What a gigantic waste of time. Tons of stress for 2-3 months for nothing.
I now this is incredibly privileged. I'm not humble-bragging, just observing the change in the market.
As things usually turn out, during the last week of the 3-month search I received 3 different offers all at once.
For reference and if it matters: I've got 14 years of experience.
I’m mid senior level in Product Management but come from a big well known tech company, and I work remote from a non-tech “city”. 5 years PM experience, 6 years as a Software dev. Launched 3 products from concept. One has over 20 million MAU, one created 9 figures of revenue for my previous company, and one I have no idea because I got laid off lol
According to my LinkedIn I’ve applied to over 200 roles in the last few weeks and heard back from about 5. Of those interviews, I’ve been rejected from all of them, even smaller shops.
Hearing from recruiters has been much more fruitful, making it to middle and final rounds at surprisingly good companies, but in both final round instances, the role either got defunded due to a hiring freeze or other issues.
In one instance, the recruiter I was working with at a Big N tech company got laid off in the middle of interviews, at which point the company ghosted me, presumably with my application falling through the cracks.
My severance package is much smaller than most, since my company is framing the thousands of layoffs as “performance based” which allowed them to skip the mandatory notice period, and avoid paying out our very generous severance packages. It turns out benefits don’t matter if a company is afraid of a recession.
If anything this whole experience has wiped out my idealistic views of working in tech. I’m a cog in a machine that can be gaslit and disposed of when convenient for people levels above me who have no empathy for my existence
Can any other PMs speak to how their job hunt is going? Hoping it’s not just me
7 YOE in web dev, full-stack.
Leaving this here if anyone has any remote work for me :)
EDIT: For anyone accessing my site, I apologize in advance for slowness or crashes, it's hosted in my residence on a puny server sitting behind me :( I've been meaning to cloud it for a while now but I kind of like the DIY of it all.
No credentials to speak of other than the fact that I could probably think my way out of an undergrad level abstract algebra or real analysis problem if cornered. Maybe topology, too. Native speaker of both Kazakh and Russian. Speak rudimentary Turkish, but could easily pick it up to a decent level if necessary. Currently studying CLRS to finally learn how to design algos. Also, trying to pick up Mandarin. Maybe I'll be able to immigrate to China in the coming years. Shenzhen or Hong Kong area.
I'll just leave this here in case anyone has a remote work for me :)
~15 years fullstack and DevOps experience, visited top local university, no degree. Mostly Python + some other languages. Have been interviewing for Lead SE/DevOps/SRE roles as well as some architecture positions.
My findings about the German job market for developers:
- Remote-work is here to stay. Almost all companies are okay with full-remote, those who are not, want ~2 days in the office per week.
- Companies are starting to do leetcode-style interviews. Sometimes some FizzBuzz level to check basic understanding, going up to harder problems unrelated to the position. Unless they are very hard, you will just get used to that.
- Remote or hybrid meetings with multiple participants are horrible for interviewing. The delay makes you come across slow and is very distracting, when you need to look sharp.
- If you want to earn money in Germany, you have to join a bigger company.
- Bigger companies do their development in Java with a minority being MS shops. Python is for data science and DevOps.
- The missing degree is mostly not a problem. Sometimes the CTO's PHD makes it one.
- Landing lead/lower management roles seems to be difficult if you have limited experience leading people. Those seem to be mostly staffed internally.
- The market value for a profile like mine in a big German city seems to be around 100k € including some small bonus.
- There are many offers under that number. I think I would get hired almost instantly if I would accept offers for 80k €.
- All-in all IT does not seem affected by the downturn yet.
While these numbers are not directly comparable to the US (lower cost of living, better social security, health-insurance included and not tied to your job etc.) my subjective feeling is, that I am getting taken advantage of here. Salaries seem to be too low. You are often getting low-balled because "it would not fit within the salaries of the other team members".
For the time being, freelancing is the way to go in Germany, even though you are fighting against regulations.
Applied to around 25 jobs. Ghosted by 15 of them. Out of the 10 remaining, 3 of them are limited in terms of remote - to be considered you have to reside within certain countries.
From the remaining 7 I only got the interview round with 1 of them. Did not get an offer because I was not strong enough candidate despite successfully going through 5 interview rounds. Whole process was very slow and lasted for about 1.5 month, with not getting the feedback something like 2-3 weeks after the last round. All in all very weird experience and unexpected outcome with no strong arguments.
From the remaining 6 I did not even get an invite to an interview but a direct decline.
Getting the (systems programming related) remote job while located in Europe seems like an impossible task to me right now.
So I spoke to 15 (remote-friendly/first) companies through my network (could've been more if I were up for onsite work), 4 started the interview process (rest had hiring freeze or wanted to prioritize folks that got laid off from FAANG) out of which:
- 1 ghosted me in the last round
- 1 rejected in the last round without any reason/feedback (although I think I did pretty well)
- 1 rejected in the first round because they wanted me to stick to a specific programming language (in their leetcode round) that I am now rusty with
- 1 rejected me in the last round on fair grounds and were decent enough to give feedback. I believe I made mistakes out of being super desperate to land a job.
One thing I noticed (although small sample set) was that the interview processes are very slow (like 1 round per week). This might mean things like companies are in no hurry to hire and they have abundance of candidates applying for the same positions at different "expected CTCs" making it a buyer's market. I am currently interviewing another company who has scheduled the next round to happen after 2 weeks.
Also no inbounds on Linkedin from recruiters. I used to be swamped till like July/August. Probably means there's decent amount of hiring freeze and most of the recruiters are fired?
Tbh, even though I got rejected in a few places, I did not feel too bad because I did not "feel" like they were doing solid engineering work (I ask lots of questions about the tech stack, challenges, culture, etc. in each round).
I've decided to spend a few months upskilling myself till the situation gets better and take the hiring process slow (rather being desperate). Although lucky to be in a position to be able to do so.
My approach has been often to take a mixed-risk approach, and it seems to work out well. First, no debt. Second, long-cash. After working for about ten years in relatively low paying roles I have something like a runway of about 25 years - that is I would not need to take on any job for 25 years while keeping mostly my current standard of living (plus be happier, as I would have more time).
I plan to work for about 5 more years, then switch from a high-stress environment to cool projects that do not need to make lots of money.
The key has been to continue to live like a student, we have a small cheap flat, go out eating maybe once a month, no car, no expensive hobby, little distractions.
With a faang salary, I probably could have achieved that not in ten, but in two years.
That's why I'm a bit curious why people are so stressed out.
Bold statement: Tech will pick up first. And companies who are making noise based on Elon's move at Twitter will strave for good workers and die
At the seed/series A stage (one I'm most familiar with), any company that raised money this year or is cash-flow positive is still hiring opportunistically. At Series B and beyond, it's really a function of the health and resilience of their business model.
Within this bracket, there's fewer total jobs available, but the "median quality" of jobs is better than it's been in a long time: most companies that are hiring are good companies, so if you were to pick completely randomly between offers, you wouldn't be too bad off. Comp packages have not come down ($180-200kish cash basis for a "senior" engineer).
For people who know how to analyze early-stage companies as a prospective engineering hire, this is paradoxically a great time to be looking.
From my perspective, it seems like many ex-FAANG employees are seeking stable comp at late-stage growth companies (which may be a buyer beware situation...). I think the hiring there has gotten much more competitive, but I have less firsthand experience fishing those streams.
My tackle box: laid off from Meta after <1 month of Bootcamp, 5ish YoE as a backend engineer. Meta would have been my first FAANG experience.
1. Last 10 years of low interest rates and growth made Faang like companies seem much more valuable than they were. Now that tech is making it easier/cheaper to build and compete with their products (think TikTok vs Insta or AI driven frameworks for automating all kinds of workflows) expect the big/old companies to take time to realize and pivot to build more valuable products to stay alive. And it's not just Faang but any companies that are ripe to disruption where if you get hired it may be less stock comp or volatile job durability.
2. Also related to this, the FTC is tightening the screws(meta was blocked from supernatural, Nvidia could not buy arm) so they can't grow the way they did monopolistically like before and expect less of hiring bounties.
3. Seasonal and recession effects will slow down things for a bit but the former will wear off come January. Latter is a wildcard.
4. Don't get the first job you get without vetting the positiom even if it takes 3-4 months to find one(assuming you are not squeezed by issues like immigration or cost of living). Try vetting the companies and see if they value what you have to offer and the place is not toxic. Remember that only cracking the tech round is a zero sum game but mutual value in a work relationship is not and often more important. So vet it well.
5. If it's been a while since you last looked and are procrastinating on practice of leetcode or interview prep cause or you aren't clear on what to do like I am, take care of my mind first. Meditation, simplifying your life, figuring out what you really value in life and why you value it, is useful. Networking and talking to people on what's out there to change what you do is also useful.
For experienced people, things slightly better - at 1 years exp, 5-20 cv/pos; 2 years exp ~1:1; 5+ years exp, there are much more positions, than candidates.
I've interviewed with ~20 companies this year, usually with folks that reach out to me from the 'Who Wants to be Hired' thread. I've received three pretty decent offers (200-250k base + equity) all at small, early-stage companies. From what I've observed this year, companies that are doing difficult or low-level work are still as starved as ever for senior/staff/architect-level folks that can deliver, and are happily willing to hire them. Probably irrespective of company size, but I pretty much exclusively look for teams of ~5-20 people.
One material effect I've noticed from the downturn is I've gotten a lot less emails from recruiters advertising positions that are at companies with BS products, or that have clearly nothing to do with my skillset.
My bio: I've got ~10 years professional programming experience and consider myself a generalist. Typical projects I look for include graphics programming, language runtimes, compilers, data streaming.. low-ish level stuff that's usually pretty technical.
Anyway, since someone asked, that's my 2c :)
I do however mentor a bunch of juniors (less than 2 years of experience) and the 3 that got laid off got a bunch of offers within a month. It took more interviews but my experience from the last few weeks is that there are still a lot more jobs than applicants.
I think I had something like 3-4 offers rescinded and a couple of interviews where I reached the final stage just to be informed that the company halted hiring.
I guess what's more important for me is the type of work. I'm looking for startup work that's a bit more secure now, if that's possible, lol! Doesn't seem so easy to find.
Job search has been going pretty bad. Only a few screen out rejections and a handful of obnoxious crap recruiters have contacted me. No interviews yet.
The company offers work visas, relocation assistance and a relocation bonus, and stock RSUs.
[1] I applied for a startup, on a lark, on one of HN's who's hiring in such and such month and landed at a startup in Hamburg. I am now in Berlin. HN changed my life!
As others have said, hiring really slows down in Nov and Dec. You have quarter end, the year's budget is running low, project priorities are being shifted with anticipation of the new year, etc.,. Having been on the hiring end many times over the last several years, I know that higher ups often push you to fill a position - but just as soon as you settle on a candidate during this time of year, they almost always pump the brakes on actually hiring until new year.
Knowing this, I'd initially planned no not looking for a new gig until 2023, but once folks hear your back on the market, you basically can't avoid people trying to play matchmaker for your next job (which is a good problem to have, I suppose).
Not wanting to pass up a potential opportunity, I accepted a few interview requests that came about from my personal network in Nov. After going through 2-3 rounds of ultimately fruitless interviews with 3 different companies since mid-Nov, I've decided to just wait and enjoy the downtime. Each company I interviewed with essentially signaled "you're perfect for our needs and will be moving quickly with you" during the interview process, then would go radio silent - only to have them follow up a couple weeks later with "some of our internal needs have changed with the end of year approaching, but we'll be in touch".
So I figured for my sanity and so that I could enjoy a little bit of my funemployment, that I'd just be upfront with them and set some boundaries. Now, I've basically just been communicating "I appreciate your interest, but this is a bad time of year for bringing on new hires when considering year's end, so let's plan on touching base in January". We will see if this works out in my benefit or not - but if they can't respect that, and aren't capable of acknowledging the reality of things, I'd probably not want to work with them anyways.
Applied to about 30 positions, heard back from 3 and received 1 offer for Google. Didn't exactly give me confidence about the future when I may be looking for another job...
YOE: 3
I'll be starting in mid January since am legally still employed with the old company until 31 December. Still employed since that's how we get our severance, so am enjoying the time off.
The thing that bothered me the most was that I had to update my CV, interview again and all the things related to that. I landed that job in March so I really didn't feel like finding a new one, I also liked the place.
I have a nice resume so was pretty confident I'd find something before the end of the year, so I didn't feel much anxious about it.
I have a some life events coming up next year so I have started to turn the gears on my network and contacts but I am pretty much only interested in consulting and contract jobs that can be worked remotely. Right now, I primarily see it as a means to raise some cash, so I can make the occasional splurge purchase. I have honestly thought of doing DoorDash.
Someone in the thread talked about the importance of a runway and I totally agree. I spent 6 years doing a STEM PhD and about 6 years working in industry on okay but not great salaries and even at that rate I have a runway of about 10+ years of savings before I run out of money (living frugal).
After my last job I think I promised myself to never just take a job because I am offered or out of prestige - I am turning mid-30's and I feel like I can't waste anymore time just doing time - i.e. waging for a paycheck without a higher purpose.
This causes tension with my partner and probably my future father-inlaw doesn't like me but long term I intend to be my own boss and run my own company. Especially since the pandemic I feel increasingly the urge and need to be the master of my own destiny - especially with regards to income.
Very hard but also very forgiving, which is what allowed me to get in - I've learned TIG welding, too, may even get certified just for job safety. Welds get x-rayed and warranty is in the double digits so you can't half ass the important parts.
Plenty of work from big and small companies alike. Some US middleman has contracted most firms around this city to build ion exchange components to be used in lithium battery production. A lot of orders for big ion exchange containers from DE and CZ, afaik also for lithium battery plants (Production? Recycling?).
I'm also Berry Alien, the fastest replacer of ion exchange material alive in September 2022 in bf middle of nowhere, Germany :D
Next step, building robots at some company. Always wanted to try that. I seem to fall ass first into opportunities I always just abandon, but this time I have medicine and crypto on my side.
Thanks Chris for the unique (for me) opportunity.
- 38 applications
- 8 rejections with no interview
- 1 rejection after 1st round
- 1 first round with no response
- 1 2nd round interview (no response yet)
- 1 3rd round interview scheduled for this week
- 1 1st round scheduled for this week
The others I've gotten no response.
Senior Product Designer with 8 years of experience, well versed in UI/UX Design, Design Systems, Accessibility, Prototyping, Documentation. Sole designer at my last startup on a brand new product that got acquired.
I've got 10+ years as a design who is also a full stack engineer (node stack). If you're hiring for a role that is well-rounded product, please message me, I'd love to talk.
Portfolio link in my profile.
In my experience applying for jobs feels like a waste of time. Maybe 1/20 will acknowledge you. And you have no idea if the job really exists. But if you're contacted first by the recruiter the hit rate seems to be much higher.
Hope this helps, if you want me to share more tips please let me know and I can add a few more things.
I’ve wrapped up the Fast.ai deep learning course and switched to studying the language of my country of residence. The rest of my time is calls with random people via my office/mentoring hours (https://sonnet.io/posts/hi) and learning how to live with a dog!
I try to code a bit and have some side projects I want to monetise or share, but tbh I’m struggling with getting them out because for some reason I’ve started to be overly critical of my work. I know it’ll pass.
I’m also exploring different ways of working, such as co-ops.
I’m a founder/SWE with 20 years of experience.
I think openings and interviews are very slow right now due to the holidays
Demographics is the killer force, basically with a MINT background, you can find a job almost instantly. You may not earn a top salary, but you'll earn enough to get by well.
Given Europe is in the worst crisis since WW2, I'd say job market is fine.
Here is a site that aggregates jobs from major Space companies https://rocketcrew.space/
Already have another part-time deal starting next quarter. Some initial billable hours in Dec. So not bad.
- Recruiters being very open about the salary range. This is a change from even a few years back, where there would be endless back and forth of "who calls the number" first. Now out of maybe 30 early conversations only 1 recruiter absolutely refused to state the range. The top end is extremely consistent, the bottom end (as typical for Canada) can be laughably low.
- US companies and remote work coming in in a big way. Some of them position themselves at the high end of the local market (which I define to be around C$200k base for non-MANGA companies). Others decide to offer the US range (US$180-200k), which is of course better but in some cases has the drawback of being a contractor.
- Demand in my field (DevOps/SRE/cloud infra) hasn't changed much. Still multiple pings a week from recruiters, down from multiple a day. Not a problem getting interviews, at all. Had multiple offers already but looking for a better fit.
- Few attempts at take-home exercises. I generally refuse these outright unless they are paid; some companies react to that by simply waiving the take-home.
Some things that did change...
- the remarkable extent to which US salaries are outliers worldwide is beginning to have an effect. Every single company I worked at for the last decade had non-NA dev teams, usually at the periphery (support, integrations, follow-the-sun ops). Now core teams are distributed and dev work is shifting away from high-cost centers. One example I saw is in Gergely's "which companies are still hiring" spreadsheet -- how many of these companies are not looking in US at all, or are Europe-/Asia-centric?
- startup non-base comp is becoming a really bad deal, even for Series A. I was offered some shares, even with the founder's own rosy projections an exit for me would be a nice bonus at most. Why deal with the stress if there's no meaningful payback at the end?
- some smaller companies asking LC Hards all of a sudden. To me that just feels like someone out of Google founding a startup and having no idea how to hire non-developers.
- people having less filter in general. One of the best things I really started doing in my interviews is shutting up and listening instead of working to sell myself / ask questions. People will admit amazing things about the company or about the level of fit / misfit for a role when they try to fill in the silence.
- as a corollary, how do interviewers behave if they sense it's likely not a fit? Do they start trash talking your experience / chances of success / achievable salary, or just let it go? I've had a recruiter try to convince me there aren't offers at 175 base + in Canada. I've had a founder tell me no one will offer me a manager role (after a 30 minute interview wherein they talked most of the time and barely asked me anything). Just take a bit of time to listen and the trash will sort itself out.
#ATXJobs #jobs
Engineering: Principal C++ Engineer - Remote https://hire.lever.co/jobs/internal/480a3819-a573-47b6-9e83-...
Engineering: Senior C++ Software Engineer - Remote https://hire.lever.co/jobs/internal/8975c3da-5bbb-40c6-8813-...
Engineering: Senior Cloud Engineer - Remote https://hire.lever.co/jobs/internal/e0573a22-ea25-48f3-80b8-...
Engineering: Senior UX Designer - US Remote https://hire.lever.co/jobs/internal/979e375f-d87f-49bd-ac27-...
Engineering: Sr. Software Development Engineer - US Remote https://hire.lever.co/jobs/internal/3a74b305-c866-4341-abc3-...
IT/Dev Ops: Lead Dev Ops Sys Admin - US Remote https://hire.lever.co/jobs/internal/0138eb4e-a717-438f-9aa9-...
IT/Network & IT Systems: Business Application Developer - US Remote https://hire.lever.co/jobs/internal/56211e7c-82d1-4038-91ac-...
IT/Network & IT Systems: Senior Directory of Customer Information Security - Remote https://hire.lever.co/jobs/internal/1a6c54b1-8f70-47bd-bdd9-...
Support: Senior Support Engineer - Remote https://hire.lever.co/jobs/internal/89ac8232-1a98-4cb9-9149-...
Support: Senior Technical Consultant - Remote https://hire.lever.co/jobs/internal/97df98a8-24dc-45f0-9b36-...
Marketing/Digital & Demand Generation: Data Marketing Analyst - Remote https://hire.lever.co/jobs/internal/f01ecfef-bfe3-491f-85c0-...
Marketing/Product Marketing: Product Marketing Manager - Remote https://hire.lever.co/jobs/internal/8c0b7a5c-43aa-40b1-8b5b-...
Marketing/Sr. Product Marketing Manager - Remote https://hire.lever.co/jobs/internal/b30d2148-f5c5-49dc-bee7-...
Sales/Sales Engineering: Cloud Sales Engineer - Remote https://hire.lever.co/jobs/internal/9f6a0e71-662c-4f07-9005-...
Sales/Sales Engineering: Inside Sales Engineer - Remote https://hire.lever.co/jobs/internal/deb33f8c-b325-419a-abbd-...
Sales/Strategic Alliance: Revenue Operations Manager - Remote https://hire.lever.co/jobs/internal/c6d516e8-b95d-4a67-b215-...
Finance/Sales Operations: Sr. Manager Sales Operations and Compensations - Remote https://hire.lever.co/jobs/internal/6d29d877-8342-44ac-95ff-...
But anyway - we're always hiring if you're into small consulting companies. We mostly do AWS, Azure, and not a lot of GCP (sad because I like GCP), and it's almost 100% K8s. You will have to be able to get a CKA, CKAD, or CKS at some point. Need to be in the US.
Send resumes to Josh@BoxBoat.Com
Perhaps now one may say, it is time to 'learn to adapt', since with the recent release of ChatGPT now gives the excuse for managers to be more motivated to hire less engineers and programmers as the cheap money has essentially evaporated.
So this time it is indeed different and I would expect less engineers to be hired and more programming jobs to become very competitive. No-one is safe; and that includes 'seniors'.