How's the job hunt going? (For those laid off)

I'm not laid off but actively looking to change after spending a couple of years at my current employer. Despite being a staff engineer, managing 12 engineers, and having a solid revenue stream tied to my current team - I've mostly gotten rejections without interviews, 1-2 low ball offers, or radio silence. I cannot imagine how hard this must be for those laid-off, hopefully this storm passes soon.

EDIT: you cannot make this up, it's a saturday and we got an email 1/3 of our team got laid off (I didn't yet, but I have a feeling it might happen soon).

I keep getting the same amount of emails from recruiters as before, mostly startups.

Found a new job (non-startup) by responding to one of those. Signed the offer and was going to quit FB on a certain date, then got the FB layoff severance package a week before that date as a nice bonus.

I also interviewed at Google and got the thumbs up to proceed to team matching, but no team matches after a month. This makes me believe that they have at least a partial hiring freeze, although their recruiters are pretending that this is not the case - they're just saying that team matching takes a bit longer. Google interviews were useful as practice for the other jobs, but not for actually getting an offer.

For those of you feeling down about being ignored, keep in mind this is the slowest hiring time of the year, with holidays and vacations, and end of year budgets.

Even in down markets, hiring tends to pick up in January as managers get their hiring budgets for the new year and are back in the office.

Hang in there!

I took ~1.5 years off after 12+ years of FAANG. 1 month ago, I decided I was ready to work again and started talking to recruiters for real. It's been very slow. Most positions I've applied to, I've heard nothing back, even when referred by a current employee. I've had some flat rejections without even a recruiter chat. One recruiter called me to say they were on a temporary hiring freeze, and then she got laid off.

I've had a handful of tech screen interviews, but only one* has progressed all the way to a full interview loop so far, and I got a generic rejection a few days later. I have been waiting 2.5 weeks and counting for a phone screen result from another (larger, public) tech company. Nothing close to an offer yet.

I'm considering just taking more time off until things speed up again - I can afford it, but I worry about how hard it will be to get hired again with a "long" gap of 2+ years.

* for "Senior Software Engineer" at a medium-sized pre-IPO tech company

Let me show you the backdoor:

Find a company whose open source projects you are interested in. Dive in and and start fixing things. Then if you really like it after a couple weeks start nudging around for a job. If you do good work they'll just give it to you, no bullshit funnel required.

I like this method because you aren't just doing l33t coding exercises to work on some sight unseen codebase that makes you suicidal and throw you into existential crisis.

In this modality you are test driving each other.

If you are job searching and reading the comments on this post, there’s a >90% chance that "An Engineering Leader's Job Search Algorithm" may help you:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/19fr_36WOzKlq_zyGP2RdxMEs...

Good luck!

I wasn't laid off but spent Jan-Aug taking time off and then interviewing for a while. Even before the layoffs started things were getting tricky. I was mid-process with multiple companies between June and August that pulled out because they were having freezes, or no longer hiring for the west coast due to budget constraints, etc.

I was still getting a fair amount of interviews though. Fortunately I landed an offer in August, because without it I may still be jobless. But the layoffs, freezes, and continued whiteboarding style interviews and things are definitely a trifecta.

I was laid off as part of a layoff large enough to trigger the WARN act, so I was put on garden leave for 60 days.. I was fortunate to find a new job and start it exactly as the garden leave expired.

It was my first job search in the post-COVID era, aka the era of remote work, and wow was it different. Traditionally, I'd see a handful of jobs that looked interesting each week, and would be one of a handful of applicants. Now that geography isn't really a barrier, there were far more options, but far more applicants. I'd see 20+ roles per week that were a good fit, but each would have 40-200+ applicants, even for the senior (Director/VP) level roles I was looking for.

I've got over 20 years experience from startup to massive tech companies, and applied to 58 jobs. 12 of those led to an initial discussiopn with a recruiter, and 3 of those led to a full interview loop and 1 job offer.

Since accepting the job offer, I've heard from 4 more of the companies I applied to and they were interested in going forward with the process. For each, it was at least 5 weeks since my initial application.

No longer hunt for work. Instead will spend 1 year to build product for my own customers.

Again, software engineering is such a great career, when you can create valuable things for others in case of crisis.

Disclaimer: This is 100% a plug (for a friend, no financial interest on my part).

A good friend have mine who has been focusing on career coaching has started to put together a few articles [1, 2] targeted more at folks impacted by recent layoffs. Like so many of these articles, the intent isn't to have deep, novel ideas -- instead, it's to pull together things that you probably already know, think about them clearly, and get some comfort in the next steps of job search. If a small number of readers have just one thing "click", it has some value, in my mind.

This is one of the rougher markets we've seen for engineers in a while, but in my opinion it's still a worker's market -- in almost every niche I interact with, hiring has slowed but we are still having a hard time filling the open positions we do have, and we're always looking!

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7001201... [2] https://alignedclarity.substack.com/p/streamline-your-resume...

I just got blindsided two weeks back from the best job I've ever had. Not looking forward to the search (taking December off to get married) as I have extreme anxiety when it comes to live coding, and I cannot figure out why. Even basic SQL queries escape me when somebody is watching. I've always been fantastic at test taking so take home assignments or leetcode type tests I can do, and hell, even putting together a presentation of a project I've done and presenting is fine. Just that live coding portion that always sucks.

Senior Data Engineer with 15+ years of Python experience and a background in Physics and Math. Can't wait for the new "Who's Hiring"

I’d ask in a month. It’s still early since the layoffs. I’d guess that even for people who were laid off first, started looking immediately, and found plenty of hits, few have accepted jobs.

I’m much more curious in 4-5 months. I assume VC funding is harder to get now, for example, but I don’t think that’ll make a massive impact for a little while.

Not great. I have been to last rounds with several large companies and then just get ghosted. Honestly have been interviewing for like 9 months (7 months before getting laid off)

I've just started a new job, a startup hedge fund with friends and former colleagues, so not really that applicable to the question (but also, my god how nice it is to just get a call from someone you know and respect, get offered a job and not even have to interview for it :)

However, I've noticed that the LinkedIn spam is getting increasingly outrageous in their offers (I'm in quant finance in London). This surprised me given the market is supposedly cooling off with lots of free agent talent, but I'm getting multiple offers a day promising 300-500k (GBP) compensation, sometimes even fixed base comp! It sounds a bit too good to be true but the frequency of messages and the numbers in those messages have both been blowing up over the last 3-4 months.

Not sure what's driving this but it's definitely unusual given the market and location. I'd say it's about double the top range I've seen in previous years.

I have 15 years experience, run large production sites, our company sold for near a billion dollars to a foreign company recently, and they are doing layoffs based on "order by salary desc" . My days are numbered. I do SRE mainly, but I code all day and run teams.

Company 1: Terrible over-engineered music firm (no users). Full 7 rounds, exams (which were easy shit), but "VP" ghosted me, he was a former twitter guy, seems like he wants to hire a twitter guy.

Company 2: Credit card company. Full 5 rounds. Four hours of exams. The recruiter feedback from team was "too much of a people manager", then ghosted. Someone lied and said I was non technical - yet i passed the technical exams. I used the term "we" too much explaining projects.

Company 3 (automatic): Finished the exam in LUA for a openresty opensource project (didn't even know lua). Everything worked nicely. I was told he didn't like how i laid out the lua.

Company 4: "Not enough of a people manager."

Company 5,6,7,...: Recuriters make me do calls and exams then ghosted. I don't think they have jobs - just recruiting cause that is what they do.

Exams:

1) using openrusty to create a application load balancer in lua

2) using python to create a url shortener

3) using php, complex input file, then output file (sorting, hasing, parsing)

4) using ruby, connect to an oracle db then do complex queries (outer joins etc). Just for hazing sake, they named the tables keywords eg: "join".

I will say the take home tests at these companies are fun. I have a family and I am very nervous.

I know this may not be the correct thread for this, and hope it doesn't come across as not being empathetic:

I'm paying $100/hr (negotiable) for skills in { Rust/Actix webdev, Unreal Engine plugin development, computer vision, audio processing, signal processing, ML }. These roles will convert to salary/equity later on, once the project outgrows my ability to self-fund.

We're building a cloud-based AI film and music production suite.

https://storyteller.io

In any case, I'm sorry to anyone impacted by this down tech cycle. The world will get back to its senses, and tech will continue to eat everything else not-tech.

Edit: I broke the contact form. Email me directly. echelon@gmail.com

I wasn't laid off, but am unemployed. I've found it very difficult to land any interviews, or even get a response from companies. Even what I thought were safe bets (like a job at a bank, writing CRUD apps) do not respond.

I've only had one interview this year. It was with a FAANG. I easily passed and got an offer, but then layoffs were announced and they had to revoke.

I transitioned from full-time employment to contracting in April 2022. I am currently over-employed and working two gigs simultaneously.

All leads have come from my personal network or my reputation as a known entity in a relatively niche field.

Only trouble I've had is invoice approval and waiting for money to be moved, but it has always eventually come through.

Cashflow remains equivalent to when I was an FTE, but I'm working fewer hours per day and working on more interesting things. A lot of that has to do with transitioning out of management, I think. I don't miss it :)

I've been at this for almost 40 years, and it's shocking to me how little urgency there is to hiring over the last 5-10 years. I have a sinecure but still interview from time to time. Compared to (say) 1990, it's intensely time-consuming and unproductive.

In principle, I'm likely someone that hiring managers are looking for, and really a pretty good deal. In practice, I'll probably just retire rather than throw my hat into the ring again. Or--since I have a vindictive sense of humor--maybe I'll spend my retirement doing "fake" interviews with prospective employers.

Garbage. I'm looking for marketing/communications/social media work. Those industries aren't really hiring right now, and despite changing/improving my resume/cover letter three times now (with help from a hiring manager friend, and a career coach), I'm still not getting any kind of non-automated response. Been searching for 6 months now.

Strangely, I had one place basically self-flagellate at how bad they were at their response time (again, in an automated response), and never followed up again.

I feel like part of my problem is that I worked in an industry previously that inflated my titles. I'm applying to entry-level/associated positions with "Director" on my resume, mostly because I'm trying to upskill things I didn't get to learn, in an environment where I'm not managing the whole department.

It's disheartening to see LinkedIn say "Yeah, want to see how you stack up against the 100+ other applicants?"

Quit voluntarily in April, have been working on my own project since then, if it doesn't work I will start interviewing in Jan/Feb/Mar based on how the job market is looking. I find it hard to believe there wont be some recovery and would rather apply during a time where job seekers have a bit more leverage.

I am not laid off but interviewing since I don’t like my current job. Seems to be tons of jobs still if you are L6+. Below that it gets harder.

Pretty badly. I’m getting way more rejections than usual and positions are closing before I can get through the funnel

Thanks for asking so that we can all vent!

I have 2 YOE as a SWE, got laid off in August from a startup that was Series A and generating no revenue. I was able to get interviews in September/October, and got far at 2 companies but got rejected by one and ghosted by another. I have found it's much harder to get an interview this month as layoffs increase. I'm pretty much hoping that once the holidays are over, things will pick up again, but I am pretty worried that I may be forced to just join the military or something because I can't get a job in tech.

Looking to quit w/o anything lined up. Rejected a few offers before the shit hit the fan. Starting to hate the field and need some time to think.

this is a terrible time of year for interviewing, most places won’t be adding headcount until january.

I have an opposite problem, I am trying desperately to hire developers but we don't do full remote. We require some in-office time and that just turns people off. Upper management won't listen to me, they want people in the office at least three days a week so basically I'll never be able to hire anyone. We offer big salaries, benefits, you name it. Commuting sucks and people know it.

For those who did get laid off from F(/M)AANG, are you considering "lower" end positions or looking for comparable total comp at comparably sized, tech-focused companies?

Just curious, as a flyover midwesterner, it seems like no one here is affected, nor are we getting any interviewees from FAANG into the pipeline suddenly.

Not laid off, but company was recently affected by one. I got recruiter interest, but that died down pretty quickly (My theory is that I got marked as "not laid off"). It was reminiscent of recruiter spam during start of covid. Looks like startups without talent now have the ability to get some engineers.

Just got hired doing firmware stuff. Core technologies seem to still be doing okay.

I'm gonna let the H1B folks take first crack at things...I'll start looking in a week or two.

I was laid off from an over leveraged startup-type company you haven’t heard of.

The search so far has been pretty bad. Probably in part because of the timing (a week before thanksgiving, but it’s the same story every time. Any job I want I won’t get and any job I don’t want I can get.

I expect things to maybe pick up a little in early December, but I’m honestly kinda defeated. My last job was far from perfect, but I was planning on using to save up the industry afterwards which ofc won’t happen now, at least not in the timeframe I envisioned. Worst case I have to accept a pay cut that will nip those plans very quickly.

Are only the people with FANG-like compensations (200K base/300K+ stock) being laid off or are the "regularly" compensated (60K-150K) devs affected as well?

We're hiring, but very slowly/carefully atm (https://getstream.io/team/). It's insane, similar companies to us used to raise $100-$200M with our metrics, at the moment i'm not even trying to raise additional capital. On the other hands it's nice that there is less hype and you can just focus on building and real progress.

Curious on how many are taking this opportunity to start their own company. Would love to see a list

TLDR: the job market (for senior talent) is much better than you'd think, from my observation. But if coming from FAANG expect compensation cut (and that's probably ok!)

I didn't get laid off, but. Quit Google at the height of the frenzy last December. Coasted for a while doing my own thing and entertaining a job offer that fell through. After that through the spring and summer it was actually slow and difficult finding work. I signed a contract that was initially very exciting and promising but then found there was a crypto/eth association I was not comfortable with, so started looking immediately and was very worried because of the layoffs that were starting to blow up.

But in the end I actually found it not bad and I had the choice of basically two excellent and exciting jobs. I'm still not 100% certain I picked the right one, but here goes! And holy crap am I tired of interviews.

Similarly I have a friend who got laid off from Meta in the latest round, and she's already interviewing in boatloads of places.

I think the key thing is that compensation that's out there won't match what is made at a FAANG, esp with the latest round of layoffs. But I'm personally fine with that. In exchange for getting my soul back.

I have been laid off since August, the options I have in front of me are not positive (things have slowed to a trickle where I am in the US), and I hope the New Year will be better, but...

Otherwise I will look into non-tech related work to meet expenses.

Since this thread is the most relevant - my partner has been struggling for a long time to get going into the field as a Data Analyst/BI analyst doing SQL, Tableau, Excel and (beginner) Python/Pandas. She has been hunting for junior positions or even internships with no luck so far.

Here in the EU, either her career gap (due to covid + country change + taking time to upskill herself) gets in the way, or C-level German language does, and if nothing else, they're hiring Seniors.

If anyone is willing to hire a bright and hard-working beginner with an MBA in Finance, drop me an email at me [at] manishgill [dot] com

I am not laid off yet but the org I am part of, in one of the FAANGs, is rumored to have layoffs in December or Q1 next year. I have been with this company for almost a decade, am one of the top performers and think I am close to a promotion to the staff level - despite all of that, I am cognizant of the fact that none of this matters when it comes to layoffs and I am as likely to be laid of as any other person in my org.

It's a bit scary. So, I am spending some time on the side sharpening my technical skills. For e.g., Crafting Interpreters and Designing Data Intensive Applications.

Actively looking. Jobless and homeless since completing my technical degree from a Nordic country. Subsisting on ~3€/day.

The responses have been: not a cultural fit, wasn’t the perfect match (German speaking responses), overqualified (mostly from western countries), under qualified (from countries like Czechia, Poland, Romania,etc.) for junior positions.

Getting interviews has been difficult and sparse. Contributed to FOSS, and keep learning programming/higher maths. Hope is low.

any tweeps who've engineering experience with algo feeds, if you fancy a short stint in #techforgood i'd love to hear from you... dom@birda.org

A friend of mine was doing an almost week long (thankfully paid) interview with Automatic for a senior data engineering position. These are the folks being Wordpress and Hey — the DHH company — anyway.

Long story short while he was working on tasks in this weird ass way to interview about half way into the week he gets a message saying the role had been closed. Suddenly. There was no inkling or hint that the role was tenantive.

Shortly before he he process to interview and maybe hire my friend there was some message or rumor that they were trying to scoop up laid off Twitter employees.

I dunno. It seems shady. Avoid Auromatic not for the politics but because it’s not well run at all.

Are people in this boat thinking of working on fun or side projects as they look? Especially non-commercial or for-good work. Curious if we’ll see interesting creative work come out of this period it if people are growing disillusioned enough with the current system to start experimenting with other approaches.

Sounds like it's broadly terrible... Good news is the who's hiring thread is coming up again in a couple days.

I am not laid off but I am looking. There is a lot less jobs available. The ones on LinkedIn are all old job posts being refreshed and don’t exist anymore. I was finally able to get 1 interview with Google because I reached out to the same recruiter I rejected a few months prior for another role.

I am a final year student persuing computer science (July'23 expected graduation), applying constantly but not getting responses.

> but likely this next week I'll start studying and getting ready.

Studying?? For a job interview? Do you seriously need to do whiteboard algorithm reverse a linked list kinda coding as a senior in the US? Or what is it that you need to study before an interview?

I wasn’t laid off but was at a startup that went through 4 rounds of layoffs. It took me 8 months to get an offer in this economy. Literally mid interview loop a few of the companies froze hiring. It was pretty crazy.

Poor luck as a 2 yoe backend based in Canada

Would love to know any good job boards if people know

Pretty tough, altho I'm not sure if it's because of macroeconomic conditions or because I'm applying to a lot of hedge funds and I'm not amazing at leetcode.

Why does OP ask about people layd off? Are there some big waves of people being fired? I don't live in the US and I didn't read much news recently, so that's why I ask. In my country there aren't many people people in It (if any) layd off.

tl;dr some people hiring but December is going to slow you right down. Wait for Jan.

Applied for a small pre-ipo biz lately, I’m over qualified for the position and respectfully let them know that I’d expect a very clear and direct path to a more senior position in max 12 months.

Interview process is slow but ongoing. I was told that it prob won’t happen before Jan.