How is your job search going?

I was laid off as a JavaScript developer last from a job where I wasn’t even really writing JavaScript at that job.

After 6 months of what felt like lying on a resume to compete with children I gave up. Then Raytheon contacted me to do geospatial engineering. That was going to be a very long drive through very heavy traffic. While I was waiting on security clearance validation a different group reached to me with a work from home position for a little less money doing enterprise API management.

Shortly after taking that job I made a promise to myself that I would never take a JavaScript job again. I still write JavaScript/TypeScript applications for personal use though. I have since been promoted twice and enjoy the work much more even though I really like writing JavaScript. I am not around a bunch of pretenders afraid to touch a keyboard without two or more ridiculously massive frameworks telling them exactly how to proceed.

My best recommendation is if you cannot find employment doing what you know or don’t like what you are doing try something wildly different.

Absolutely horrible! I am about to complete my MS EECS degree and have been applying to SWE or MLE roles. Even with my previous ~3 years of Backend Dev experience I am not able to get past resume screening. I just get auto rejected all the time.

Doesn't help the fact that I have been in the US for a little bit more than a year and half, so building a network is pretty hard. Attended a hackathon, won 2nd prize with my team and tried to leverage something from there but no luck at all.

Makes me feel that I might be missing something but no idea what's wrong with my profile. (I don't need sponsorship too).

I can't help but feel like I lucked into easy mode given the general consensus that everything sucks right now. Applied to 10 places (mix of FAANG and small startups) after taking a year off from work. Heard back from 5, somehow got offers from all 5 and am starting at one of them next month.

It took a fair bit of prep to get back into things - especially when it comes to system design interviews - but otherwise everything went fine. Really enjoyed how some companies are trying non-leetcode approaches lately like code review and debugging sessions.

Started prepping/interviewing in Oct after reading this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41402581

Secured interviews with Facebook, Databricks, Snowflake, and Stripe (3 referrals, 1 recruiter reach out).

Bombed the FB phone screen due to nerves/first interview of the cycle. Completed the remaining three loops by December, and got offers from Databricks and Snowflake (Stripe went on two week holiday break and hasn’t gotten back to me yet).

Accepted the Databricks offer!

Happy to talk about practice/process (within the limits of the interview NDAs)!

I have a job, but it's in a terrible department. I've been actively looking and posting internally. I've been looking externally too, but haven't posted externally.

I've been looking for over a year and there have been extremely few internal postings around my level/role. External postings in my area seem to be mostly garbage, both in the sense that they aren't actually hiring and also the ones who are have terrible culture or pay.

Over the past year, I've probably interviewed for 6 internal roles, most in the past 6 months. I've declined 2 of the postions due their team being even worse than my current one. I have one that I did well on and could result in a double promotion. I should find out about that soon, but I'm really not hopeful. I'm surprised they even took me as a candidate given I'm 2 grades below it.

It seems like it's picking up internally at least. Maybe that will translate to more external jobs next.

It hasn't been great. Applying for jobs in this market while having the post-MSc burnout has been tough. I finished an MSC in AI back in June, but there are so few AI-relevant jobs where I live it's depressing. I've interview for data science and analyst roles, but barely get in the door.

I'm getting a good amount of interviews for developer and data engineering positions, but the competition is tough. Many positions have seen a 5x increase in candidates since the same time last year, according to my interviewers.

However, I'm hopefully getting an offer as a data platform engineer soon. The department leader has ranked me as their first choice, so unless the higher-ups complain... Knock on wood.

It is not going bad at all. I work as a contractor with EU/US companies that outsource to Asia. And I get paid 35$-40$/hr, which here is a huge sum of money to earn here (2-4x the local rate). In 2024 I was able to choose from 6 different clients, I worked with 4 and made it into 2025 with 2 clients. I am expecting for 2025 to be the same. The interviews are usually all just meeting the team, no technical interviews, then start, work down a backlog in my preferred stack for months + meetings - rinse and repeat. Different clients, same work. Scrum seems to be dead in 2024 as well.

There have been a handful of these threads on HN lately, I thought I'd chime in as someone on the other end hiring engineers, recently.

- If you're using the new "AI Tools" to auto-apply, especially if there are additional questions asked in the application that you use AI to auto-fill - it's relatively easy to spot, and is an immediate disqualifier for me. (fwiw - it may seem like it's providing good/unique answers, but if you get 100 applications from people using ~similar tools, guess what, many of the answers are ~similar or follow the same format)

Sure - AI is increasingly more a part of all our workflows these days, but I'm still hiring a human and so want to hear from the human.

- Speaking of applications with additional questions on them - if the application has those questions, answer them! The more thoughtful, the better. Why half-ass the first step of the interview process?

- There are hundreds of applicants for every job, plain and simple - a resume is not enough. Everyone has experience, and education, and skills, and it all just blends together. You need to stand out. Whether thats your GitHub contributions, a link to a personal website with writings or projects, personal side-projects or cool hobby hacks you've worked on - you need to have something you can point to and standout.

When I get several hundred applications for a role - I can quickly narrow down to a top 5% or fewer just by those that put in effort and had something to showcase.

Hopefully some helpful suggestions to someone.

Very bad. In my country, even though I have an excellent master degree, 2 years of work experience in decent sized companies, I'm having a hard time finding a new ideal job as a backend engineer. I want to change my job because this job is 996.There are very few companies that are hiring, and even if they do, it's a 996 job too.

My wife has been looking for a Javascript/React developer role for the last 6+ months in London with no luck. Not even a single interview call. We relocated from India to the UK for my job. She has 5+ years react experience in a startup in the business analytics space. She also has some backend experience in python, springboot, postgresql etc. She's comfortable in a Linux development environment.

I thought getting a web developer job in London should be easy because like everyone needs a web developer, right? But it's shocking to see rejections after rejections just at a resume level, even for a position in a company in a similar business analytics domain :-(.

Not great so far.

I've applied to about 5 jobs on Upwork and the clients still haven't even hired anyone.

The year is just starting, hopeful still.

I personally gave up on attempting to find a job. I’ve been learning about trading and my best buddy trades for a living, so I’m jumping full time on that because might as well…

The usual disclaimers apply about losing money etc etc… but apart from the job situation I’ve been getting more and more disillusioned my the tech industry, or rather, big tech and all the crap that has infected what seems like every tech company.

I don’t have any recommendations apart from, explore alternate source of income, I’m working, apart from trading on at Etsy shop and some electronic projects.

It’s also been a good time (since Medicaid is better than any other health insurance) to work on my mental health as well. It is hard to find motivation to do anything when I’m looking at over a decade of experience that I have now being almost worthless…

Now that ZIRP era is over, it feels like the AI space is the new tech space.

Senseless investments and exits and high salaries moved to AI and they're hard to find in normal startups. I have two active contracts totalling more than 0.4M€ and I've been working 70+h weeks from how much work there is.

I also fear things will get worse at some point, so it's better to make the most of it.

If I had more free time or downtime from work, I would work on building some products.

Was Searching from July till October, landed a job as a Fullstack TS dev.

While I'm really grateful for having an income, I wouldn't want to do this for more than 2 years. Hopefully they either give me a project that's peaks my interest more or I find a different positions (hey Rust companies!)

I don't even really bother anymore. It's such a giant fraud and time-suck.

We all know that society is propped up by people going to work and doing nothing much of value. But now the do-nothingness pervades even the recruiting stage. It's such an empty faff. WTF are they doing? Why bother? I guess automation makes it cost-free to churn out bullshit job posts and waste our time endlessly; there's no human cost to the perpetrators.

It really does make you wonder about the collapse of our society.

I went from zero monthly LinkedIn messages from recruiters to 2 in December. So one could say infinitely better?

But realistically these contacts have little chance to materialize into a solid, well-paying job.

Awful, and the part of the country I live in doesn’t help at all.

Horrendous. 3 months in. O interviews.

Full stack web development, native mobile apps. Tech lead/architect.

Good, not great. The Market is still terrible.

  Location: Yerevan, Armenia(UTC+4, but willing to work in US timezones)
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies:
    - TypeScript, C#, Python, Go, Rust
    - Next.js, React, Angular
    - SQL, PostgreSQL
    - Azure, GCP
  Résumé/CV: 
    https://www.linkedin.com/in/vadimpashkov
    https://drive.google.com/file/d/1N-0hp0OjlMSWGHaNWkggoxGyfamos3IP/view
  Email: vad.pashkov@gmail.com

I'm Vadim, a full-stack software engineer with a degree in software engineering and computer science and 16 YoE working in companies of all sizes: from small, startup-like companies to tech giants like Google. My core principles at work are to do the right thing, consistently ship, and communicate effectively.

Absolutely brutal, difficult.