They said I passed the interviews and promised an offer. After a month of "trying to find a customer to place me", telling me I'm a fantastic candidate etc. they finally decided to cancel the verbal offer until maybe next year.
I've recently had other bad experiences were they basically try to find excuses to cut me on interviews. It's like I'm answering the questions correctly minus one, so I'm disqualified.
I don't remember job searching being that hard even a few years ago, anybody relates?
If you're going through interviews which are going perfectly and companies are backing out at the final stage with weird excuses which don't make sense, you could be in the same situation as me. I'd recommend to NOT apply for any big corporation or VC-backed startup; only apply for bootstrapped startups; you will save yourself a lot of time. Some of these bootstrapped startups are very successful/profitable and growing quickly.
I had a lot of weird stuff happening to me. One big name company I was interviewing with (and perfectly matched for) seemed very interested to recruit me; they told me they had several different possible roles open for me and already hinted to a high salary... Then after the final interview (which seemed to have gone very well), I got an email saying "The role has been filled." - Whatever happened to all the other roles they said I would be suitable for? I had wasted hours on a challenging tech test (which I aced) and did 3 interviews - I thought the final interview was meant to be a formalty. Sometimes I think that maybe I've been blacklisted by big tech.
Next time a company tells you about their mission statement, stop them midway, eyes open in awe, and say "That's my mission statement."
Do the same thing when they tell you about their tech stack. Or anything else. I'm not kidding. The last applicant agreed with everything, and you need to agree with everything harder.
Agreeability and disagreeability are two separate skills but the tech industry sees it as a spectrum. They do not hire disagreeable people.
What’d important to know is right now is a critical point before trends show how bad things may get. During this period companies tend to hold their breathe.
Of course, usually most companies will backfill for positions so you can find those even during a freeze.
I completely shifted my mindset since closing off my own company and stared working as an UX designer.
Since I am considered “old” (hello, ageism) in the UX design profession, I don't expect someone to judge me by my proven experience and accomplishments of the past.
I don't give my honest opinion on the given issue. I ask more follow-up questions and let others give the direction of the solution.
Furthermore, I consider my self a facilitator of processes, my focus is on a communication and documentation part of the work. The other stuff (actual design work) is somewhat automatic.
The tricky part is how one navigates the landscape of responsibility, but adaptation to a political point of view is a must.
Actually, I found out that my employers are not paying me to deliver good UX for their users.
They are paying me to visualize and validate their own biases and let them freely contradict themselves.
In short, I UX'ed the hell out of the employment process. And when the users (company, PM, teams) are happy everything is fine.:)
Hiring is broken; very many reasons for it; I suspect many of these companies aren't actually hiring but haven't yet figured out that it's uncool to waste everyone's time pretending.
I am getting flooded with offerings but just for the "Stay in your cubicle and write code for a boring company, but we have a pingpong table so we're super fun" cringe jobs. It's like recruiters have to make some dumb quota to make and just spam everyone. Nobody truely cares anymore. Engineers are really desired and recruiters know that, but they also kinda judge you negatively for it. Like smiling at you but hating your guts at the same time. (A lot of recruiters where hired during covid19 to find SEs)
Others want to make you pass 25 different psychological and programming tests that have absolutely nothing to do with the actual job, and some you have a great conversation with but never hear back from
It sucks. Big time.
Maybe someone else answered questions faster or more confidently. Maybe someone else’s background is more aligned. Maybe someone else clicks more.
Remember there is the minimum score to get a job and the competitive score.
There is no such thing as “finding excuses” for the most part. They didn’t like you, didn’t feel confident in you, or liked someone else better.
Are you really answering questions correctly? I’ve never seen an interview where I can confidently say I answered everything absolutely correctly, meaning “the most correct”. Asked the best questions, answered the most optimal algorithm, explained it the smoothest way possible, etc.
If you think you have, you likely have a perception problem. Ask yourself those questions again, video record yourself answering them and watch yourself.
Nothing is final until your first day of work (and that cuts both ways).
Well, this has gotten a little better since I'm working a seasonal job doing shelf stocking (retail job for 90 days since last Monday; 2 days per week, 4 hours per day; 8 hours per week), and is for getting work experience. I got it only with the help of a job recruiting agency. It's not involving computers much, but it's better than nothing.
Low years of experience or a poor resume/CV? Yeah, I bet it's a bit harder than usual.
10+ years or a great resume/CV? You're still getting flooded, although Amazon and Meta spam have stopped for a bit.
That's been pretty almost every interview for me. The ones I get further are the ones where I can answer every question right (or are a bit more relaxed, which has been the exception, not the norm). If I get a single question wrong (or struggle somehow) but otherwise did well, I often don't get the benefit of the doubt and get passed over.
Fastest and most obvious 'getting disqualified for giving one incorrect answer' was when I was called for a technical phone screen for Facebook (many years ago, probably a decade ago at this point) by someone who sounded like they didn't understand anything technical, just had three trivia cards provided by someone on the engineering team with the question and a single term answer.
I was told 'correct' after my first two questions, then after the third question, I answered it in a general sense but without using the term that was apparently printed on their card, was told "Wrong, the answer is blah, thank you for your time." And I got a rejection email a few days later. I was only asked those three questions, nothing more.
I don't remember what the answer was anymore, but something like "toll booth messenging" something like that, it was for an iOS position, I was a lead developer of a small team and had released a half dozen games and apps on the app store already, including one I developed from scratch[1]. Still quite proud of a platforming game called Tracklapse and wish the company was still around and the game still on the store[2].
I don't really do iOS development much anymore, except working on a Swift game for a while that I eventually abandoned (working on something cross-platform now), so I don't really remember what the answer was anymore. A quick google search didn't bring up anything obvious.
[1]: https://youtu.be/uy08ohBLGhE [2]: https://youtu.be/BJ3NNLnKPdQ
They always oh you are good but we found someone with more number of years and whatever... I still thank God the industry is such that you never feel desperate. Partly, because you always have part-time gigs coming through and also you're well compensated.
Wishing you good luck man! You're not alone.
One way to eliminate the latter would be to interview with for jobs that require experience that substantially matches yours.
Another tip I keep giving, is to keep interviewing while being in a job or getting your next job. Don't grow complacent. I average an intro or interview per week, sometimes two. For two reasons, firstly to get better at interviewing and talking about my own skills and goals. And secondly, to not having to start interviewing when I need it. Regardless whether I stay in my current position for 1, 2 or 5 years. I want to have my current job lined up, the last thing I want is to stress needing a job when I don't have one.
> I don't remember job searching being that hard even a few years ago
I think, that if you go about interviewing, by just submitting a CV and cover letter, then things have certainly become much harder. As for some, interviewing has become quite a game to stay good at. I interview for the sake of interviewing. I have now declined at least 5 good offers this year because I already have a job.
And there can be deciding aspects way beyond your pure technical abilities, like personality, symphaties, ability to communicate clearly, humour and so on. Especially in smaller companies you might be the future collegue of the people you are interviewing with, that means if they don't get the feeling you are a guy they wanna work with, that will be a pass.
A good idea for you would be to make sure your self image matches with the external image you produce for your surroundings. I don't know you at all, but I know many people in our profession who would interview absolutely horrible and still be convinced afterwards that they did a good job and are the best candidate.
That means the first thing you should do is to ensure you are not lying to yourself and are 100% aware of your shortcomings and your strengths. One technique to do this is the Johari Window: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johari_window
> trying to find a customer to place me
It sounds fishy; you may have actually interviewed with some recruiting or contracting firm, not with the actual company with the backend dev position, that being their client.
That client bailed on them for whatever reason and so the job vaporized; then they scrambled to find another one (which they need to make money off you).
I get downvoted everytime i say this. But, from the recruiters that actually speak afterwards, there are too many good resumes on the market: FAANG. They are everywhere trying to get a remote gig. Anywhere in the bay/ny is hosed for non remote. I have no idea why everyone is trying to hire first to be laid off FAANG. PRO TIP! You can use linked in to see who they ended up hiring.
You could also consider trying to find a niche and start building a product or service. Maybe for a bootstrapped startup in a related business so there is a little pay, but make it clear that you are building a tool to sell to everyone.
One very simple example which can result in a good candidate who got far through the process hitting a wall is that a key person in the company became overwhelmed with something unrelated. Suddenly they don't have the bandwidth (or have left the company perhaps), and the progress is now halted. That's just one little common example, but there are so many more. Unless you have an insider who can investigate, you just don't know. Wondering is futile, especially as many of us assume it was some failure of our own which caused the process to end.
In the last year I had several very promising applications which went through multiple phases, all seemingly very positive, which ended abruptly and shockingly (with a "Sorry").
From the other side, we have seen posts here on HN where the person says, "I applied to 100 jobs and this is what happened." If you take a shotgun approach, you absolutely will get something. There are many problems with this approach, especially if you are more senior and have opinions about things. For example, there may be some industries or companies which you would not work for regardless of the money. There are also some companies that you know would be horrible to work for, so you would skip those.
It is possible some of us filter out possible companies a bit too heavily, building our hopes on 1-3. And 1-3 is not a big enough set to reliably make it to the end.
My new strong feeling is that those of us with a little runway (as in 1-3 months, not "rich") should just find a personal passion project and build it. Then maybe the project makes money, or maybe it's just a showpiece to pass some of the dumber interview processes which want you to solve unrealistic CS300 level algorithm tests in a crappy web UI with a timer and audience.
But I totally relate about the feeling. Just one of several examples: There's a company that advertises jobs on HN at least once a month. They are hiring many people for this role. I went through two verbal interviews, two live coding test interviews, and finally an interview with the CTO (or at least the tech guy responsible for a big chunk of the devs in the company). Then I got a no. Either I offended the guy (which seemed difficult to do as he showed up to the interview apparently disinterested and unable/unwilling to ever look at me in the camera), or I failed earlier in the process and nobody stopped the show. But given how simple the programming challenges were and how I was able to suggest multiple solutions, I don't think it was that. So I was baffled. I have more stories not so different. You just _never_ know wtf is going on.