a number of jobs big and small. In fact, I personally find it kind of not respectable in some weird way (leaning on others for something I naively still hold onto as a merit-based system. People that break this value break what makes the system good), but I'm obviously biased from having always gone into an interview knowing only myself and what I know.
Vetted resumes seem like a real solution here, the issue is incentives.
One possibility for a free and impartial services would be via government funding. Unemployment insurance is paying out a few hundred per week per person, cutting that time down even a little could pay for a decent background check. That doesn’t get you a job specific resume but it should be good enough for an initial screening for most jobs.
Been a couple of years since I last was an interviewer, but I’m always amazed at people who blatantly exaggerate in-depth experience while seeking a highly technical position.
Job Requirements: Senior Staff, Deep technical work in X, Y, Z
Resume: 10 years as tech lead in X, Y, Z
Reality: Once walked near someone with experience in X, Y, Z and heard them sneeze loudly. Can spell X correctly.
Why do they even bother?
Usually you really don’t need that much experience. There are only a few percent of jobs will need very specialized folks, regardless of that description.
> Why do they even bother?
Because the job requirements on the position are likely to be real as the applicants accomplishments on their resume.
At every company I’ve done hiring at my job descriptions for positions on my team were edited by my boss or hr and read like what was 1-2 levels above the nominal title of the position or had shit like the well worn joke of asking for X years of experience in technology that hadn’t existed for that long.
The entire hiring market for tech at least has devolved into almost 100% noise over the last few years
Use hiring brokers. The good ones will vet the candidates and verify them.
Job seekers should also consider seeking representation from top tier brokers.
Any suggestion on good brokers?
Iceberg Slim?
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Hiring doesn't work like that. It's not like you glance at resumes then hire someone because what the paper says matches your job description. You spend a lot of time, if you're doing it right. Some resumes have everything you want, but aren't honest. Some resumes don't have everything, but they're pretty close, and worth the conversation. Some people seem perfect on paper but once you talk with them you realize (for whatever reason) that they don't fit. Even just a few applicants can take many hours of work before you can pick the one that fits best what you're looking for.
If you're a team of 5, handling 1,200 resumes, how much money are you expected to invest in this process? Does everyone take a week off billable work so you can find someone? Can you afford that? With only a team of 5, probably not.
We all want to feel like we're being treated well, but scolding someone because they were overwhelmed by the massive amount of adversarial spam they received for their job posting is a failure to put yourself in their shoes. Let's all be better people, here.
You and I both know the truth is in between both of our responses. It was worth discussing.
I've lived through the recessions of 1990-91 (in my 20s, not tech), the Dotcom bust and the Great Financial Crisis. I can tell you that it's always been this way when its' a "buyer's market" and the employers can afford to be picky. I can also tell you that this is not some game-changing phenomenon[0]. The jobs will return when it is once again a "seller's market" -- which it surely will be. This applies to non-tech job markets as well.
During the DotCom bust I ended up getting a taxi license in NYC and driving yellow taxicabs on 12-hour (standard) shifts for over 18 months. During the GFC, I got trained in HazMat handling and joined contracting companies as an employee cleaning the beaches after the BP oil spill for a year. In both cases, I re-entered the software engineering market as a high-demand candidate and made even more in base and total comp than I had previously.
I am over 50 now. I never transitioned to a management position. Still, I do plan to re-enter the software engineering market when the current winter ends and spring next arrives.
[0] I work with agentic AI on my own projects. Due to limited context windows, even the best models like Claude Opus or Alibaba's Qwen-coder require much more expert handholding than people let on. Even with good context engineering and memory tools.
What could potentially put an end to the current hiring "winter"?
We have an increasing amount of immigrants coming over in hopes of getting a white-collar job, in combination with the tech sector shrinking, as well as companies as a whole being much more careful when hiring.
There would need to be some explosion in the amount of tech jobs, in order for everyone to be able to get one. However, I just cannot see what could cause something like this in the near future.
This is just recency bias. People often tend to think that present trends will continue indefinitely even though past trends did not.
What does the moment look like when one trend ends?
ZIRP is one example of a decade-long trend that is ending.
zirp ended a while ago when all the big layoffs happened and we're slowly seeing news of rates going down again.
Presumably the end of such a winter would involve the tech sector growing.
According to wikipedia[0] there doesn't seem to be any significant uptick in H1Bs. Is that what you were referring to by "immigrants coming over in hopes of getting a white-collar job"?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#H-1B_visa_tables_and...
In Australia, it refers to
https://www.education.gov.au/international-education-engagem...
So basically Australia wants to force the cost of employing workers down.
I'm not American so I'm not specifically referring to the H1B system
> What could potentially put an end to the current hiring "winter"?
April 18, 2017; EO 13788: Buy American and Hire American (H-1B reform)
Still waiting on that one. Just need a favorable administration back in office.
I'm not American but I do find it quite annoying how majority of the economic trends present within the US, are subsequently reflected in Europe with a slight delay.
I think that a slight increase in autonomy of other western countries could go a long way
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>You can't imagine the death of an elderly figure pushing questionable tariffs that undermine financial planning happening suddenly in the near future?
The masses are asses. People largely get the govt they deserve, Germans included . Directing your anger at politicians is really lame.
All former US presidents who died in the 21st century died well over the age of 90.
Don't underestimate what access to the best medical care in the world will do, regardless of your lifestyle.
Not sure it helps all that much: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/billionaires-death-a...
"But the truth — despite the unique challenges that accompany majority stakes in the world’s resources — is that most of the ultrarich seem to die bloodless, unperturbed deaths, and at advanced ages [...] The Dead Billionaires of 2022–23 enjoyed an average lifespan of almost 86 years, outperforming average Americans by more than ten years."
It's either extraordinarily tactless to suggest this, or on purpose, so soon after the assassination of a political figure.
You're referring to Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman, right?
hey now it's been too long to talk about. you missed the window. it's no longer a valid talking point it the zeitgeist /s
the media coverage difference says everything
Agreed, this is total blasphemy
I missed this part in the Bible.
I'll admit it's tactless, but as a presumably European in your other comment what have I sacrileged against God? You asked an economical question it's hard to make economical decisions with repeated 90 day deadlines.
He that is glad at calamity shall not be held innocent?
Your statements contradict each other.
If companies are much more careful when hiring, they would not consider immigrants unless the candidate is exceptional, which doesn’t significantly change the number of opportunities for an average worker.
Contrary to the conspiracy theories, H1B requires the employer to pay market wage or higher, so hiring an immigrant for a white collar job is extra cost and risk, and only makes sense in a low-interest rate environment where finding a qualified candidate becomes a challenge.
The exceptional and even qualified immigrants that would take these jobs are coming at a significantly lower rate since Trump 1.0. And that includes international students that would eventually become exceptional/qualified candidates.
The 50 year old commenter has pointed out the root cause and showed examples of the cycle to explain when the jobs will come back.
> Contrary to the conspiracy theories, H1B requires the employer to pay market wage or higher [...] where finding a qualified candidate becomes a challenge.
Something doesn't add up here. If you are paying the market wage, you fundamentally cannot have challenges finding qualified candidates. The market wage isn't established until you already have someone agreeing to your terms...
H1B is built around the concept of past market wages. This is why the 'conspiracy theories' state that H1B drive down wages. Not because the H1B workers are paid less than other workers, but because they are paid the same.
Consider the scenario where yesterday it took $20 per hour to find a willing worker. Your competitor hired that person. Said worker isn't going to come work for you for $20 per hour. He is already positioned with that. He would come work for you for $30 per hour, though. You could offer him $30 per hour, or you could cry and say that you can't find anyone and then hire an H1B for $20 per hour. Technically, in this scenario, the market wage became $30 per hour, but since the H1B was introduced you were able to bring it back down to $20 per hour.
Which isn't much of a conspiracy theory. That's just basic economics. The macro effects are considerably more complicated, of course. H1Bs are granted on the understanding that having two workers being paid $20 per hour is more net beneficial to society than one worker making $30 per hour. Including economically over the long term — where businesses that are able to expand with more workers will eventually be able to pay all workers more, although the "trickle down" crowd will dismiss that idea.
The so-called conspiracy theories disagree with that notion, believing, no doubt because they are thinking of it from an individualistic point of view rather than a worldly point of view, that they would be better off making $30 per hour instead.
"this is not some game-changing phenomenon[0]. The jobs will return when it is once again a "seller's market" -- which it surely will be."
Pretty bold. Things like manufacturing haven't recovered and we're seeing similar outsourcing in tech.
There was also a trend of outsourcing in tech after the DotCom bust, but that was reversed (and arguably not as much of a problem as it first seemed to be).
I think that was a pretty small trend. The trend I'm hearing today is 300k jobs are being offshore annually and that around 75% of those are in the tech sector. Assuming a company could only hire half as many people here due to peice differences, that would be about 9k more jobs per month.
It was just ahead of its time. No longer the case with our present tools and techniques.
Substitute "church secretary" for driving a hack, and "soldering heart monitors" for hazmat work, and you're me!
You do what you have to to pay the bills. If that means going outside your field for a while, so be it.
When the Great Recession hit, 90% of the food truck operators in my neighborhood were very recently bankers and finance people.
I wonder if with AI it is possible for someone to be a productive entrepreneur easily than finding a job in today’s market. Specially for someone over 50.
How much would it take to make 100k per year off an app, B2B, or B2C software?
The thing that bothers me so much about this post is that it reeks of privilege by treating unemployment as if it were mainly just a bad trigger that you talk to your expensive therapist about once a week.
For most people in the real world, psychological burn out is NOT the problem with unemployment. The problem is becoming homeless.
The median household net worth in the US is $193,000. The rate of home ownership is 65%. I don’t think the median American is at risk of becoming homeless during normal unemployment. Maybe you mean that the article isn’t as relevant for a global audience which is fine, but I would think that the median American lives in “the real world”.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/table...
https://www.nahb.org/blog/2024/08/lowest-homeownership-rate-...
I am not sure that means what you think it does. That’s not liquid dollars and does not mean those home owners have savings for emergencies.
The median American also owns $39,000 in liquid financial assets.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/scf23.pdf (page 22, “Financial Assets” section)
It doesn't say liquid assets though, it mentions multiple options which vary in how easily you can/should use one to pay an unexpected bill or period of unemployment.
For example, if one is using their life-insurance payouts to pay their rent... well, something has gone very wrong somewhere.
Specifically, this part:
> financial asset—which includes transaction accounts, certificates of deposit, savings bonds, other bonds, stocks, pooled investment funds, retirement accounts, cash value life insurance, and other managed assets
For the highly-liquid "transaction accounts" (checking, savings, money-market) the conditional [0] median is just $8k.
[0] AFAICT "conditional" here means "we don't include $0 data points in the median." That explains why the subcategory of "stocks" has a higher conditional median value than the more-general category of financial assets.
Sure, I couldn’t find a better data source than that. If you find a better source that includes liquid assets specifically that would be helpful. I am skeptical that of the 39k in assets listed there, there isn’t a substantial amount that can be used to pay the bills (i.e. who has $39k in their 401k but $0 anywhere else?).
Again I don’t think that means what you think it means. It says “value of all financial assets” which includes banking accounts, cds, stocks, bonds etc. that is not liquid.
The next exact line it calls out those bank accounts and the mean at $8,000. That is not a lot of liquid emergency savings for a household let’s say of 3.
So I don’t think your point stands.
Everything you listed is liquid. CDs can be withdrawn early for a small penalty, and most likely without even losing any of your principal.
Again that number is inclusive of retirement accounts, hard to say much without knowing the breakdown but we do know $8k is the closet cash number. I would suspect the majority of the rest are in retirement accounts. Sure bonds and stocks are liquid but not like cash is. Using Fred is not that useful for these type of exercises as I don’t think those datapoints do a great job on topics like this.
So I don’t see what you are trying to point out. Most surveys I have seen put something like a quarter of Americans without any emergency savings.
Good luck accessing any of your home equity if you don’t have a job. I guess you could just sell your house of many years and move your family into an apartment.
Yes, obviously that's what you have to do. And also thank God that you have that asset to sell to give you emergency cash.
In may cases that'd be very foolish since mortgage payments are often way lower than rent.
Until you factor in maintenance, utilities, taxes, etc…
Depending on where you live, renting is often cheaper than owning, but real estate agents who make money off selling houses will never tell you the full cost of owning a home.
I think "most people in the real world" have at least a few rungs between their current situation and true homelessness. Many people have some sort of family or other community that they could lean on, even in America where family ties are weaker than any other place I know.
I have a couple friends who haven't had steady work in years, and they still eke out a pretty reasonable existence living with friends and family because they are kind and considerate and people don't mind having them around. A lot of street homeless have mental or substance issues that make it hard for them to coexist with other people.
"Homeless" is not the same as "living on the street". People living in hotels, temporary trailers (in some places even tiny homes count), living with a friend temporarily, etc are all homeless. Plenty of Americans are much closer than this than you might think working in tech. 50-60% of Americans currently live 'paycheck-to-paycheck' which means the second work stops they're on a timer for missing bills to start coming in.
I've had the luxury, working in tech, to have lost a job and had the opportunity to take a few months off before searching. Even this was incredibly stressful in practice, but I never had to worry about losing my place of living.
> People living in hotels, temporary trailers (in some places even tiny homes count), living with a friend temporarily, etc are all homeless.
You're right. But is a 30-year-old who moves back in with their parents "homeless"?
And yeah, the paycheck-to-paycheck stat blows my mind. Somehow the standard American experience has become the latest model iPhone (financed), a new car (financed), a rented home, 4-5 meals out weekly, and almost zero money in the bank. And all this in a country with some of the weakest social security in the developed world. I'm sure the half-trillion dollars spent on advertising every year has something to do with this.
> You're right. But is a 30-year-old who moves back in with their parents "homeless"?
No, but this is also not ideal for many reasons
I have a friend going through this right now, actually. The biggest challenge is that her parents don't live anywhere near a strong job market. So the decision for her is "be homeless in a place where jobs are available" or "have a home but no access to employers"
It's not ideal
I have been applying since March 2020 out of New Orleans and I have come up with nothing (5-6 first round interviews) so I think that this is a much bigger problem than people think.
> But is a 30-year-old who moves back in with their parents "homeless"?
Depends -- how safe is their parents' home?
That answer can vary, for a lot of reasons.
> Depends
It doesn’t.
A phone for internet access is basically mandatory now if you want to work, and depending on where you live so is a car.
A serviceable refurbished Android can be obtained for $50. A new iPhone costs at least $800, which is 100 hours of work at the federal minimum wage.
And a serviceable refurbished iPhone isn't that much more, e.g. https://swappa.com/listings/apple-iphone-se-2nd-gen?carrier=...
ok, but could that mean many people that are assumed to have new devices could actually be using older devices?
Probably. The iPhone users I know mostly replace their phones once every 3 to 5 years, and they don't all buy brand new replacements even then (although some do.)
I'd be surprised if you had no one around you that didn't have an old android laying around collecting dust. I'm still on an old A52s and it works fine.
i might, but i wouldn't want to rely on something i'm uncertain exists.
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You might need to get out more, I've lived it, I've been around people who live it every day. I met someone for the first time in like 15 years (old school semi-acquaintance), something like the second thing we started talking about was how rough it was just finding and paying for an apartment in the remote super "LCOL" place we found ourselves.
Think about it, I'm guessing the guy welding the beams in your kid's school isn't making a quarter of what you make a year. Yet he has to be reminded every day that he's an economic failure vs what do you do, javascript? Early stage startup ideas? I bet it was pretty good in 2006-8.
> I'm guessing the guy welding the beams in your kid's school isn't making a quarter of what you make a year.
The majority of software engineers aren’t earning anywhere close to 4 times a union welder’s wages.
Getting out more won’t help in this case because I will be walking around SOMA. The fact of the matter is that the stat is made up by a payday loan company and has no bearing on reality.
People like to share it because they are LLM like and just repeat things without looking at the data. “Hallucinations” are the common way that humans experience the world. World models born of pure fiction.
Also wtf I know journeyman ironworkers. They own homes in Oakland. People act like this is some poverty mode existence. Their lives are fine.
Thanks for sharing the slowboring blog post. I didn't know that stat came from payday loan companies, which definitely makes it suspect. Encouraging to hear that 55% of Americans have enough cash on hand for 3 months of expenses, and most of them have less liquid resources they could draw on if they needed more.
However, saying that the median American household has ~$200k net worth doesn't necessarily mean that they're doing great. A lot of the burden of funding retirement falls on the individual in the US, meaning if you're 60 and only have $200k of net worth in a M/HCOL city you're still potentially kind of fucked.
whats making the confidence that you are correct, and other people are bots, vs you being the bot?
up until recently, you didnt know the definition of homelessness that is used in the data. how are you making claims about the data? which data? what does it say?
since you know journeymen, you might want to ask them to meet their apprentices. That way, you could visit the apprentices homes that theyve bought, and can definitely pay the mortgage on by themselves.
or, if they dont have any, you could try to meet some CNAs at the local hospital? or the person at the grocery til?
its wild you dont think poor people exist.
I made no claims about homelessness. Only about the paycheck to paycheck thing. Did you use Llama 3.2 1B to make this comment? Next time use a bigger model. Gemma 3n 4B is sort of the limit before it starts talking nonsense about “claims about the [homelessness] data”. Complete non sequitur.
https://institute.bankofamerica.com/economic-insights/payche...
BoA says 25% are paycheck-to-paycheck based on their internal data, which is still pretty nuts.
I also remember seeing something a few years ago that this stat has always floated around 20-30%. It was in the context of reporting that living paycheck to paycheck "has reached 30%", but that the reporting never included historical averages, to make the news much more sensational than it actually was.
Yes, it is much lower than the 60% postulated above, even counting those who have massive positive home equity they could access at any time.
Median net worth is almost $200k. People in this country are so wealthy.
> "Homeless" is not the same as "living on the street"
The word is being used to invoke that image.
> Plenty of Americans are much closer than this than you might think working in tech. 50-60% of Americans currently live 'paycheck-to-paycheck' which means the second work stops they're on a timer for missing bills to start coming in.
How is that actually defined by whoever measured it?
The median American has $8000 in transaction accounts and a net worth of $192k. 50-60% of Americans self-report that they’re living paycheck to paycheck, but not everyone understands that to mean “I literally can’t pay the bills if my paycheck doesn’t come on time”.
(Is it deeply uncomfortable to get laid off with $8000 in your account? Without a doubt, especially in an increasingly weak labor market, even if you have home equity or retirement savings you could theoretically dip into to cover what unemployment benefits can’t.)
> People living in hotels … are homeless
Does that include digital nomads who don’t have a permanent residence?
Does that include digital nomads who don’t have a permanent residence?
Since they're not even a rounding error, it doesn't matter.
Yep, they're just winning at homeless
> I have a couple friends who haven't had steady work in years, and they still eke out a pretty reasonable existence living with friends and family
What about their wife and children? Do they get to stay with them too?
No, the people I'm thinking of are childless. They recognize that their level of stability and functioning is not currently high enough to support a family.
I didn't say that they're thriving and living their dream, just that they're still a couple rungs above homeless.
I think you should look this up instead of surveying your guesses about your friends.
A lot of my friends' parents rely on their support. If they lost their jobs their parents would be in trouble, too.
> I think "most people in the real world" have at least a few rungs between their current situation and true homelessness.
This is one of the most out-of-touch HN comments I've seen in a while. Most people are not nearly as privileged as the community on these forums. Not even all the people posting here are fully removed from the risk of being out on their ass. Some have moved from other parts of their home country (think people in the Bay Area who moved for a job and have no family in the same job market). Some have moved from other parts of the world to where they are and have no one upon whom they can impose. Plenty have huge student loans and are so fresh out of school that they're at the edge of the many rounds of layoffs affecting the tech industry in the last few years and lack enough experience on their resumés to land a new position before their finances run out.
I can't believe how tone deaf it is to suggest that most people have multiple rungs upon which to fall back. And I've only been talking about people on these forums, the "fortunate" types.
> think people in the Bay Area who moved for a job and have no family in the same job market
If they've failed to find a job for long enough that they're about to be homeless, does it really make sense to remain in the most expensive housing market in the country?
I think it's equally out of touch to imply that if you select a random person from across America (the richest country in the world) you will land on someone who is an inch from homelessness, with no close family or community, massive debt, and living in terror of the next layoff. Certainly there are people in that situation, but to imply that it's somehow the median American experience is to caricature the country.
All I said is that "most people" have rungs to fall back on, not "everyone".
> I can't believe how tone deaf it is to suggest that most people have multiple rungs upon which to fall back.
There are rungs which are available to the population at large, so all of us have those privileges. For example the armed forces are recruiting. They will put a roof over your head and food in your belly, as well as give you medical coverage.
Not if you’re over 35 they won’t.
Normal functioning adults do not easily become homeless.
There are several drops in lifestyle you have been accustomed to, before that happens.
If you don't have an income and you don't own your place, then you become homeless. That's not hard to see.
If it doesn't happen it's because someone bails you out, this is a privilege not everyone has.
No. What happens is you accept employment and terms you would not previously consider.
This is going to upset some, but the tech industry is full of delusional people that are completely out of touch with reality and the needs and struggles of everyday Americans.
I recently stumbled upon a YouTuber grousing about losing her six-figure tech job. She was in full freakout mode about budgeting etc. but something didn't seem quite right. Then she disclosed she's married, financially stable, husband still has a great job, etc.
It made me stop and think how there's people out there delivering groceries, putting on an apron, all so they don't have to switch to eating cat food by the end of the week.
OTOH ex-Googlers are worried they might be forced to switch to store-brand mineral water within weeks.
Blog posts are aimed at an audience, HN is an audience, and in both cases the audience in question is a technical one with an above-average number of well-paid professionals. The whole framing that the blog post "reeks of privilege" to "most people" is a bit strange. If I were to read a Yachting Monthly article about The Five Most Attention-Grabbing Mega Yachts For The Conspicuous Consumer Billionaire it would probably reek of privilege to me, too, but that's an entirely self inflicted problem: nobody is making me read a specific article from a yacht magazine.
I think people would be shocked at HN demographics. I'm quite confident it's more representative of the average population in terms of things like income than some people seem to realize.
I suppose if you are including European and Indian salaries and American students? But upper middle class students are literally temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
All non-student Americans on HN are making 6 figures or something, I guess?
In software? Yes - no matter which part of the country. Maybe a few hold outs in the 90k.
The jr's in my company are making $60-$70k.
Anyway, the government actually compiles this information
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
>The median annual wage for software developers was $133,080 in May 2024. The median wage is the wage at which half the workers in an occupation earned more than that amount and half earned less. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $79,850, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $211,450.
That's laughable.
Anyway I'm not American, Indian, or European. I guess I don't exist!
You’re telling me you don’t live in America. But also you know better about salaries and standards of living in America.
I don't think one has to live in a country to be able to look up and read statistics, or talk to people who work there, or read job postings from there, or have worked for companies in that country, or...
Anyway I'm not really sure why you're so insistent on this focus of America. HN (and the Internet in general) is a pretty diverse crowd... which was sort of my point
My claim is about US salaries for software engineering roles.
Please share your stats.
Your claim is that all non-student Americans on HN are paid 6 figure salaries.
Please share your stats.
Sure, but none of us have to read all the way through every article that hits the front page, or take it to heart when the article is about a rich person.
One of my friends has given up on finding a software job and become a handyman to make ends meet. I get that not everyone in tech is loaded. I just don't think holding your nose and gagging at the "reek" when you deliberately read about someone who has six months of savings is a productive or useful reaction.
> I just don't think holding your nose and gagging at the "reek" when you read about someone who has six months of savings is a productive or useful reaction.
Interesting way to characterize GP's response when all they did was use a word in a very common way.
>psychological burn out is NOT the problem with unemployment. The problem is becoming homeless.
Thanks. You hit the nail on the head.
Burnout is real, and it’s worth talking about, but it’s a luxury to be able to even think about rest when your bank account is at zero and you're juggling survival
I've been thinking about job searching lately, maybe a bit too much. I'm employed, so it is not any immediate concern for me, but one has to think ahead.
Between age discrimination that starts after 50, and how difficult the job search seemingly is...some people will have to work at least until they're 70. That's a solid 15-20 years more, after the job hunting is an uphill battle.
If the work search is hard while you're at your peak, professionally speaking, how are you supposed to be stay positive after that?
Me and my partner are doing everything we can to achieve some minimum level of FIRE, just in case.
I've also accepted that sooner or later, probably the next 10-15 years or so, I'll have to accept the fact that I'm going to end up in a lifer position. If FIRE can't save my ass, I simply can't afford to hop around.
This is one of my main concerns. A lot of countries are talking about raising their retirement age, and I just think to myself, which tech company is going to hire a 68-year-old? Sure, I could transition into management, but my company just laid off a number of middle-managers and the ones left are expected to do more than just manage (code, design, etc.). So I'm not sure that's all that safe either.
I like learning new things, and I hope to continue that into my 60s (and beyond), but I have to imagine picking up new skills will get harder as I age.
> A lot of countries are talking about raising their retirement age
This is solely done to reduce/delay pension payments by pushing the old unemployed into lower social security / forcing them to live off of their savings.
No one in any industry is looking for geratric 70 year olds.
The politician industry seems to love 70+ year olds! (But I think you have to get in at a younger age).
Oh you mean for literally being a politician. Lol yea, just a very small industry. And the interview loop really sucks.
I didn't have problems with age discrimination — I don't think — but I think because I countered it with energy and eagerness. "I'm ready to hit the ground running. Availability? Leave a laptop on my desk and I'll be there tomorrow. I'm not yet an expert in your line of business, but I've worked through 8 different industries and succeeded in each, and learning as I go is my favorite thing in the world. Let's go!"
I feel like the underlying issue is less with age and more with ossification. If you're a world expert in Visual Basic but don't want to learn that "fad" TypeScript, well, get used to being unemployed.
That’s the thing about age discrimination, they don’t care that you’re eager, they care that you’re over 50. How are you supposed to demonstrate you’re not just another ossified old fart if your résumé goes straight in the bin?
Don't put anything on your resume that allows them to guess your age. Don't include dates on your education. Leave out everything except your last 10 years of work experience. Leave out your COBOL skills. And so on...
Hard agree. I used to be really good at Perl, but you won't find that on my LinkedIn anymore. Old certs for obsolete skills? Gone. The job I had 18 years ago? I'd be happy to tell you about it if it comes up, but you'll have to hear about it in person because I'm not advertising it on my resume.
The second they see and talk to you, they know your age...
Yeah, but hopefully you’re face to face by then and can wow them with your expertise and eagerness.
It was always my understanding that software careers are shorter than other technical careers, and the higher wages compensate for this. More than compensate, if you invest early.
If by FIRE you mean retire in your 50s, I don't think that's an aspiration. That should be an expectation. You might be able to work a full career in this industry, but I wouldn't plan on it.
Most people don't have the temperament for FIRE. You have to live below your means, save a double digit percentage consistently, and invest.
And you have to do it for decades. You need to be able to tough it out through the worst of times (like the dot-com bubble, financial crisis, covid, and random political chaos like tariffs.)
You have to tune out the noise and always remember that on a long enough timeline, the market only goes up. And if you think it's "different" this time, it won't be for long.
And all of that is made easier by having more income.
Yes, if you can avoid the traps of life style inflation. That's easier said than done.
Yes, it’s just very clear who the responsibility to succeed is on. And the only one to blame for failure is yourself.
> If the work search is hard while you're at your peak, professionally speaking, how are you supposed to be stay positive after that?
Life never gets easier with age. I guess that's just something we all have to come to terms with eventually.
I wouldn't say that at all. When I think back to all the store I set by ephemeral status things like worrying what was cool or if girls liked me in my twenties .. life is definitely a lot easier now I get to just be myself.
100% I love middle age (54).
It's not that things get easier, they don't and I realize I can't do what I could at 28 but my attitude about life has changed. Less chasing sex, less impulsive actions, less neuroticism. More contentment and acceptance. Also I have seen a lot of ways to be screwed over by now and zillion personality types and I can smell potential problems a mile away.
On the downside I took what would have been a very minor fall in my 20's a few weeks ago and my shoulder still hurts. I'm not "old" like fallen and broke a hip but I would have been fully recovered after a few days 20 years ago I think.
One piece of advice for young whippersnappers: Age comes up on you a lot faster than you think when you are young. Take good care of your body, your teeth, your gut and your mind and don't put off eating and sleeping right and losing those extra pounds. Solid, lasting relationships are worth more than possessions and status too in my opinion. Those are easier to build when you are young.
I don't mean to rain on your parade...just want to say enjoy it now, and remember it later. Good luck.
> Life never gets easier with age.
HAHAHA. I have so much more "fu" money now, it really takes a lot of pressure off. Something goes wrong? I can solve it with money. Stranded somewhere? Just pay. Friend in trouble? Help out.
It's been such an obvious self-own for tech workers not to capitalize on any of the multiple booms they've seen, and unionize.
Unionizing may help some things, but it won't make it easier for the unemployed to get employed.
It could help with networking and it could serve as a way to get rid of totally fake AI applicants since they aren't going to be union members.
We need to forgo unions and straight up legislate forms of workplace democracy. People do not have meaningful control over a massive part of their lives and if democracy is good enough for state governments, it's good enough for private enterprise.
I’m with you on the first part. They should have capitalized.
If there was a union there would be no boom to capitalize on.
Unions drive wages down in the electronic vehicle sector by forcing pensions and dissuading RSUs. Most Tesla workers make far more than their unionized GM counterparts
Also unions are mostly there to allow the lazy low performers to coast. We already have a serious problem of this but making it hard to fire them will make everyone’s life worse.
Unions don't make it impossible to fire people. As long as management does their job and documents correctly there's zero issue firing workers who aren't doing their job.
employers preempted that option long time ago. h1b visa workers cannot be in an union.
> h1b visa workers cannot be in an union
There's a law that says this?
Less than 17% of tech workers are on H1Bs. They can't exactly scab for the other 83%.
Wow, is it really ~15%? No wonder unemployment is so high.
Tech unemployment was also low with similar #s of H1Bs.
Pretty sure that short term trends drive it more than long-term visa holder counts.
curious how is a 'tech worker' being defined here ?
> next 10-15 years or so
That’s a long enough tech career to retire. I don’t know you, but I know that even 65 year olds with 6 million in the bank are nervous to retire.
Oh how I would love to just stop looking for jobs for a bit and leave it on rest.
Unfortunately I am selling things off right now to not go homeless and refusing to apply to jobs is an admission of defeat to me. Said as a (former?) tech worker.
Read through your comment history and it sounds gnarly. I hope you find something soon. I was unemployed for 6 months in 2022-2023 and it was horrible. I guess I learned something from it, but I hated it. That said, I became employed after applying to a role by emailing the CTO after they posted on the monthly Who's Hiring thread. I've had 2 jobs from HN since.
HN has been huge for my career personally, so I made this site to help make it easier to find stuff that's good for you: https://hnresumetojobs.com/
Sincerely wishing you the best of luck.
Just for clarification, you've had 3 jobs in the past 2 years? Were some of these contracts?
Otherwise oof, that sounds like volatility only worth dealing with if one really needs an income, esp. considering the signal for prospective employers.
> only worth dealing with if one really needs an income, esp. considering the signal for prospective employers.
Is this not the purpose of a job? I've had 3 long-term jobs/contracts since the pandemic, for a total of 2.5/5 years, and that's a better rate of the prior 6 years before that. Idk what their story is, but I think it's pretty typical for people who've had stable careers for one reason or another to assume it's within someone's control how often or how long they're able to work for. Sure, sometimes you're just job hopping or intentionally taking risks on early startups, but if the job goes away—depending on many factors—the ability to turn around and get another one can take a laughable amount of time, and the awareness of the perception of "the signal for prospective employers" compounding that difficulty makes it harder the longer it takes.
I try not to think about it, but there's been numerous times where I've been a year or more out from losing a job due to layoffs or financials or whatever, and getting rejected by even the least desirable place in the 4th+ round of interviews, usually by that point shifting my energy from applying/interviewing to looking at trade school. Imo it's always been brutal out there if you don't know someone running a startup who'll hook it up right away.
In my personal experience, as of the start of my current job and every time prior, in 10 years I'd accumulated no savings, always draining it to nearly zero by the time I'd get the next one. Ain't pretty.
I was laid off in Aug 2022, found a new role in March 2023, then found another role in March 2024. So basically 2 roles in 2.5 years. It's fairly common in the bay area, especially since I'm in the startup space.
Sounds awful. You're articulate and it sounds like you have a decent amount of experience, I hope you find some employment commensurate to that.
I've had some extended periods of unemployment. Only advice I can offer is to strengthen existing social connections and put yourself in situations where you can meet new people. I've gotten work before from people I met in random social contexts. I guess you could call this "networking", but I hate that word. It's good to reduce your isolation, whether or not it directly lands you a job.
Email in bio if you want to chat. Maybe I can help.
> (former?)
This hurts. As someone who's been unemployed, struggling with mental health issues, for far longer than I'd care to admit in such a forum, I struggle with the question of when it's just been too long to realistically get back into it.
I wish you luck
is the job market really that bad for tech workers :( . I got laidoff on paternity leave last week. I am so scared.
Hope you find something soon !!
It's as bad or worse than the 2000 dot-com bubble burst right now. We had a covid bubble for a while and that burst. The AI bubble is next to burst.
Was at your place two weeks ago. Was selling things. Found a job finally by a sheer stroke of luck within my network (cold applying never worked for 7 months).
I wish you all the best and hope you find a job too.
This past year, I noticed people reaching out to me whenever my employer is hiring. These seem to be new graduates, and there is a pattern in the way ask for a reference or a job:
These are people I've never met, yet they are so direct to the point of being rude. But to the best of my knowledge, they are real people. And what it looks like is that I'm contact #258 in a spreadsheet, because they have to cast an extremely wide net to hope for a single response. When I respond, they are lost because they don't even remember which of the job I was a contact for.I don't envy anyone looking for a job right now.
I'm guessing it is due to the advice that getting a job is a "numbers game".
When I was hiring somewhat recently, I talked to a worryingly high number of people that didn't know what role they're applying to, had perfect resumes and were taking the fake-it-till-you-make-it attitude to its limit. I mean I get there's a sales aspect to an interview, in a way, but this was pushing it way too far. It was a very frustrating experience.
A lot of the recent advice has pretty much destroyed the hiring process, in my humble opinion. It swings from solving hard computer science problems to testing trivia to being a political round-table. I keep on wondering how much worse can it get before a reset is needed.
tbh a lot of roles are pretty similar where it doesn't really matter that much...
It is a generational difference. Zoomers have a tendency to communicate like Jordan Belfort. Oftentimes it seems scammy but it is prevalent because it sometimes leads to new opportunities.
I block those people
This is why I honestly think it would be better if the popular job boards limited the number of applications you could submit per day. The game theory of the job market incentivizes spray and pray.
That wouldn't work. Candidates would just create multiple accounts, and apply from multiple job boards. Or they would use the job board to find the employer's own careers web page and apply directly there.
Apps like tinder already deal with the multiple account problem - not an unknown challenge.
I’ll admit the second issue is harder, and would require some kind of common application standard framework.
I still maintain that the status quo of noise drowning out signal is horrifically bad, and I don’t think job boards making things even more frictionless is helping.
In my recent experience (20 yrs experience so ymmv)
- basically all jobs you see posted on LinkedIn or on big sites are either fake or might as well be because they are being run through HR
- everything is optimized for engagement, not outcomes, so there are lots or meaningless things to do (basically anything on linkedin). You might as well do some of them to stay sane but they'll never get you a job
- what's valuable is networking and getting the opportunity to speak to a real person who might want to work with you. There are always lots of jobs, even when there are no jobs, but there are trust problems, process and bureaucratic issues, and incompetence (all of HR/talent) that need to be navigated
- sort of redundant, anything that's easy (like Easy Applying to a job) is useless. Hard, uncomfortable prospecting, involving real people, increases your chance of success
> - basically all jobs you see posted on LinkedIn or on big sites are either fake or might as well be because they are being run through HR
When I was looking (a while back), my experience was that the big sites are a dozen or so of consultancies and head hunters reposting all the jobs as "an opportunity for a client."
FooCorp (a real company) would post a position. Then headhunters and contract to perm style consultancies would repost it. This way, you'd get 1 + 12 job postings for the same position (assuming that the company even posted it there in the first place).
Next, applying to a position (other than the real one) on that set would get you ghosted (they're collecting resumes to send on and will pick 100 that they feel have the best chance of getting hired before contacting back). Sometimes, they'd call you back with a different position that "you'd be perfect for". Often, the resume that they send on to the actual position is significantly doctored from the original (to the point where its "this person isn't the one on the resume"). In today's world, the "this is an AI fake" is sometimes the transformation that the head hunter does to your resume.
So its not so much run through the company's HR, but run through the head hunter's filter trying to find the "best" ones to send on and for that filter, even though you applied it might not get to the hiring company to consider.
(Anecdote: when I was unemployed looking for a job a number of years ago, I tried some headhunters. One interview that I got they were asking me really odd questions about technologies that I knew nothing about. When it was pointed out that "I should know about these things, its on your resume" they showed me the one that they got that had my name on it... and it didn't match the copy that I brought with the exception of when I got my degree and what university it was from. They thanked me for my honesty and we both agreed that I was not a good technical fit for the position.)
People forget that finding a job is a sales problem. All the other stuff - interviews, resumes are just sales tools.
Imagine trying to find customers only by cold emailing.
This disaster is why I've built a whole side project automating the act of doomscrolling through job boards, so I can focus on actually talking to people when I find something that does interest me. (And can track the results in one place without repeatedly running into duplicates.)
"Sometimes the best way to search is… not to search." Last line of the article and man... it hits! All while applying and going through multiple interview processes, I was taking a break: traveling, fishing, and reading.
I was in the job search after leaving the GOV for about 3-4 months. I had received offers but they were all less pay or less flexibility than before and I wasn't willing to compromise. All the "big and sexy" start-ups required 3+ interviews, most I had was 7, and they still ended up deciding I wasn't a fit.
I reflected often that I was in the wrong line of work... not being able to get what I had wanted. With some rationalization and imposter syndrome gone, it ended up being LinkedIn and my connections that had saved me. Living proof that network and connections out last technical prowess unless you're the best-of-the-best at something.
It's all fun when you have money... otherwise it's a recipe for disaster
And unfortunately if you don't have a network for whatever reason, you're essentially screwed. Networking is basically the only way to get there, but I don't think most of society can handle the networking requirements to be stable.
I don't understand why LinkedIn haven't stepped in to this market more strongly.
They can verify if people are real. They have the information on what experience people have. If I was them then I'd be saying that your LinkedIn profile was your CV, and persuading companies to make LinkedIn be their route to applying for jobs.
(Not a shareholder, don't really use LinkedIn myself, just feels like such an obvious step for them to take.)
This is an interesting take. I think they are heading down this path, especially with the 'Easy Apply' button which is essentially what you're talking about.
If I have to guess, the current business model is likely profitable & any deviations too far from that could hurt their bottom line. Incrementing slowly overtime to LinkedIn replacing the CV seems to be the play, mainly to keep the current cashflow going.
My wife is on phase 3.
She graduated with a computer science degree in January, and then her dad passed away. The estate was a mess so she ended up spending time figuring that out. Then, we found and fixed a medical issue that had been draining her energy. She's doing a lot better now, but as a result she has an 8 month gap on her resume. She also never took an internship so that she could finish a semester earlier with summer classes. So now she's absolutely screwed for phase 1.
She switched to phase 2 recently. She got a hit for software support. She got rejected, but the person was like "Why aren't you applying for programming jobs, since you like programming?" They set her up for an interview for an actual programming job, and said her lack of experience wasn't an issue because they had a lot of pull, and that they would offer her a test where she could prove herself. She spent the next several days preparing non-stop for the interview, only for the same guy to be angry at her for not having multiple significant projects on Github and refused to even give her the test.
After that we thought about continuing phase 2, but we both felt like it was just a waste of time, especially after the last experience. She's had previous experience tutoring and I've written some instructional books, so we've now just decided to ignore the job market and form an LLC related to teaching. She'd be a great programmer, and it's really stupid that no one wants to give her a chance, but at some point you just figure the job market is so irrational that we should be able to beat it by doing it ourselves.
Four months? Six months? Is that supposed to be a long time? I know people that have been in this situation for nearly two years now. Forget hopeless, it's a bottomless pit of despair. I don't know how to help them, and neither does anyone else. But they keep trying and doing whatever they can.
The argument of "have hope, almost everyone picks themselves up eventually!" doesn't work when you're the one who is actually homeless.
I've had about six or seven months of temp work in the last four years. It's uncanny when people talk about having a couple months of unemployment being rough. The article points this out.
> Tell them you’re unemployed, what do you get? “Oh yeah I was unemployed one month ten years ago boy that sucked.” Yes, friend, yes it does suck right now six months in, and unlike your little story there I don’t know when or if it will ever stop.
This is on point, but then the author completely misses the mark a following paragraph.
> How often have you known somebody whose life was really, finally wrecked by unemployment?
I don't know anybody in my situation. The people I know send one job application, get an interview, and get an offer. I don't know how they do it. They don't know how they do it.
People look at me like I must not be trying very hard because it's trivial for them to get a job and infer that it must be for me as well.
The author says
> It won’t turn out as bad as you fear.
And continues by asking how many people does the reader know go homeless from being unemployed?
> I’m talking about who do you personally know who’s had it go that badly?
Homelessness is just a weird way to frame that. A family friend is the only other person I can think of in a similar situation to me - mid 30s, university educated, very unemployed - and they're living with their parents.
That doesn't mean they're not having a really bad time. Or that its not bad for society in general when we waste human capitol like this. She had motivation enough to travel out of country to get her degree. She is educated, but had no place in society, no career or family of her own now. That isn't fine just because she isn't homeless.
My savings are gone and even when I lose my home this year I will have social support structures, like living with family. I won't go homeless but that doesn't mean my career isn't over or that things aren't that bad.
I'm not even worried about being homeless.
I'd sleep in a tent if every day I woke up to doing what I loved.
I am worried that every day for the rest of my life will be worse than the day before it because nobody will work with me and nobody wants me on this earth.
1.5 years for me
Still searching for some reason!
My most recent job search had 30 interviews with 21 companies (you read that right) in 24 days. Rent was due and there were mouths to feed. Unemployment simply was not an option.
I consider myself exceptionally lucky to land where I did, and yet still would not care to do that process again.
Can you share a little more? Because this is outside the norm I’m hearing and I’d like to know more.
I'm not a PM, but I PMed it very aggressively. I made a Notes.app personal wiki tracking every company I spoke to, with a timeline in reverse chronological order of every contact I'd had with them, like:
I kept a "pipeline" note with companies in each stage, like: And then there was a separate Interviews note, which was a lot of the content from the Pipeline doc, but ordered chronologically and with more detail: And I replied to every recruiter I talked to, even if just to say "thanks for reaching out, but I'm looking for something more like ... right now", which often led to followups like "ooh, I have another client looking for that! Want to talk to them?"Hyperorganization is one of my superpowers, and I leaned into it. Every morning I'd review the pipeline and timeline docs and ping every recruiter or company who I should've heard from but hadn't yet: "hey, it's me! Thanks for the chat the other day. Hope your Maltese, Mr. Pickles, feels better! Here's a picture of my cat waving to Mr. Pickles!" A lot of times that'd nudge them to respond and move things along.
I'm looking at my timeline right now and seeing the day where I had 2 recruiter screens, a tech screen, and an onsite. It was busy. But I was ready and willing to work, and at the end I turned down 3 pending offers to accept the one I most wanted.
Again, I count myself as exceptionally lucky. That said, half of "luck" is putting yourself in the right place, in the right condition, to jump on a good opportunity.
Obsidian app with it's latest "bases" feature (or Dataview plugin) would work nicely for this.
For sure. Or Bear, or Notion, or ...
There are a lot of things to track all this. I personally didn't want to spend more than the minimum time setting up and using the system, because last think I wanted was to get nerdsniped into inventing a job application tracking systems instead of, like, applying for jobs. That would've been a real risk to me.
Thanks for the details—Its encouraging to hear how you approached it, and I’m glad it worked!
Awesome work! Really nicely built funnel. Great to hear people doing it the right way.
Thanks! I treated it as my full-time job and spent hours scrambling nearly every day. If things had worked out a little differently and I didn’t get a job in a reasonable time frame, I wanted to know it wasn’t from lack of trying.
Is this because you were talking to recruiters and they would respond? Because I've only been able to talk to ~three hiring managers this entire year. So the idea of lining up thirty interviews sounds preposterous, and not because it's hard work.
I followed up with the three of course, but was ghosted after one reply or so.
It's a little of that, and almost my particular job skills are still in demand right now. Just putting "looking for work" on my LinkedIn profile got the contacts flowing.
BTW, I did not, never, not once, apply to any jobs listed through LinkedIn this time around. I did that before and it was utterly demoralizing. Their ads were like "subscribe to LinkedIn Ultra and move to the top of the list of 9,000 people applying for this role!" I've never gotten a single hit from applying for a tech job through LinkedIn. I don't think that's actually a thing.
This essay just makes me feel so hopeless about our society. I don’t feel it’s right that employment has such weight in people’s lives that the search causes psychological damage.
I think a lot of people simply don't know what to do with themselves when they don't have a job.
There are many psychological needs that jobs often provide for you that you have to sort out yourself when you don't have traditional employement. This is a problem you face through unemployement, but also self-employment and early retirement.
At least in part, it's not so much not having a job as not having daily structure, not having a social context, and lacking a sense of belonging. Lacking these factors will absolutely ruin your mental well-being.
These aren't things that are impossible to find when unemployed (or otherwise not working), but if you've spent most of your life being told what to do, first in school and then at work, you've got some figuring out to do.
That's a little out of touch.
Most people don't have the financial resources to be out of work for a month or two, much less indefinitely. For most people it has nothing to do with the factors you listed.
I've been laid off twice in the past and each time I was fortunate to have enough savings to take several months off of work to relax and unwind. I'd quite happily do it forever if I could afford it. I loved being able to set my own routine, tell myself what to do, and find my own social context and sense of belonging while doing activities that I enjoyed, usually having nothing to do with work, like biking, skiing, creating open source projects, etc.
But watching your bank accounts slowly tick downwards is incredibly stressful, even when you have a long runway, and each time I ended up job hunting sooner than I had planned.
> I think a lot of people simply don't know what to do with themselves when they don't have a job.
I would be perfectly happy without a job. It's the income I'm concerned about.
Agreed. I have can think of about a dozen things I'd love to do if I didn't have a full-time job. Unfortunately, most cost at least some amount of money (not to mention food, a roof over my head, etc.).
As a friend of mine put it, "I don't know if UBI would take people out of the workforce, but it would probably take me out of the workforce."
"I don't know if UBI would take people out of the workforce, but it would probably take me out of the workforce."
A realistic UBI would be $10-15k/year, which means a crappy apartment and/or roommates and no luxuries. There's probably a margin where some people who want to do FIRE would be able to retire slightly earlier, but I can't see many people abandoning median or better paying jobs.
UBI sadly is purely a fantasy. We don't have money even for retirement funding, which shows cracks in every country. And UBI is basically a lifetime pension.
> We don't have money even for retirement funding
We only don't have it because we refuse to collect it. There is enough wealth in the world to end hunger, poverty and allow people to age to death in dignity, but we lack the political will to achieve any of these things.
In countries without sovereign currencies it's more complicated, but in the US money wouldn't even need to be collected (technically it would need to be collected/added as debt, but that's entirely due to the Constitution and not some kind of natural law). The only real considerations needed to spend are whether or not adding more debt is politically viable and whether or not percepetions of and expectations for inflation are manageable. A UBI would be way too big to be able to avoid triggering inflation expectations and opportunism. Ending hunger would be much more manageable as the costs are very low relative to the impact and so it could be more easily hidden from financial doom-speakers.
Nominal wealth is useless if supply of products and services is in decline. The population histogram of pretty much all developed societies has passed the curve where the supply of labor is decreasing so that “wealth” will be competing to buy less and less labor.
US federal government alone spends trillions of dollars on wealth transfers from workers to non workers via Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, along with a few other program. And even that doesn’t guarantee you will be able to see a doctor in a timely manner.
I'm also curious how UBI won't turn into the same convoluted mess that our tax laws have become. I doubt it would stay universal for long.
We have the money, it's just flowing into making the top 5% comfortable and the top 0.0005% really comfortable.
Real estate in particular (but there are others) is a bottomless pit that society dumps money into, and speculators scoop money out of.
I don't have a job right now. I've been applying about 100 places a month. I just graduated with a phd in a quantitative field and have all the skills of an ml data scientist + my own domain expertise. And, it sucks. I am so broke. I have no money in my bank account now, maybe $7. Family helps me with rent but until then I can't bear to ask them for more money. I've been waiting on unemployment claims to process for a month now, even then the projection is around $150 a week out of that based on my former teaching income. I generally eat 1-2 meals a day these days. Some meals are things like a pile of peanuts or toast with butter. I go to bed hungry many nights. I haven't engaged in any of my hobbies since my teaching contract ended, hiking takes too much time and makes me too hungry and I can't afford to golf right now. Trying to fix my bike so I can start doing postmates with it and bring in some money to not be so dependent on other people while I am in this limbo during the job hunt. I don't have any health insurance right now. Haven't been able to see my therapist due to out of pocket costs. Routine panic attacks and anxiety. Three credit cards maxed out. Falling behind on other bills. Yeah, I'm in bad shape. Hoping things turn around for me soon. The silver lining is the jobs I'm qualified for would pay me at least 10k a month if I manage to land one. Four months of that I'll have all my debt paid off and be out of this hole.
>I think a lot of people simply don't know what to do with themselves when they don't have a job.
Partly true. But today there is no way to live off the land either, as people used to in the past by raising cattle and pigs. Either it's illegal or you owe the govt taxes.
What are you talking about? That's not the issue for most people. For most people the issue is that if you don't have a job for long enough, the government will send people to throw you out on the streets to suffer and die.
I have tried various forms of non-work (including unemployment while unqualified for government aid), and the by far most mentally devastating thing I've done was to take an extended sabbatical where I really just did nothing but sit on my ass, play video games, watch netflix, and scroll social media for 8 months. Took me years to get my brain sorted again.
This was covid for many people. And many people have not recovered and many employers are still trying to get people back to work.
It's tough to watch the change when not too long ago a software developer with decent skills could literally submit 5 resumes and end up with 3 good offers.
I'm not sure, but that's still happening. At least it happened to me this year. I consider myself a decent developer (in every job I have landed, I was always considered the "best" in the team after not much time in the job). I'm not faang-silicon-valley level, though. I haven't written a compiler or an OS, or contributed to the linux kernel. I have read all the popular tech books out there, I do more or less know what companies (and interviewers) want to hear, and I'm easy to work with.
I'm in western europe. I think the situation in the US is way different, though. Also, for juniors (or people with less than 8-10 years of experience) is much harder, that's true.
The only way for anybody to have any good jobs at all is for millions to have none, and/or have nothing resembling formerly respectable pay.
And it's got to last years or there will be no recovery for shareholders from what they've already suffered with a stagnant economy.
In the 1970's it ended up 10x this bad or worse, in most technical fields at the time as well as non-tech.
There was nothing else that could be done except recognize it was a crap shoot.
There will be plenty of millions who do not lose their jobs, some will not even lose much momentum. There will be nowhere else for the "new normal" to coalesce around, after nothing else resembles the old normal for so long.
As before, only the relatively unscathed will write the economic history of these years, and many less-fortunate millions are slated to be forgotten.
The only other alternative is for everybody to take a steep pay cut, and all upwardly-mobile climbers to halt all momentum. What are the odds that could happen this time?
And that still wouldn't allow hiring as many early-career professionals as there will be available for quite some time to come.
Don't worry, employment is not where all the negative outcomes will affect future generations . . .
In the recent UAP hearing, whistleblower Borland talked about how financial ruin is the real fear holding whistleblowers back:
> Are you scared for your safety?
> … I am not scared for my physical safety in the sense of an agency or company coming to kill me, but I have no job. My career has been tarnished. I'm unemployed. Living off of unemployment for the next three, four weeks until that's gone. So it's a complicated question.
https://www.rev.com/transcripts/house-uap-whistleblower-hear...
There is something fundamentally broken about this entire user journey and industry. There are lots of jobs to fill. But hiring managers don't find people reading through resumes submitted in a form. People don't get jobs by submitting resumes into a form.
The opportunities happen from talking on the phone, meeting someone for coffee. I feel like this entire resume submission industry should just be deleted.
3 out of 3 jobs that I've had after college have been from submitting resumes into a form... It's not perfect but it can work
agreed. And guess what? I was able to get a job without a network, right out of college in 2015!
My last search was in late 2022 and I got a job with my (great) employer via an online form as well.
It's just an abstracted and bureaucratic repackaging of the difficulty with searching for prey and forage during a succession of harsh seasons that some of our unluckier ancestors experienced, such as those who lived at the time of the Pleistocene Toba eruption.
To the brainstem, employment is the process of hunting for food. No employment means there's no hunting going on.
It's less the employment and more the eating and shelter that the employment provides.
Life used to be even worse than this, though.
I know it's going to be deeply unpopular -- it always is -- but I never understood how reasonable people don't find bringing children into this world to be an act of abject cruelty.
My kids are happy, thriving and optimistic about the future. For me, they bring more joy than I thought existed. Having kids is the best thing that happened to me ever and pretty they’re glad I did too. What world are you talking about?
Because otherwise all the reasonable people get replaced with unreasonable people.
Some say this has already happened...
You might like Ajit Varki's 2013 book which is entirely devoted to using evolutionary biology in answering that question.
I mean, if it's so cruel, then why wouldn't you just commit suicide?
The reason why it's not cruel (IMO) is that there's hope for a better future, if you don't have kids, you will never be able to know. That's choosing to just not play the game, total darkness. There isn't an alternative universe to choose from.
> then why wouldn't you just commit suicide?
I'm trying not to upset the people around me.
Please, and I say this with love, seek psychological help. If that's the only thing from stopping you, you need to talk to someone.
Agreed, but I would say talking to someone isn't a magical fix here.
OP, I would be interested in knowing if that's the case, why are you posting here on HN, getting up in the morning, doing the things you do etc?
Are you depressed (if so) in a physiological or psychological kind of way (because of something external?)
I will say I am not doing too well, but still, if I look at things objectively right now, I'd still rather wait and see what happens in this world rather than choosing nothingness. My rock bottom is someone's heaven
This is good advice, but needs to be bookended with through research about your rights, and the consequences of discussing this with a medical professional, and all the various ways in which you can be fucked over.
Because there are some incredibly serious consequences to it.
>The reason why it's not cruel (IMO) is that there's hope for a better future,
This part is correct.
>if you don't have kids, you will never be able to know.
This part is incorrect from _my_ point of view. Most people believe that they somehow live on through one's kids. I don't.
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I started working on shipping a game to Steam after I realized how broken the market was. I realize this might sound even more stressful than a job search for something like a backend role, but I feel like I have a better chance than average based upon cattle-like, low-effort trends in the space and my willingness to endure certain kinds of suffering that most indie game developers aren't even aware of.
Worst case scenario, this provides something interesting to talk about in subsequent job interviews. You can often delete large portions of a resume when you have a fully published product live on a platform like Steam, even if it's very mediocre and selling like trash.
In any reality, this is way better than working in the domain of boring bullshit banking and suffering the miserable personalities that inhabit the space. I feel like I might cross the "never going back" threshold with that entire industry within the next few months. If I reframe this, it is really stressful but it's also quite liberating. If I hadn't walked away from that job last year, I would have had zero time to think about these alternative paths.
Even if the game doesn’t take off, just having a shipped product under your belt is a signal. It shows follow-through, creativity, and self-direction
Last time I was unemployed for an extended period I thought I would put my skills to good use by hunting for bugs and contributing fixes to open source projects.
Only to mostly be ignored, bugs closed as WONTFIX, or finding out many open source developers aren't really interested in fixing bugs, rather some self-aggrandizing labor of love.
That's when I learned to stop working for free.
I'm sorry you had that experience, I can certainly empathize.
Open source isn't working for free, it's working for connections instead of money. I find this way of thinking about it useful: my first order goal is not to fix a bug in the project, it is to do a favor for the human being(s) behind it.
If you're really contributing and aren't getting the reward, by all means, walk away and hack on something else. But it's also important to have some humility, and recognize that most of the time you don't get that reward, it is because you simply aren't being helpful.
The hard truth is that nobody is going to help you figure out how to be useful. They're just going to say no.
If you don't like how an open-source project is run then you can fork it, or start your own competing project from scratch. That's the beauty of open source.
We were looking to employ someone with experience in server experience in the field of High Performance Computing. We got a resume for a bartender with server experience. I so wanted to interview them.
Also, the number of junk resumes, where I take a resume block and post it into a search engine and it comes back with an exact match of the text. I write up a caustic response as to why not to hire the person… and they still slipped in!
Sometimes you just need to look locally. Chances are there are positions available close enough to your home that its worth the following effort. I have personally walked into places I was interested in working at and asked for an engineering manager. About 50% of the time, a manager comes out to meet me. I show interest, they show interest (generally, and even if they are not hiring). This has lead to much improved chances of getting an interview over just filling an application or email through a network. People like to see and get a feel for the people they might end up hiring. Face to face puts you ahead of the pack. This technique is critically underutilized. Obviously, if your only interested in remote positions, this won't work very well. If the org is big enough, you can try to locate a nearby satellite branch or office to find a person who can tap you in.
> I have personally walked into places I was interested in working at and asked for an engineering manager. About 50% of the time, a manager comes out to meet me.
This is surprising to me. Unless you last tried this long enough ago that the manager said, "I like the cut of your jib, young man, you've got grit" in a transatlantic accent.
"Just walk up to the president of Google and give him a firm handshake! That's how I got my mail room job in 1948!"
Is this in America? I can’t imagine walking anywhere, nor being able to get past security, if indeed there is even a human manning the gates.
Reminds me of Netflix in Hollywood. Can't get inside the gate outside without a notarized electronic certificate prepared beforehand. There is no front door, only a security post at the parking garage entrance.
I'm genuinely thinking it may be time to batten down the hatches and stay put for a year or three. As genZ would say the vibes feel off
I met many programmers during the boom years of software that straight out refused to develop any type of soft or managerial skills. Forget that, they even refused to maintain good relationships with decision makers (and I did this too, but only once in my carrier), left jobs in bad ways, focused on chasing salary increases every 6 months.
And here is the problem. If you have been chasing "easy" salary increases, working only on the comfortable stuff like developing tech skills, you should have seen this coming. It's very, very, very hard to maintain sharp coding skills decade after decade. Even if the job market was good, the reality is that you will eventually end up with a set of tech skills that a kid 20 years younger than you, with no family and so being able to live on lower salary, probably has too.
> you will eventually end up with a set of tech skills that a kid 20 years younger than you, with no family and so being able to live on lower salary, probably has too.
I was this young hotshot 20 years ago. In hindsight, the skills I had at the time were commodity or even irrelevant compared to the wisdom, life experience, and maturity that took me 20 years to develop and determine how effective I am now. You can't fake or rush those 20 years. (Even though the me of 15 or even 10 years ago wouldn't believe that statement.)
So I agree, although it wasn't really managerial skills that became important for me. It feels more intangible. I got sort of lucky that I didn't have to transition into management as I got older.
But that's not to say that many workplaces won't value the young hotshot anyway. I'm retired but if I was job searching I wouldn't really consider myself in competition with them, I'm not looking for the positions that can be done as effectively by a 28 year old. That's not a matter of job title or seniority, it's matter of finding people and positions that value or need the more subtle strengths that I find most valuable and important and interesting about myself.
> It's very, very, very hard to maintain sharp coding skills decade after decade.
I am at the end of the third decade, soon entering the 4th. I find it easier with the time. This is because with the experience, I can directly zero on the fundamentals of the new technology popping up and quickly see if this is just marketing or more a breakthrough.
Also, we have less diversity now, every new tech getting momentum is quickly defacto standardizing. Look at the way we run LLMs now, tons of models, 5 lines of Python, within 2 years, everything kind of standardized. You can now quickly pick up the subject (ironically, the LLM will help you there) and run with it.
It is way harder for young people, because of this FOMO, they try everything and nothing, they copy/paste what "God" GPT told them and have no understanding of how things are working in the background. For them to learn "through the stack", without experience, with the new big thing coming out every week but without the ability to judge, it is very hard. I am happy that my first website was static and cgi-bin was still a thing, happy that I learnt how to get my Fortran code to run fast on an multi-core system (yes, Sun stuff), that I was able to build relatively slowly my experience.
>I met many programmers during the boom years of software that straight out refused to develop any type of soft or managerial skills. [If you’ve been] working only on the comfortable stuff like developing tech skills, you should have seen this coming. It's very, very, very hard to maintain sharp coding skills decade after decade.
It’s funny you say this. I’ve observed the opposite: even basic coding skills can atrophy extremely quickly in previously sharp developers who quit coding to go onto a management track. The devs who never quit coding are the ones who stay sharp into old age; the ones who have problems getting hired in their 50s are the managers who quit coding in their 30s, worked the same middle-management position for 15+ years, and as a result have a skill/knowledge set that’s 15+ years out of date and can't answer FizzBuzz-level questions in first-round pulse-check interviews.
My experience has been just the opposite. While I developed solid technical skills, my focus was on developing soft skills. However, all the management jobs I've seen hire based on programming rather than management skills.
The pool of young kids that can challenge the technical ability of someone with 20 years more experience is small enough that I don't mind competing with them for employment.
That’s why AI is dominated by a bunch of 40 year old gen Xers.
Oh wait, it’s not!
Zuckerberg just gave a 25 year old promising AI researcher a 300 million offer that the researcher said “No” to.
He didn’t give that to yann lecun, or yoshua bengio, or Hinton. He did it to a kid.
When I go to NeurIPS, it’s mostly grad students in their 20s who are the first authors. The professors are almost always the last authors.
20 something kids are running circles around boomers today.
I don't know what this is suppose to say outside of big tech needing a massive amount of regulations and taxations to reign them in.
> the reality is that you will eventually end up with a set of tech skills that a kid 20 years younger than you, with no family and so being able to live on lower salary, probably has too
I agree.
But if they only solution is to go into management, how is the career not a pyramid scheme? For each former engineer to go into management, 5 more must take his original place. That’s clearly unsustainable.
>I met many programmers during the boom years of software that straight out refused to develop any type of soft or managerial skills.
Let me stop you right there. Not everyone can be a manager, mathematically speaking, especially in a downturn.
>Even if the job market was good, the reality is that you will eventually end up with a set of tech skills that a kid 20 years younger than you, with no family and so being able to live on lower salary, probably has too.
You say this as if a kid with no family has the same skills as a person 20 years older. This is not the case. Generally old workers have seen a lot more and make wiser use of their time, on top of having superior skills.
A kid twenty years younger than me is in their early twenties and they would have to be some kind of Wunderkind to have spent decades learning operating systems, networking, programming languages, business and law to the degree I have.
When I'm sixty I'll have transitioned from software on commodity hardware and clusters to electronic things but I expect people in their forties to still come to me for advice.
> It's very, very, very hard to maintain sharp coding skills decade after decade.
This is straight up agism and should be banned. It's like saying black people can't code as well as white people.
Carmack and Torvalds would disagree with you.
Would you say, broadly, concepts you disagree with or find uncomfortable should be banned? Do you think that's sufficient, or should they be criminalized as well?
False information targeting a group should be banned in my opinion.
Or just counter bad ideas with good ideas and let the up/down votes take care of the rest.
Thats not how it works.
If I call you an idiot I will get banned.
It's not up to you to prove you're not actually an idiot no matter if its true or not.
Relax. Opinions aren't that big of a deal.
This isn't twitter. You don't need to demand a ban against the first bruise to your ego.
Wrong comparison, black vs white is racism, ageism is real
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A colleague, who is very accomplished in tech industry (but not rich, for good reasons), said he would be in town, and asked to meet.
He strangely didn't say why (not even "to catch up"), so I thought it was probably that he had a new startup or executive role, and he was going to pitch recruiting me again.
But immediately after sitting down in the cafe, he said he was looking for work, and asked for my advice.
I hope I didn't laugh. Since I was in a similar boat, after a startup got disrupted. I wasn't seeing hardly any good job opportunities, so I wasn't feeling like someone who should be asked for advice on job-hunting, except as a cautionary tale.
Quickly moving forward from there, we had a good talk, exchanging thoughts and ideas, but neither of us had direct opportunities to give.
What's really dumb is that the world has capable people who spend huge amounts of time and downtime, simply getting permission to apply their hard-earned valuable skillsets.
It's grossly inefficient and unpleasant. We know some of the reasons, but it's still dumb.
> simply getting permission to apply their hard-earned valuable skillets
I dont think its this. I think its just brutally hard to earn a return on investment right now. For whatever reason, innovation has disappeared from the market. There's a lot of things changing with generative AI right now but very few actually valuable ideas have come out.
The real challenge today is finding problems to solve that people will pay money for.
[self promotion alert] the "you are not alone" point really resonated with me. When I lost my job, I was alone, helpless and not sure what the next steps were. This is why I tried to create a community of people willing to support and be a listening ear for people going through job loss and this tough job market. It's at layoff.supprt. honestly I have not been supporting it for a while but of you find this helpful and would like more features then do let me know!
I think the benefit of the “weird path” need not be monetary but instead a way to stay afloat of the burnout and find motivation to keep going. While I agree with many things in the article, I found in my experience that these feelings are not responsive to rational arguments, and rest doesn’t help after 6+ months when recruiters’ first questions to you are “what have you been doing since your last position?” That’s why I think the “weird” route can be a good way to answer by keeping up with new projects, etc.
Worth to mention is do reach to your friends and network telling them you were let go of / looking for a job. There's no shame in that, and in fact, it can help a lot.
Another small points: reduce your expenses. Basically plan for the worst in terms of budgeting. Widen your search space. There are other younger markets in global south you can also approach.
Theres this expression i couldn't exactly translate to English. It goes along the lines of loosen up your body (literal translation), but it's more about yielding to the flow and less about physically doing so.
> OR maybe you have what experts call saying nothing while typing many things (SNWTMT) High and low you search for the words but lo and behold you're served nothing from the highest plateaus of the your top mind
Throw into the mix any immigration concerns and you have a perfect cocktail for stress :)
Something seems really off about this system. At least in tech, I see a lot of open recs and hiring. Im even seeing some teams struggle to fill open recs. It should be possible to build a system that matches workers to jobs without going through this dumb and stressful process.
Really appreciated the honesty around rest, not as laziness or avoidance, but as an actual, necessary part of healing from burnout. Feels like we don't talk enough about that
I think more often people cast the widest net and then filter what comes back based on “is this better than what I have”.
I’m not sure that the process the author describes is all that common in practice even if it is eminently sensible.
I've been working in a non-tech role the past couple years hoping things would improve. Reading stuff like this, doesn't seem to be happening and makes it difficult to plan long term (but I haven't been actively applying).
So for an (employed) developer like me, who is dreading the next job search, what's a "hot" profession I could train myself on so my experience in the job market over the next 15 years could be like it was in the salad days of 1996-2022?
(I'm making a pass at "learning AI" but don't feel 100% certain that demand for that will be sustainable at a high level over the next decade ...)
Well, I'm currently having a hard time finding a good electrician, and the ones who I have employed in the past earn pretty generous hourly rates.
(I say this half-joking, but also I know a DBA who retrained as an electrician and was happier than ever. It's the fact he retired - early - which has put me in my current predicament.)
Jobs are aggregated into gigantic boards like Indeed and LinkedIn, and the market is national or international. You can choose among thousands of companies, but you're also just one potential applicant among millions. The cost of applying tends to zero -> number of applications increases. The only way to succeed is by sending out an absurd number of CVs. Numbers that would have seemed inconceivable a generation ago before everything moved online and globalized. It's normal to send out hundreds or thousands before getting hired.
Economists look at this and see only an improvement in market efficiency, but they're ignoring the emotional toll. Reject, reject, reject, reject, drip drip drip every day like water torture. It's the same thing on dating apps. No wonder people give up.
That’s before getting into the jobs that are functionally not real, even if the employer in question believes they are honestly looking.
Seeing bog standard senior engineer positions still advertising for the places that ghosted me 5 months ago means the job posting is fake for one of the n-teen reasons companies paste fake postings or the company has gotten unreasonably picky with how much labor is on the market
To your point: You could make a fake company with a fake job posting in probably 15 minutes, and use it to easily waste hundreds of hours of time in people's lives.
Edit: Maybe it could be used to start some sort of unemployed software engineer fight club?
This feels like the dating market right now too.
And the analogue of the exceptionally good-looking STD super-spreaders would be... the resume-driven-development self-proclaimed "10x devs" who job-hop every 6 months, leaving a wake of disasters?
Statistically the majority of STDs spread by sexual activity are spread by gay men.
For purposes of the analogy, I was referring to the familiar meme/belief about how interest is distributed in straight dating.
In hindsight and in the future, I would phrase the point differently.
Dating is unbelievably easy in some ways though. I'd argue the problem with dating today is that people don't do the hard things and instead look for love on apps and other bad places.
Dating is just a numbers game. Roughly speaking it's about maximising interactions with potential partners and taking a shot in as many of these interactions which go positively as possible.
You can game dating in your favour with a bit of strategy. Unfortunately job searches are much harder to game since you can exhaust the number of active positions for your preferred role quite rapidly. The only advice I can give on job searches is to keep your skillset as broad as possible. Specialising is good if when you find work you want to be paid well. Being well-rounded is good if you want to find work as easily as possible.
I honestly don't know what I would do if I was fresh out of school today or over 40.
That said, grinding through middling startup jobs also sucks.
The ability to get vc attention seems incredibly cliquey - not a game I really want to play again. On top of just wanting a normal / decent salary as a founder.
What nonsense. Does he really think his friends are sharing the full extent of their difficulties? There is an exquisite feeling of shame, guilt, fear, and anger that goes with being jobless for the first time and making zero progress with the job search. When your savings is gone, when your credit cards are maxed and in collections, when you're selling your stuff to pay for food and electricity, when you're about to be evicted (and have no idea what to do with your stuff because you can't afford storage) - and you have to keep trying. Keep a smile on your face, act confident and happy because no-one wants to hire you if you're a drag. You revise your resume, you apply to tangential jobs - but you don't get any response, no interviews and no offers. The one you do get is a disinterested indian guy at a bank who is clearly not even hiring right now.
Then you think, oh well I can find some sort of job, right? Even if it's a service job. Wrong. They won't hire you with your resume. I applied to Trader Joes and was ghosted. The only people who'll 'hire' me are day labor places that pay $13/hour for digging ditches - you just have to show up at 4:45am and hope you get called on. Then there is also substitute teaching, $109/day and you have to shell out the $85 for a background check on yourself to even get started.
Long before all this starts you cancel everything that can be cancelled. You might keep internet thinking it is necessary to find work and work remotely, but eventually that goes. You even let your car insurance expire, playing the odds. You sell everything you can. You keep looking. You go through periods of terror and sanguine acceptance. No-one really knows what you're going through - the people you do tell don't know how to process it, or what it really means, and some of them get offended that you'd burden them with this when more important things are happening in the world, like Gaza or Trump.
There is something perverse about starving in the middle of such wealth. When you have always been one of the smartest people in the room, you have a ton of real-world software engineering experience and have built real systems that service millions of people, and you are discarded like you are nothing for apparently no reason. You wonder if it's you, but you hear growing rumbles of it happening to others. Honestly, I hope its just me because if this happens to us in any great numbers you WILL start knowing people who couldn't get back on their feet. I find it easy to imagine the two kinds of reactions: he must have had some problem to not get a job, or if only he had reached out I could have helped! Both useless, both avoid responsibility for your "friend" in need.
This is very well said. It's horrifying, but very well said and very true. Sometimes the situation is just plain bleak. I have been unemployed for more than a year twice; I've been unemployed or underemployed for about 5 years in total. This despite accomplishing great things while employed and being well-regarded at past jobs. For me, each time the cloud has eventually passed and new work has come along, but that doesn't help until it actually happens.
Great write up.
How many of us are in Phase III right now? The struggle is real.
The worst part of this demoralization caused by the struggle to find a job is that it demoralizes your colleagues whilst putting a lot of pressure on them to 'appear' extra hard-working.
The tech industry has turned into some kind of beauty contest of who appears to be doing the most work. I suspect the reason why it's more about 'appearance' is because deep down, they are demoralized - They are only pretending to be motivated, they are not actually motivated to improve anything. They're motivated only to keep their job. They are laser focused on that goal. The rewards are small, the punishments are big.
It makes the work more competitive and stressful, especially for those who aren't used to keeping up appearances and actually want to get stuff done. You kind of have to play the game.
It feels like the current job crisis is artificial and specifically intended to lower people's salary expectations and increase their work output but I feel like it's mostly backfiring. People are burned out. I was shocked to realize that even immigrants from developing countries who come to my country are feeling demoralized in the tech sector. 10 year ago, they felt they were on a career fast-track, now even they don't really see the light at the end of the tunnel. I've met some of them with master degrees who feel like they walked into a trap by leaving their home countries. They're feeling the high cost of living. The cost of living (and salaries) also went up in their home countries, the remittances aren't what they used to be. Meanwhile, cost of living here is sky-high. Doesn't feel like success anymore, for anyone.
I'm very good at software development and I enjoy coding but even I've had thoughts of changing career to something more essential like plumbing or construction, to stop the feeling of powerlessness and systemic manipulation which seems to be the core of this industry. I need more control over my destiny. I'd like a career where skill determines outcomes with high reliability and doesn't require permission from gatekeepers. Unfortunately, the country I live in is not very good for bootstrapped software developers and raising money is impossible unless you have a certain pedigree.
"It feels like the current job crisis is artificial and specifically intended to lower people's salary expectations and increase their work output"... bingo.
It's awful when billionaire boomers say stuff like "The pie isn't shrinking, anyone can grow the pie." Meanwhile, on the ground, it feels like literal Hunger Games or Squid Game and young people have literally 0 self-esteem or hope left to squeeze out... So the politicians bring in starry-eyed immigrants who at least have 'hope' which can be juiced and help to further suppress wages... All while millennials are called 'snowflakes' for complaining about the situation.
The problem isn't that millennials are unwilling to support previous generations in their retirement, we are... but we are not allowed to because the game we play is a race to the bottom for our own survival, not one about value creation. The system is not letting us be efficient, it's forcing us into bureaucracy and politics; that's where the money is coming from.
From the comments here, now super tough to get a job. Much different when I started, and can draw a lesson:
Started my career as a "physicist" at the NIST in research on the "Lamb dip" in the wavelengths of He-Ne lasers, got into the numerical analysis of ill-conditioned matrices, and, thus, got a career in scientific computing.
For a job, just look in the 'Help Wanted' section of the Washington Post, send a few resume copies, get a few interviews, and get 1-3 offers, all in less than 2 weeks. No problem.
The DC area was awash in organizations trying to get into computing and were desperate for anyone who could type in code and have it run.
A guess is that there was a larger plan: Some Big Shots in US National Security were really big on getting the DC area really moving on computing so pumped in big bucks with the theme, "If they look like they have aptitude and interest, then make them an offer they won't refuse and have them learn on the job." I.e., the Big Shots tweaked the supply and demand curves -- considering the money they were spending on military hardware, getting young guys into computing was small potatoes with a big gain.
Soooo, from the posts here, now we are at the other extreme: Way too many people and way too few jobs.
Part of the problem is the concept "geographical barrier to entry". E.g., there around DC, the Big Shots wanted to hire people already in and around the local area of DC, Northern Virginia, and Maryland and, thus, the employees had for competition a "geographical barrier to entry" -- no one outside that local area would compete.
So, I got a good career going, Camaro with 396" engine, the best restaurants, fancy food cooking hobby, violin practice on a decently good, new violin, a sack full of Nikon camera equipment, self-study in math, furniture, clothes, wife in grad school, in computing with also, crucially, some math, Fourier theory, numerical analysis, Navier-Stokes equations, etc. With that success, to improve that career, got an applied math Ph.D. -- ruined my career, never recovered. My brother warned me, "Each year in your Ph.D. program will leave you 1 year behind in your career" -- CORRECT.
Now, with the Internet, often no barriers to entry.
Curiously, people mowing grass, removing trees, installing roofs, repairing driveways, installing HVAC, electricians, plumbers, painters, real estate agents, insurance agents, ..., do have a small geographical barrier to entry. E.g., in my neighborhood, a guy mowing grass has two, nice, new 4-door pickup trucks with some nice trailers for the equipment. They have useful tools, e.g., pickup trucks, riding mowers, leaf blowers, wrenches, saws, volt/amp meters, etc. and are good at using them.
Now there are computers, useful tools, with people who know how to use them. Sooo, find some uses with some barriers to entry.
Uh, can't not notice, that looks like it's time to move to the other side of the table, be an employer instead of an employee.
I have no idea why governments refuse to deal with matchmaking the unemployed and employers. It would be at least as productive as highways, but a hell of a lot cheaper.
Employers do not want this, and they have a very big say in the government.
From someone in a country where the government does get involved: The entire system is overrun with bad actors and blatent abuse.
All US states I have lived in have government employees that organize job fairs and connect unemployed people with businesses that need employees.
https://www.worksourcewa.com/
https://edd.ca.gov/en/jobs_and_training/Job_Seeker_Informati...
https://www.worksourceoregon.org/jobseekers
https://dol.ny.gov/career-centers
https://www.nj.gov/labor/career-services/
Employers don't want to have this dictated to them
This is genuinely well written. Anyone know who Jeff Wofford is?
His about page: https://www.jeffwofford.com/?page_id=464
His story here https://www.jeffwofford.com/wp/?p=2227 probably tells you a lot about him.
Disclaimer: I've been navigating the job market for almost a year now, and have practically given up.
An acquaintance of mine—he was the owner's/CEO's deputy at a place I worked—now runs a team-coaching-turned-recruitment business. I saw a question from him on social media the other day, something along the lines of: "Some businesses in the industry are receiving over 5,000 applications for advertised roles. How do you effectively screen that many applications?" I didn’t respond, of course—I have neither credentials nor experience, nor any real relationship with this guy—but I formed an opinion nonetheless.
My intuition was simply: you don’t. If your candidate pool’s fitness function is normally distributed, you’d likely get approximately the same quality of candidates from a randomly selected 50 out of 5,000. The distribution will be practically the same, and the maximum will be indistinguishable from the true maximum in any practical sense. As I recently explored—prompted by some statistical curiosity—this, of course, is modulated by the mean and standard deviation of the distribution. A higher standard deviation calls for a larger subset, while a higher mean dramatically shrinks the number needed to screen.
But I also think nobody really knows their "true" fitness function, much less its distribution across the applicant pool—simply because businesses have no means or resources to actually measure or research this aspect. That doesn’t stop them from pretending they do.
I also felt the urge to respond with some snark: maybe they don’t really understand their own business, at least the placement/recruitment aspect of it. If they’re recruiting mid-echelon personnel—software devs, BAs, testers, other office roles—it makes sense to publish an ad and gather applications. But it doesn’t make sense to expect that pool to include extraordinary candidates from a fitness perspective. Sure, we’re all extraordinary in some sense, but in roles like these, businesses are simply not in a position to materially benefit from that extraordinarity. Nor are they able to detect it during hiring—and I don’t even mean that as snark; it’s just the nature of things.
In a natural distribution, the second-best candidate is not materially better than the top-best, and the third is almost like the second, and so on. Businesses that set their hiring threshold—whether explicitly calculated or intuition-based—too high will simply go out of business, because in this echelon you need to rely on mass hiring. Relatively speaking, of course, but you still need to be able to fill multiple positions with readily available candidates.
So, the question posed by my ex-coworker doesn’t make sense. But as I see it, it doesn’t make sense even for hiring in the top echelon—C-suites and so-called "rock stars." The strategy for top-echelon hiring is well established. It’s widely used in business, show business, and sports alike, where "fitness" follows a power-law distribution. It’s called "scouting" or "headhunting". You don’t throw a job ad over the fence and wait for a torrent of applications. You meticulously maintain a rolodex of potential candidates, watch their careers, court and dine them, and try to snatch them when they’re poised to make a move—or even just before it becomes obvious.
You don’t wait for them to apply to you—you apply to them. You don’t ask "Why do you want to work for our company?"—you shower them with perks and sign-on bonuses if they show even a hint of hesitation. The "agents" in this echelon work for candidates, often on retainer—not the other way around. It’s a completely different world, where you’re never in a position to screen a pool of 5,000 in hopes of finding an extraordinaire. In that world, hiring the second-best can have a humongous negative impact on company performance compared to hiring the top-best. For better or worse, that’s reality.
So I found my guy’s question quite unsettling—an indicator that yet another "recruiter" doesn’t really understand what they’re recruiting for.
I was able to fish out a useful metaphor from the LLM-generated word soup: "talent brokers vs gatekeepers." Over the last decade, recruitment agencies and internal departments have been universally rebranded as "talent acquisition." That rebranding feels disturbingly phony and hollow. Now I know why. Despite pretending to be "talent brokers"—scouting for talent—the reality hasn’t changed. They’re still the same old "gatekeepers", applying selectivity to boatloads of "talent" that come to them.
As industries and their associated keyword-spaces have grown dramatically—and AI tools have proliferated—such selectivity has become increasingly diluted. In my opinion, it’s now indistinguishable from random picks, yet still cloaked in the illusion of validity. For someone like me, swimming deep in the muck of the mid-echelon and with no ambition whatsoever to strive for oxygen-deprived heights of top echelon, it’s deeply disturbing.
Hate to say the obvious, but it's all about supply and demand. The field I was working in 30 years ago was "hot" and the hourly wage has dropped at least 5x since then.
Sure, in the last 20 years I did "development" work which was related but more advanced (24 hours a day stuff, it's always in your head) - but once those efforts were complete, so were the jobs.
My field was laboratory science and I still take solace in the fact that 200 years ago, only the rich (or minimally subsidized) ever got a chance to to touch this stuff. But solace doesn't pay the bills.
Maybe take on volunteer work? Once you get involved, it leads to stories and sharing and new perspectives. I've done a few thousand hours over the past 15 years. It feels good. You chose to do it. You see results and have new ideas. Maybe even a new business.
>Hate to say the obvious, but it's all about supply and demand.
Presumably the computer science departments will continue to churn out more supply for a while yet.
This only works if you had a good job and a decent amount of savings and no family to support.
or a dual income household. My wife and I have taken turns on who has the jobs with the benefits. Maybe you're right, maybe we're an exception. But I know educated guys around here whose wives work, and stay home with the kids, run volunteer .org in their spare time.
Right that works too. But only if a single income is high enough to keep the boat afloat for a while.
Yes but the flip side, is that we lived in Indiana for a while. Very cheap living there. So, keep your expenses low, with no debt. Freedom.
Very key point.
TLDR:
No Debt
Lots of savings
Single-income able to support family
WIN!
You forgot “low COL”
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There are no jobs. I'm being stalked and fucked with in San Francisco. Constantly. Everyone here is insane and most people are sick. Life is pointless. I'm just waking up and doing something and then going to sleep in a shelter again.
They give me sick to their kids as some sort of sick joke and wait for me to die. I had someone put fentanyl in the coffee they served at de haro church while I was lugging fifty pound bags of potatoes to give to the poor. Cool way to fuck up someone's back. Because they're insane and murderous. It's like that shit everywhere unless you have money and can hire private security or a group of you and your friends have a secret way to poison people.
I've asked construction workers if I can do shift labor for cash and they always say no. Fucking bonkers. I hurt all over more or less all of the time. There are people that have had their entire bodies melt from disease from being exposed to weaponized sick here.
There's absolutely no point in giving a shit about anything anymore. I'm just waiting to die truth be told.
@phoenixhaber, you're in a very dark place, no doubt about it, and it sounds like you've been there a long time. I've been in that dark place and I feel for you. Let me just assure you that dark times do give way, eventually, to light. If you need a rational basis for that claim, think of it as regression toward the mean: extremes, good or bad, move toward the non-extreme. Things will get better.
In the meantime, your task is to separate from the darkness and let it be on the outside, not the inside. It's bad enough when it's on the outside: that is, in the world around you or even in your own body. When it's on the inside—not just the body but the mind—then it destroys. Push the darkness out of the mind and into the outside world. That's pretty abstract advice but it's the best I know, and if it makes sense to you, I hope it helps.
No offense, but maybe they're narcan-ing you because you because you're nodding out in public?
I am not doubting you have been fucked with -- I once got into a 2v1 brawl on the Mission and 16th BART that only ended because I sent one flying into a pillar and told the other if he kept coming, he was going onto the fucking tracks.These guys kept going over to a homeless guy who was just... sitting there... trying to get a rise, hoping for an excuse to "defend" themselves. And when I told them to quit being bullies, they tried to jump me.
So trust me, I believe you, and I get that trauma can have an impact on your life.
But if you are using narcotics, it will impact your search.
If you want help getting clean, I could send some resources to the email on your profile -- on the technical side you sound like a better coder than me and if you had that part locked down I suspect you'd quickly find work.
Where did he say he was getting "narcan'd" ? I only saw something about his coffee getting spiked with fentanyl, which would be the opposite of getting narcan'd.
I'll be honest though, I had a lot of difficulty parsing that and some chunks of it are beyond my reading comprehension abilities.
I think it got edited? Or maybe my mind ran with the "poisoned" comment because there were reports of people involuntarily narcaning people in FiDi recently.
Anyways, his writing style reminds me more of people I knew with addiction issues than something like schizophrenia (which can make folks come off paranoid).
How do you reconcile your experience with the common narrative that there is a huge shortage of tech workers in the US and, hence, the H1B/H4 programs?
That narrative is outdated. There is clearly not a shortage right now. Any decent job on LinkedIn shows 100's of applicants within a couple of days.
Is there actually a huge shortage of tech workers in the US?
I don't think there's actually a shortage of tech workers in the US. I think there is probably a shortage of tech workers in the US that are willing to work for the wages that companies want to pay.
Experienced tech workers? Yeah.
One of the "problems" companies have is that it's hard to find skilled workers in the US with good experience who are not demanding SF wages. And recent graduates aren't that useful so while they might technically be "tech workers" in the sense they would like to fill open roles, companies don't really want them.
So for most companies if you want to hire the most experienced and qualified for the role, and do that at a reasonable cost, you'll need to consider the H1B route.
h1b is not "reasonable cost". there is not a shortage of highly experienced tech workers. every big tech is shortchanging USA workers in favor of H1Bs to make a racket. what a joke
How do you reconcile that with developers over 45 finding it impossible to find jobs, are all of them asking for "unreasonable" pay?
I mean, if you are senior, you probably have a family and possibly kids. Even with a part-time RTO position that means more than a three-roommate setup, you need a house or 2b/3b in SF/SEA/NY. That works for industries where you dont need to be in the most expensive cities, but how does it work for tech workers with families?
> How do you reconcile that with developers over 45 finding it impossible to find jobs, are all of them asking for "unreasonable" pay?
What's "reasonable" depends on perspective. Truth is it makes relatively little sense hiring tech workers in the US today. I'm not saying I'm happy about that, but unlike a few decades ago, the majority of tech talent in the world today is overseas, and increasingly in low-labour cost countries like India which previously didn't have the internet access or education to compete.
Given this today a reasonable cost to a business for software development is lower in the same way a reasonable cost for manufacturing is lower because of low-cost manufacturing in places like China.
I'm just pointing out what's happening. For a while now people with an education thought the reason they could find good work and were doing okay relative to uneducated people was because of effort. And while this was somewhat true, it's probably better explained by much lower levels of international labour competition from low-wage countries. It takes skill to be good at manufacturing too, but that skill doesn't protect you from extremely low cost labour which doesn't quite have comparable skills, but can do the job almost just as well.
People should be thinking about this. Economists will argue (perhaps correctly) that allowing the free market to do its think will result in higher GDP growth. But if people are unemployed and struggling to find good work, what's the benefit of that GDP growth? There should be some effort to balance what's reasonable from an employers perspective with what's reasonable for employees.
> One of the "problems" companies have is that it's hard to find skilled workers in the US with good experience who are not demanding SF wages.
Then companies should set up training pipelines outside the San Francisco Bay Area. Simple as.
You’re spreading misinformation. H1B workers are required to pay prevailing wage.
> "You’ve spent several months sending out scores of carefully tailored resumes and cover letters for jobs you know you are fully qualified for and would excel at."
People should not do this. It is causing so much suffering. In my 6 jobs in my career from college internship to startups to Big Tech, I have never gotten a job from sending an application into a site. It's always been through (somehow) tracking down a person to speak to over phone or coffee, and get a referral.
A form is not going to a hire you, a person is. You need to ignore the form and talk to a person.
I wish I could put this on a billboard everywhere. It seems like many people are suffering from thousands of applications, and it makes me sad.
As other posters have said, this only really works if you have a network. Zeroth-order referrals (i.e. they call you) work best, first-order referrals (i.e. you know someone at the company) work decently well, and second-order referrals (you know someone who knows someone to refer you) are a guided shot in the dark.
People who have networks all know this. The issue is that a shocking number of people don't have any network at all. These tend to be the sorts of people who are either actively antisocial at work (the "coworkers aren't your friends" type) or job hop so frequently that they don't spend enough time at any single job to develop any meaningful professional, let alone personal connections.
or you are working for small companies with people who have no (useful) connections. i worked with one for 10 years. not a single referral. a few connections from the university. nothing. they all work in small companies that are not hiring or simply have no pull to provide a meaningful reference.
looking back, the best options i got was from active networking in tech and business communities. actually, all of my jobs and clients come through that. except the most current one, which is from reconnecting to an old client, but there too the initial connection and the reconnection happened through a tech community.
And juniors. I’m in a masters program right now and everyone’s got a network, it just happens to be filled with poor starving grad students instead of FAANG super stars :)
Give it time. Networks are a garden that grow over time, and moreso if you cater to them. Some of those starving grad students will be VPs in 10 years.
That doesn't help them get a job this decade.
Speaking of networks, hey Joe! Clark from Belly. Hope you're doing well!
I job hop frequently, and have a large zeroth-order network because I did good work at each one.
When I am in a hiring role, I am not flipping through memories of good times with former coworkers that I had deep and meaningful time with -- I'm thinking back to who was the verb who got ish done and will make my project a success.
Unless you are a hermit, everyone has a network, even if it's small. Everyone has a few friends, a brother/sister/dad/mom/cousin, a few people in their town they know. All of those people know someone else, and that's your initial pool of job opportunities to look at.
This might not get you into your dream company. But it can get you a next job to grow from.
For one of my jobs I had no contacts in the industry so I emailed someone at the company who went to my school, mentioned we both went there, and could they meet for coffee. I then drove 2 hours to meet him. We discussed what was happening at his company, are there opportunities, and he referred me.
Yeah, it's not exactly that simple.. I worked ~15 years at an EDA company as a SW developer, got laid off in my 50s. I had a couple of people I connected with, but both of them had already retired and moved on by the time that happened.
I moved here (the Valley) because I met my wife online. Reached out to anyone I was vaguely connected to at the time. Got a few "send me your resume", none of them were a good fit.
All the interviews I got (some good, some bad) were either from headhunters, or through LinkedIn applications. In the end, a random, "don't know this company, but they want software people" ad on LinkedIn resulted in the GREAT job I've had for 1.5 years now (about a year after getting laid off) - way better pay, better work-life balance, etc.
So applying online CAN work.
I got my dream job by applying on their website. As a hiring manager, also interviewed many people who got theirs at other companies' websites. Networking is better but website applications used to work alright. This could have changed with AI resumes.
I know this is just anecdotal but just want to say I got my current job just applying to a job from a linkedin email. I admit I was surprised how easily and smoothly it all went actually...
I always got my jobs applying via linkedin. It's true that I usually find the recruiter and send them a message as well saying "hey I applied to X position. let me know if my profile fits". Perhaps this extra message makes the difference? I have around 12 years of experience (5 jobs in total).
I don't really have a good network, since I have worked in different countries.
This might work if you already have a network, but otherwise good luck getting through to people on the phone. HR will answer the generic questions, but tell you to apply online. Cold "calling" people on LinkedIn is a shot in the dark. Some people don't mind you doing it, most will ignore you.
You can start building a network by reaching out to alumni, former colleagues, open-source contributors for projects you're contributing to [1], etc.
Hardly ideal, but it's a start.
[1] And if you're not contributing to an open-source project, please do it, it's a great way to learn stuff, improve your CV, network and of course give back.
I find this kind of advice underspecified. The people struggling the most to find work are juniors: what projects are big enough that the applicant would a) know and care about them and b) get a benefit out of the network but also c) have fruit low enough for a solo junior to reach?
I tried this way-back-when and ended up submitting fixes to projects that were open source but had no real path to accepting patches from people outside the cathedral.
From the top of my head: Firefox (https://codetribute.mozilla.org), LibreOffice, Gnome, ...
If you just graduated college or have no network, you can reach out to alumni and mention that connection. Or, you can ask personal friends/family for contacts (will probably be local companies, which may be a first step job).
Or you can reach out over social media. "Hi there, I follow you on X and am just getting started in the industry. Do you mind if I ask a few research questions?" A friend of mine just used this technique to land a role in an industry where he had no contacts.
If the situation is "good luck getting through to people on the phone", then that probably means this person is not a real friend of yours, they are a stranger, and you shouldn't try. You should be reaching out to people who actually know your name, or you have a mutual friend.
Reaching out to alumni works in some cultures, but in much of the world they will universally ignore you.
> It's always been through (somehow) tracking down a person to speak to over phone or coffee, and get a referral.
Just be careful contacting recruiters directly. I know of at least one F100 that will blacklist you for pestering their recruiters. If you think ai-generated resumes are overwhelming recruiters, you should see their LinkedIn inboxes.
Referrals by hiring managers who I have previously worked with and want to hire me aren’t even getting me a phone screen from their recruiters.
The majority of employment in tech is with large, corporate firms, and unless you are in the executive tier they all have implemented a massive amount of process to prevent bias in hiring which means that even networking has low impact on getting a job, beyond letting you know the positions even exist
Yea, whenever someone says "Just network, bro!" they never actually fully connect the dots between networking and walking into the office on your first day of work:
Step 1: Just have coffee with a hiring manager
Step 2: Hiring manager says go check out job #41102, and submit your resume. Good luck, bro!
Step 3: [???]
Step 4: You've got an interview to ace!
Nobody ever explains the [???]. They just assume that by magic, your online submission rises to the top of the stack of 1,699 other online submissions, avoids all of HR's filters, gets to the right person in the right department on the right team, that person has the authority to pick you out of the pile, and so on... There's a lot still out of your control in this process. It's not just Networking --> Job.
HN has a lot of rich douchebags for which this is the case. Small circle = higher trust.
The rest of us have to figure out how best to rot in a low trust world created by these douchebags.
Ridiculous. So 99% people wait in line for the pizza but you waltz up to the counter and say you know the owner? That's fucked up
Hardly an apt analogy. Hiring is asynchronous, there is no line? Sometimes I go to the bar and if the bartender knows me, they’ll give me a drink on the house. Is that messed up too?
This isn't true and is horrible advice.
Use the paths available to you to get a job. Exhaust them all. If you know someone that works there and THEY track you down, yes this is good advice, great way to get a job.
I've gotten 3/4 jobs by cold applying. 2 at pretty big/famous tech companies. The 1 that wasn't cold applying was through an agency.
> A form is not going to a hire you, a person is.
This is becoming less and less true.
> You need to ignore the form and talk to a person.
Unless you're lucky, this is no longer going to happen. Getting a job is now becoming much more about luck, circumstances, and who you already know, much like getting your first starring role in a movie -- not about your abilities.
No form is going to extend a job offer autonomously. At some point in the chain, there will be a boss, a person, who talks to you and thinks, "I want to work with this person", and decides to make the offer.
So the goal is to figure out how to get in touch with that hiring manager as the first step. Even if the form or HR "rejects" you, this person can step in say, "that's silly, I want to work with them. Send them through"
I think this charade of sending in resumes to forms is causing people so much pain. It feels like rejection and is not moving them closer to a job.
> No form is going to extend a job offer autonomously.
Just wait... some time-pressed startup is going to find a killer LLM prompt that filters in exactly the people they want, and then post something on the benefits of "vibe hiring". Complete with large, well-spaced text, colored with one accent color, and several graphs of hiring spending vs. income or something.
You heard it here first!
That startup is going to fold about two years in unless they're at least Series E or so.
Incompetent hiring will kill you, and hiring people that you and your team don't personally gel with is incompetent hiring.
So I see that as a self-solving problem.
> Getting a job is now becoming much more about luck, circumstances, and who you already know, much like getting your first starring role in a movie -- not about your abilities.
That's not a new thing. It's how it's always been.
> Getting a job is now becoming much more about luck, circumstances, and who you already know, much like getting your first starring role in a movie -- not about your abilities.
Getting a starring role in a movie has a lot to do with abilities, not just luck and who you know.
Many companies are looking for strong mission alignment, because when it's a buyer's job market, why not select someone who has intrinsic motivation for what you are doing? Are you passionate about the problem? That is a lot like auditioning for a starring role: do you understand the character you might be playing? Many jobs - especially desirable ones - use this sort of "mission alignment" as selection criterion.
The thing that's different in software is that because the equipment needed to demonstrate technical skills is so cheap (just a computer) and trust in representations of technical experience is so low, they can test for technical skills in a way that other industries can't.
I don't think that anyone asks a civil engineer to design a bridge or a surgeon to remove an appendix to get a job.
The abilities is the threshold requirement - which many people have - the rest is luck and connections.
You need luck to have a network now?
Kinda, yeah.
My first job in the industry was in a startup that went belly down. Most of us didn't get much opportunity to network.
Thankfully, I happened to contribute to two open-source projects. One of them was a (then) obscure language called Rust and another one was Firefox. Both contributions eventually turned into career-defining moments for which I'm still reaping benefits 15 years later.
Had I contributed to Vlang and Camino instead, my career would probably have been much less satisfying.
Vlang catching strays made my day.
Agreed. It's next to impossible to actually connect with people about non-work topics. Way too many possible landmines, unless you really, REALLY click about a couple of topics.
I've gotten several jobs this way, including the best jobs of my career. It's insufferable the way so many commenters here assume their experience is representative of or applicable to others. It's like if main character syndrome was a web site comments section.
Can’t even tell if this is satire. If so, good one. If not, I have no words.
And of course it's the people that have a different experience than you that are insufferable, not the ones that share yours, right?
That's not anywhere close to my point, it's not their stance I have any issue with. it's their mindset that their own stance is universal:
> People should not do this.
> It is causing so much suffering.
> I have never gotten a job from sending an application into a site.
> A form is not going to a hire you, a person is. You need to ignore the form and talk to a person.
> I wish I could put this on a billboard everywhere.
My experience is opposite to this but I'm not selling it as absolute truth or even giving it as advice at all.