I've been looking for a job that suits me, a meaningful and/or interesting job, in what many call a "hot" market, and I'm at a stage where I wonder if it's raining only on me. Many would say I have unmatchable standards. When in fact, I believe my ask is fairly basic.
For starters, many recruiters/employers seem to get stuck on a keyword in my profile, or lack of a keyword, and want someone to help out with said keyword. It's enough to ask a simple question as "why I get that teams want to redo their tech stack at times, but if they don't specifically ask for it, nor does the product/company have plans to expand/grow, then why create unnecessary work? Hire for boring maintenance. Many are happy to do just that. But more work will not make your people happier. It's just maniac managers creating work for them to manage with tech they don't understand. Sometimes you like the hiring manager (which is important!) and go to the next interview only to find out that the hiring manager is actually about to leave soon, or that the manager is 100% misaligned with the team/product. Sometimes you go through the entire process, get a really good offer, and they ghost you. Sometimes they throw at you some shitty challenge, exactly like a school exam where they test your memory and obedience, but not your abilities. Sometimes they talk so much about fit fit fit, but they don't even bother with a personality or IQ test (which as a former hiring manager, I find very valuable because it allows you to balance the team, not because you see how high/low people score). Sometimes you rephrase your entire pitch to highlight what you want to do next, but nobody reads that, their eyes still fall on stupid keywords. Sometimes they think you're a good match, but they dig and dig only to find something that doesn't fit, and then you catch them red-handed: actually a former employer left and now they hire for a replacement, and they are looking for the exact set of skills. A clone. Because a clone will be so happy to replace the quitter... That's some fine logic right there! Not. Sometimes you get the job and when you start rolling questions and ideas, you get a "talk to the hand" followed by "that's now what you're here for". Why hire a senior person as a poster, if you're not willing to be challenged and listen to different ideas? Nobody is asking you to agree, just play ball with convincing arguments. Too much of an ask, I guess. I have worked and hired at times some of the nicest, most loyal, most engaged people I'll ever know - almost none of them checked all the boxes. I hired for potential. One of them even confessed years later "I'm baffled why did you take me in without a test, knowing that I don't know the tech stack, etc". Because you had mega potential, and you exceeded everyone's expectations in the end! Almost nobody seems to hire for potential these days! Everyone wants to be different, by doing the exact same thing as everyone else, and then complain that they can't find good people. Am I the only one in this dark movie? Am I the only "unlucky" software engineer?
I have limited insight into who you are, which is a post that was likely made in an irritated state and probably is a bit over the top, but various phrases in it are red flags. Having hired and managed for two decades, they sound irritatingly high maintenance.
Questioning why someone uses something is completely valid, for instance, and should never be met with resistance. Questioning in a derogatory or dismissive way (which if you're going to go on about "maniac managers creating work for them to manage with tech they don't understand" seems likely), on the other hand, is going to yield eye rolls and a complete lack of interest in humouring your question. Angling to be "smarter than thou" in a discussion or interview by trying to prove the existing team or group dumb in their choices will never, ever succeed.
We've all been there with the guy who sneeringly questions everything being done. It's incredibly boring.
I'm playing devil's advocate here, and it isn't personal. I'm just going on the limited bit posted.
Almost always asking for "meaningful" jobs. What even is that? I'll challenge the notion and call it "An inability to find meaning in the available work."
Feeling attacked about their profile, but not changing them to accommodate.
Supposedly seniors relying on recruiters and job offers instead of using their network, if they've worked with people in the past, and can't draw on that, I wonder how that is, is it that everybody they worked with are not nice people and don't like them ?
Sense of entitlement, _YOU_ liking the hiring manager? It's your job to get the hiring manager to like you, not the other way around.
Sense of pride, interview went well, got offer, got ghosted ? Well, what did you do to fix it? I'd have walked into office, hardcopy of offer in hand and told the first person I meet: "Hi, I got this offer, I'm glad to accept! Who can I talk to ?"
Not knowing your place: You were supposedly not hired into some leadership position to change the world from day 1, you have opinions, they are based on previous experiences, made elsewhere. Shut up, listen, learn, observe and do your best to do what they ask of you, at least the first half year or more, and then start gently providing input and resistance, show that you can do it their way before trying to get them to do it yours.
You don't sound unlucky, you sound hard to get along with to be rudely honest.
> Sometimes they talk so much about fit fit fit, but they don't even bother with a personality or IQ test (which as a former hiring manager, I find very valuable because it allows you to balance the team, not because you see how high/low people score).
Just for reference, if an employer ever asks me to perform an IQ test I'm definitely walking away.
Have you tried measuring their skulls as well?
In my area (middle eastern United States), once you hit the local salary average for software engineers, opportunities to take the next step up seem extremely rare. There is a never-ending set of jobs for people with 0-3 years of experience at below-average salaries. These aren't interesting at all - mostly legacy software support or quirky data analysis roles.
My last two job interview experiences were unproductive. I interviewed with a local but larger company. Very good experience with 3 of 4 interviewers but the hiring manager gave off negative vibes. I got an offer for 20% less than the minimum salary figure I gave them before starting the interview process. Declined. The other interview process was for a remote-only company. I made it through all their interviews and successfully handled their programming challenges. No offer - I had a friend there who told me I made it further than anybody who didn't get an offer but they were concerned I hadn't been building more complex software at my current job despite my performance during interviews. I was quite bummed about that.
I'm debating just doing leetcode for the next 3-4 months and taking a shot at FAANG. On the one hand, I have great work/life balance and probably job security for the next 10-15 years. But I make a below average salary and have started wondering if I'll regret not experiencing the FAANG interview gauntlet. Ego-driven if I'm honest with myself.
Alternatively, I may work for another 3-5 years and then go teach math and programming in a local middle school. I taught programming as an adjunct at the undergraduate level and mostly enjoyed that. Heck, I could even take a teaching assistant gig in the local school system and consider myself retired. I am a little worried about bureaucracy in that environment though.
Employment implies a power gradient between you and the employer.
The thing that sucks is that income is tied to employment for most of us, and it's OK to express the fact that this sucks.
How do we go beyond this? This is a problem I've found difficult to resolve myself.
For people who are creative, and good at what they do (as you seem to be) it's always going to be a struggle to fit into a structure like that.
Because I am a freelancer, I've worked at a lot of different companies.¹
What I've noticed is that sometimes they love you and praise you, and other times the hate you and blame you. In one situation you are a hero, in another a pain in the ass. Sometimes both even happened in the same company/team.
All the time I'm the exact same person. We all have a mix of personality traits that we bring to our work. Some traits the employer will like, some they won't. But what I've learned is that they all come together. They are a package deal.
So despite the posts below that encourage you to change who you are, I am suggesting you should just be more conscious of the interplay between the qualities you have in your 'bundle' and how to best deploy them in each situation.
I've also learned to take blame and even praise from employers with a grain of salt.² They are just trying to shape your behaviour, and will probably change their opinion of you next month.
So in the end it's a relationship. In some cultures they don't look for soulmates, they just marry a decent person and move on, saying to themselves, most [husbands|wives] are pretty much the same.
I think they are onto something. Find a 'good enough' employer, and stop looking for your 'soulmate job.' Do decent work, then go home. And find some hobbies!
1: Lots of short contracts, by mutual agreement. Also a handful of full time jobs.
2: A quote from the Buddha on this:
Just as solid rock is not shaken by the wind,
Even so the Wise are unmoved by blame or by praise.This describes me exactly. I'm basically a cartoon character with a rain cloud following me. I'm in the US, 10 years experience, a Masters degree, and I don't even make $100k. I've spent years working with obscure tech on the initial promise that the company doesn't outsource or lay off. Now the company is doing both and I basically have to start over. The company has repeatedly violated it's own policies to my detriment, and changed the promotion/pay structure to be less attractive.
You don't have a right to work for certain companies. People hire you to work for them, if they need you. Maybe it isn't about luck, but actually accepting that it is a dreadful process and you need to focus on what is important in order to get that job. If you aren't willing to do those things, no job for you.
It might help if you would take some therapy. I see a lot of emotion on your sentences, like "shitty challenge", "fit fit fit", stupid keywords and so on. It reads mostly as a rant from a frustrated person that can't fit in not because the circumstance doesn't like you, but rather the opposite, you just dislike IT and all the processes involved in recruitment and is not willing to work on getting better and getting through that. Therapy can help you.
What that recruiter wrote you is pretty much what I got from your post. Here is what I would do: pick some of the keywords you heard asked for and research them with genuine interest. Then apply to few jobs you don't even care about and show genuine interest (or give your best shot at this). And just pay attention how they are reacting. You are not going for a job, just a research. It should be fun.
As a colleague, I wish you find your groove and job you will genuinely enjoy.
Companies are insular enviroments (reflected in another popular thread today) that operate by dogma and will happily march to their deaths while not achieving real change to how things are done internally.
Unfortunately plenty of companies have to die this way for things to change. We are individuals. We are capable of rapid course correction (usually prompted by severe internal pain and outward meandering and failure).
Best of luck to everyone and hopefully we ride it all out.
I sometimes feel like we are in a game of chess, but somewhere someone forgot to start the clock again.
Acting like a 'yes man' will subconsciously put you in a certain bin in recruiters' head. Acting a bit fussy means you value yourself, you are confident so you know what you are doing. That naturally puts you above everyone else who follows the script and tries to please the recruiting side.
When interviewing you want to be relaxed, ask them questions. Make it a bit about them trying to sell you the position. Again its a subtle power dynamic.
Other one is not to give CVs to every single recruiting agency, as it often will result in burned CV. If two agencies forward your CV for same position, the company will often drop you automatically as they dont want to deal with litigation between agencies fighting over who got you the job.
Good luck
For example:
> Sometimes you get the job and when you start rolling questions and ideas, you get a "talk to the hand" followed by "that's now what you're here for". Why hire a senior person as a poster, if you're not willing to be challenged and listen to different ideas? Nobody is asking you to agree, just play ball with convincing arguments. Too much of an ask, I guess.
There’s nothing wrong with asking for clarification about reasoning, but when someone is constantly challenging every decision made by management then it becomes an impediment to getting things done. If you want to be the person calling the shots, you should probably be applying for management positions. If you want to take an IC engineer position but constantly argue with the work, the company will eventually need to isolate you with a patient manager or remove you from the team in order to keep everyone aligned.
> Sometimes they talk so much about fit fit fit, but they don't even bother with a personality or IQ test (which as a former hiring manager, I find very valuable because it allows you to balance the team, not because you see how high/low people score)
I’m kind of stunned that you think coding challenges and tech interviews are useless, but you insist that companies use IQ and personality tests to hire coders.
Personality and IQ tests have been widely panned by the tech industry because they have very little signal but very high noise. If you expect companies to give you IQ and personality tests, you’re going to be disappointed. More broadly: If you expect every manager to reflect exactly how you would choose to run things, you may be trying to act as a “backseat driver” manager without taking the responsibility of actual being a manager.
> It's just maniac managers creating work for them to manage with tech they don't understand.
It’s clear you have a strong lack of respect for everyone you’ve interviewed with, from your description of “shitty challenges” to “maniac managers” being disappointed that they aren’t giving you IQ tests. It may not be obvious, but this level of anger tends to show through during interviews even if you try to hide it. Experienced hiring managers are going to pick up on it and flag you as a likely difficult employee to manage.
To be blunt: If you find yourself interviewing at and working for a significant number of companies and finding intractable problems with all of them, it’s time to consider that maybe your own perspectives are the common denominator problem. Part of working a job is accepting that other people are making decisions and setting the direction. Providing constructive input and feedback is good, but you need to also have a good attitude about disagreeing and committing to go in the same direction as the team.
When you want to get serious about this game, you learn how to interview. It is an unrelated skillset where you learn what to say and how to do the technical problems. You lie on the behavioral interview, there are books on it. Everyone is lying you could probably pass a polygraph test and guard the nations secrets with this skillset, fortunately you are only interested in making 5-10x (Scandinavia low end, US high end) what a public servant with a top secret clearance makes.
What I'm trying to say is that many times we don't want to see the "luck factor".
Assume in a job interview there is a 90% of probabilities to be rejected. Maybe because of your background, maybe they closed the process, maybe there is somebody that is not as good as you but earns waaaay less, etc. That's life, and that's hard.
My advice: accept it. It's happened to me and it's hard. But life goes on and we shouldn't worry about things out of our control.
However, IMHO, if you don't care for work-life balance, look for positions in startups. You'll learn many new skills and also you'll somewhat "restart/refresh" your career.
If you don't want to work in a startup (job insecurity, no work-life balance, etc) my advice for you would be start looking job at a medium-size company, and change jobs each 1.5-2 years. After several changes, your network would have increase and hence, the probability of having delivered some opportunities.
- Re. keywords, trim the CV according to the job you want. I've worked with PHP, PL/SQL, VBA and other technologies I'd rather never touch again. I simply don't mention them in the CV, and if it ever comes up in the interview I clearly say "I don't want to work with that." If they press me on it, that's a big red flag.
- Rather than simply saying "no" to a rebuild, how about looking into the pain points and improving them, step by step? If it's slow, do a bit of profiling and fix the low-hanging fruit. If it's incomprehensible, run a formatter and a linter and fix everything which you can conceivably fix, then run a complexity checker and discombobulate a couple of the biggest clusters. If it's unreliable or ossified, add tests until it's stable and refactorable.
- Shitty hiring practices can be a sign of a disorganised or dysfunctional company. I'd simply take it as a red flag and be ready to drop the opportunity if it's too bad.
- Meaningful work is out there, but it's usually not paid the best. That said, do you really need the very best paid job you can find to have a comfortable life? You're already in a well-paid segment, even with the salary stagnation. I've found lots of meaning by working in research (really badly paid, but such stimulating colleagues & cameraderie) and currently in a place where I'm working almost full time on open source software, including third party dependencies.
Convincing arguments can be hard. I know I've been asked about convincing arguments in the past and I've tried my best, but sometimes its really difficult to recall the exact details around why a particular approach didn't work. I'm working on this by using Obsidian (or better, the company's Wiki) as a knowledge graph that I can refer to in the future, but in most situations you are not able to reuse the knowledge graph from a previous job fully. Architectural decision records / design docs work well for this - perhaps ask if they have those?
I agree though, convincing argumentation is not really common in software engineering for some reason. The way we approach best practices is the most revealing IMO: instead of explaining the reasons for the practices in detail, most of the time we just list and cargo-cult them.
> where they test your memory and obedience, but not your abilities
Obedience is the only ability they care about.
> Sometimes they talk so much about fit fit fit, but they don't even bother with a personality or IQ test
If any interview process involved a personality or IQ test I would laugh in their face.
Hiring processes are certainly not perfect, but I have not had the types of issues you describe in any sort of persistent way. Granted, I have not interviewed a lot since moving here (once in 2012, once in 2019, and once earlier this year but with a non-Scandinavian company). But I know none of my friends and acquaintances in the industry here have had the kinds of problems you describe on a persistent basis.
To be honest, your mention of personality and IQ tests was a bit of a red flag when reading the post that something isn't quite aligned with modern hiring practices when it comes to your mindset and expectations.
> It's enough to ask a simple question as "why At some moment "because I told you so" needs to be an answer, otherwise you will have 10 engineers with 10 completely different opinions on how things should be done, and you will never produce anything. They might be thinking "is every decision going to be a difficult fight with this guy?" > Hire for boring maintenance. Managers follow their selfish incentives just like the developers do. No manager wants "overseeing the boring maintenance" in their CV. That's why no one will hire you for such role, even if it is desperately needed. > Sometimes they throw at you some shitty challenge, exactly like a school exam where they test your memory and obedience, but not your abilities Something makes me guess you fail pretty hard at anything involving obedience... > Sometimes they talk so much about fit fit fit, but they don't even bother with a personality or IQ test Yes, it means that they are looking for someone they like. > they are looking for the exact set of skills. A clone. Yes. No one wants to spend their money on your learning. > Why hire a senior person as a poster, if you're not willing to be challenged and listen to different ideas? You hire the senior person to hopefully code faster, and fix bugs faster. If you want to challenge people, you need to start your own company. > Almost nobody seems to hire for potential these days! Companies want to extract value from their employers as soon as possible. Because the employers often quit, especially after they learn something new and notice that their market value increased. It sucks for both sides.
What exactly would an IQ or personality test accomplish?
> Everyone wants to be different, by doing the exact same thing as everyone else
They're called "hipsters."
Lots of people do this. I find the STARS framework a good way of assessing what's expected of me in a senior role: https://hbr.org/2009/01/picking-the-right-transition-strateg...
As senior people, we're usually pretty opinionated. There are different outcomes from sharing those opinions at different times, depending on the context (see the framework above).
If you are looking for a role that values strong opinions early on, then roles that require a start-up or turnaround approach, are the ones that will match this. They are also the roles where the org is most open to change.
Outside of these situations (I'm talking role types, not whether a company is a start-up or not), orgs are resistant to change, and unlikely to hire someone that challenges things before they are even through the door.
From what you've said, it sounds like these are not the roles you're looking for, in which case, the process is working. There are very few start-up or turnaround roles that go to unknown candidates. In my experience, these roles go to folks that have been personally recommended, as the price of failure is so high, and people want a known quantity. (Whether that is what they get is beyond the scope of this comment).
Network, get to know people and get known as someone who can bring these types of changes to an org, and one might come your way.
Of course, if this isn't the type of role you're looking it for, then you are simply rocking the boat way too early.While most places would benefit from some level of change, they will still resist it.
If you challenge things before you've started in a role, a hiring manager will probably speculate that if you are this much trouble before you've even started, you will be even more trouble once hired. And they will reach for the next candidate, because there's always the next candidate.
I wish you all the best. Pick your head up, find a position that suits your skills and has room for promotion..and begin grinding harder than the engineer next to you.
Good luck!
You are presenting interesting points. I also live in Scandinavia though not too active in interviews yet. Will be though, on the interviewing side. In case you are in Stockholm, wanna grab a coffee? I'd be happy to know more about what you are looking for.
What is the average length of employment for mid to senior level developers these days? A few years? If it takes ~3 months to go from zero to competent with a new tech stack then that's ~15 weeks out of ~150 weeks -> 10%
Too simple a metric to capture the various qualities of a candidate that would compensate for the delay in significant contributions, but not completely irrational given the supply of qualified applicants.
point is, i get a shitton of interest, and i work to blast out my resume, and even send targeted resumes. but i haven't closed anything after a _lot_ of interviewing -- two solid months. actually, will be three months soon. i've made it to a few finals rounds. not sure why i'm dying at the final stage.
small company today i talked to were pretty much all assholes. i thought that was strange. i've been on calls where 1 of 3, or maybe 1 of 2, was an asshole, hated me from the jump, but not 4 of 5 -- that felt super-strange. it's kind of a run-of-the-mill sf area startup.
but my take-away after the call was....everyone is stressed because republicans are trying to kill us all, on top of covid adding this constant, immediate fear of suffering, bankruptcy, and death over our heads. so, most everyone in the coding class is making money hand over fist, way outpacing inflation * 100, but if you can die tomorrow, what's the point of it all? it puts you in a bad mood. you can't even go to the gd bar and watch a game without wondering if you're killing yourself and your family.
and, so, people are broken. civil society is breaking down. i don't know what it's like to live in another country during covid, but i suspect it could cause social breakdown even if one of the two political parties wasn't committed to mass death.
the odd part to me was they were asking me about my moving around to different jobs -- i was like, bros, y'all been here for a couple months, and you fired most of your C-level execs in the past two months, and said most of various departments had turned over because 'the company was at a different stage now'. tf?
hopefully another, different offer comes thru.
but i got that gd raincloud following me around, too.
not sure there is any solution for you, unfortunately.
Welcome to modern startups where the goal is to build an engineering playground and not to solve a business problem.
> Hire for boring maintenance
From a candidate's perspective, being stuck with a boring stack makes them less employable in the long run unless every company does this, which is not happening (see first point).
In addition, "boring" people typically cost more than those who chase the new shiny all the time and might settle for less money to work on "exciting" tech.
Finally, again as I said above, in a lot of cases especially in tech startups, IT has stopped being a solution to a business problem and started being a goal itself. Instead of doing the bare minimum to solve the business problem at hand, they build an overcomplicated engineering playground to justify hiring tons of people and being able to brag about solving their (self-inflicted) problems at the next AWS conference, which then helps hiring more suckers in who constantly chase the latest hype.
Furthermore, "boring maintenance" means there is a successful, profitable product that you merely need to maintain. That's not the case for most tech startups where the approach is "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks" and profit is nowhere to be seen, nor is it a true objective (the objective is to either get bought out or get that next round of VC money so you can prolong your status as a founder of an exciting an innovative startup). In this case, there is nothing to maintain, you always build and rebuild from scratch.
> Many are happy to do just that
Maybe, but I'd argue they would require more money to stay in place compared to hiring people who are happy to take lower pay to work on shiny stuff. I guess most software engineers' goal is to accumulate experience in all kinds of hyped up technologies and then capitalize on that at a FAANG or similar - merely solving business problems with boring tech doesn't give you that option, so you'd have to ask for more salary to compensate.
Whether an engineering playground costs more than a "boring" stack maintained by well-paid people is a different question, but so far most companies don't bother doing the math, especially when it's startups that play with VC money they don't particularly care about.
> Sometimes they throw at you some shitty challenge
They do so because they can get away with it. You can decline. They'll have to change once everyone declines and they can't hire anyone, but as above they won't change as long as they have enough suckers that are happy to go through this.
> nobody seems to hire for potential these days
These days in tech startups you don't need long-term potential. You want to extract the maximum value now so you can "grow" and get that next round of VC money or get bought out by a bigger fish. A lot of these are outright not viable and will fold as soon as the money runs out and no bigger fish comes along, so in this case trading future potential for current results makes sense, because the company may no longer be here to capitalize on that future potential.