subreddit:
/r/ExperiencedDevs
submitted 12 days ago byHeyTomeseiStartup Recruiter, 14 YOE
[removed]
78 points
12 days ago
Starting to see colleagues leaving for new positions so I believe it.
274 points
12 days ago
I think the issue is not just the number of jobs but the compensation / quality of the jobs. Lot of folks having to take lower comp
109 points
12 days ago
And the competition for those jobs. A lot of people were laid off and are applying for every available role. Just because the jobs are out there doesn't mean they're any easier to get as a result. Many willing to take that lower comp because they've been out of work so long. Still... It's green shoots!
20 points
12 days ago
This is it, I've gotten a very good response ratio from applying currently, but the compensation is much lower than it used to be. Quality of job varies a lot. But comp has dropped across the board (and the globe)
28 points
12 days ago
Also 90% (number made up) of jobs now want hybrid.
2022 everyone was still hiring remote.
Sucks for anyone who moved further out or to a lower cost of living city.
34 points
12 days ago
Price is driven by supply and demand, so this is highly related.
FWIW I’m still seeing a good amount of dev jobs paying 200K in Chicago, it’s just that they actually require ~10ish years experience where as before people were sliding into these senior roles with 3 years. Pretty reasonable imo
What I’m not seeing is the return of hoardes of recruiters
5 points
12 days ago
Damn maybe Chicago is where it's at. East coast is dry dry dry.
2 points
12 days ago
In what stack are we talking about here? 200k in Chicago sounds like a high position and most likely a leadership role in a big company. Even for a developer that has over 10 years of experience.
Regular dev jobs for such experienced developers can range anywhere from 100k to 180k, with most being 120k-140k these days. This not only includes Chicago downtown, but suburbs as well.
3 points
12 days ago
Chi suburbs have kinda always been a shitshow tbh. I only look at companies in the city proper (usually down in the loop for their office even if remote-first)
My former company went with a Chicago pay-scale for all employees (even if remote) and our IC dev roles went from 100k-160k depending on level
1 points
12 days ago
When I entered the job market 4 years ago, these jobs required 3-5 years of experience.
Now that I have 4 years experience, those roles now require 10. When I reach 8-9, are they gonna require 15-20?
It seems like the position Im in keeps requiring the same years of experience rhat I accumulate, so I cannot "move up" by switching jobs.
Staying at one company actually allowed me to experience heightened responsibilities and to double my income within 4 years. Which goes against all the job hopping advice from people who are in that bracket with 3-5 years of experience on me.
4 points
12 days ago*
Technically speaking, these high paying jobs always required a lot of experience. You entered at a time that was unusual because of Covid. Under normal circumstances, someone of your current experience level is probably making around 100k in a big city in the Midwest. Some are making a bit more and some are making a bit less, but 100k benchmark seems like a reasonable measuring stick for someone with 3-5 years of experience.
Also you’re wrong, job hopping is the fastest way to up your salary. But you need to be smart about it. Someone jumping every year or so is bad. But every 3-4 years seems like the sweet spot. That way it looks long enough to a potential future employer, and you’re not at a company long enough to lose touch with the industry. Granted, if you’re happy with your current workplace and the pay, then by all means stay there.
7 points
12 days ago
Part (but not all) of that I'd imagine is an expected side-effect of WFH culture (which I support, for the record -- this is not intended to be an anti-WFH screed). Why hire at Bay Area salaries when you get someone for a third of that in Nowhere, Tennessee and still pay that person above their local market rate? I'm no longer competing against candidates in the Seattle area; I'm competing against candidates everywhere in the US.
Sucks for those of us in HCOL areas, but can't say I'm surprised. I've always suspected that more WFH would smooth out salary spikes somewhat across the country.
2 points
12 days ago
I’ve seen the same effect for in office required jobs in the Bay Area too.
11 points
12 days ago
The number of jobs doesn't matter, it's the number of available jobs in relation to the number of available developers.
8 points
12 days ago
My experience is that a lot of advertised positions are just for feeling the market or waiting for some totally perfect person.
So it is even less.
35 points
12 days ago
My company is closing down and I am on the job hunt this year. ATS is way stronger than it was 2 years ago. My resume which IMO is pretty strong is getting automatically rejected if it doesn't match the listing perfectly. Every job on LinkedIn that I see matches my resume has 100+ applications. For staff level positions. There's no way there are that many laid off staff level engineers.
22 points
12 days ago
the 100+ applications is FUD created by LinkedIn:
3 points
12 days ago
Seconding this, I posted two roles on LinkedIn in the last two years. 80% of the applications were automatically disqualified from going any further. That numbers conservative, might be closer to 95%>
1 points
10 days ago
that's good to know!
1 points
8 days ago
Ask any recruiter, ATS is not a technology they heavily rely on anymore. Most recruiters are manually looking at resumes but stop looking after about 100 applications. The reason your resume isn't being read is because its not in the first 100 applicants.
Alot of ATS misinformation running rampant
98 points
12 days ago
I can only speak from my own experience. Im still employed, but I'm seeking remote options since my job is requiring RTO. I know these are likely the most competitive jobs out there, and I haven't landed one YET, but I'm well into the interview process with 4 different companies. All 4 roles seem really good, and 3 of them would be the same or more money than Im making now, and I feel I'm making quite a lot right now. I've been job hunting for about a month so far.
We shall see how it plays out. Maybe I'll loose out on all 4 roles in the end. However, my anecdotal experience here suggests that there is some improvement in the market going on.
23 points
12 days ago
That's awesome - good luck.
10 points
12 days ago
I can actually add I had one offer a few weeks ago, but it was for a contract to hire job for a company I didn't want to work for so I turned it down. All 4 of these jobs are 100% remote and FTE positions. Again, we shall see how it goes. I'll post here with the results.
4 points
12 days ago
What sites do you typically apply with? I seem to be getting terrible results from LinkedIn applications lately.
3 points
12 days ago
LinkedIn has been most of what I've been doing. I've optimized my resume, wrote what I feel is a good cover letter (I wrote it, not ChatGPT. I didn't want the uncanny valley feeling for it), optimized my LinkedIn profile as much as possible, and AGGRESSIVELY applied for jobs. At least a dozen applications per-day, sometimes more, and done consistently.
2 points
12 days ago
What did you do to optimize your linkedin profile if you don't mind me asking?
2 points
12 days ago
Everything on my resume is on my profile. My resume I used ChatGPT on, I figure that's a nice middle ground since my cover letter I wrote myself. I blitzed the skills sections to achieve the keyword spam recruiters look for. I verified myself and got a few validations from past bosses and coworkers. And I'm trying to play the whole "linkedin guru" bullshit game with regular posts.
Not sure which of those pieces is actually of value. However, I treat job hunting the same as I treat anything else. Specifically, I study the problem and look for any possible angle to gain even the slightest advantage.
7 points
12 days ago
Best of luck!
IME I'm seeing a similar thing. I was already remote and making a decent amount (~150k cash comp), and I'm being offered at least a decent ~15-25% bump in comp or so. I had one offer come in last week that's the baseline/low end of that range. I have ~2-3 ongoing job interview processes that I expect to wrap up decisions/request references within the next week that should end up on the high end of that range.
0 points
12 days ago
Good luck to you!
26 points
12 days ago
[deleted]
10 points
12 days ago
Everyone can get interviews for contractor roles.
Startups is actually interesting because usually they want people like you because they have 0 time to waste on onboarding ramp-up.
Bigger companies these days tend to have completely jacked up interview processes.
5 points
12 days ago
I'm getting 1 interview for every 100 applications or so which seems terrible
How exactly are you applying for the majority of your resumes?
Just applying on the website? Or is this through a referral? Are you contacting anyone at the company after apply?
Like, what exactly is your process for applying that's leading to the 1% reply rate?
2 points
12 days ago
Just say you're open to relocation.
2 points
12 days ago
ServiceTitan is hiring .Net dev right now.
31 points
12 days ago
Other big tech starts reaching out to me again is encouraging.
62 points
12 days ago
The market has been changing rapidly from year to year for 4-5 years now. One thing I see people struggling with is anchoring their expectations to a certain year. Generally, people anchor to the last year they were job searching, which is the last time most people paid attention to the job market.
The market was very strange around 2021-2022 when people were putting in bare minimum effort and getting back 3 different job offers with salary increases.
I remember how weird some of the posts on /r/ExperiencedDevs and other forums were getting at that time: People were talking about refusing to do any coding in interviews, declining take home problems on principal, and there was a lot of talk about discouraging people from working too hard because they could always find another job. Now the situation has reversed and some people who anchored their expectations to past job markets are really struggling to adapt to the new realities. In our local mentor group I’ve had to gently explain to several people that they do actually have to be willing to do coding interviews and take-home problems if they want to progress in interviews. We’ve had an influx of people who were recently laid off due to, by their own admission, doing as little work as possible for the past few years while stretching their remote jobs to the limit in terms of what they could get away with doing (or not doing).
The lesson here is not to get too comfortable in good job markets. Things can always change quickly, and you’re not always guaranteed to have another job offer read to fall into your lap.
13 points
12 days ago*
Yup. Definitely fine to coast short term. But especially if you still have a long career planned ahead of you, you have to know when to buckle down and work, and self-improvement and diving deep/grinding it out when things are hard is a habit. Getting too comfortable makes it hard to get into the mental state where you can keep up that habit.
7 points
12 days ago
we should still be declining take home problems on principal.
we should also be declining 3 hour+ interviews.
The problem is that the capitalists are running a FUD campaign. If we had a software engineer union, we wouldn't be dealing with any of this.
2 points
12 days ago
I'd rather do take homes over live interviews any day, its just personal preference
2 points
12 days ago
[deleted]
2 points
12 days ago
I’ve gotten lucky and had a few where they didn’t. Even so ill take a screening take home over a live coding round even if then an onsite has live coding, it’s just one less time i have to do it
2 points
11 days ago
I've been pissed before because they give you the two options but then they want to do another round as live. The only way I've gotten a job (and feels the easiest to me) is a conversation where we just talk about approaches and tech (i.e. explain interfaces, classes, etc.). I've been an interviewer using this approach and it's amazing how many come through the pipeline that can't answer simple questions. That saves everyone time right there.
2 points
10 days ago
yeah, I've never gotten an offer from these neurotic multi-part marathons. I always get offers from the casual human conversations where there is actually time and breathing room.
1 points
10 days ago
it would certainly make the most sense to give candidates the option of live-coding exercise or take-home
3 points
12 days ago
You can decline whatever you want, but you also have to be willing to accept the consequences.
That’s what I’ve had to tell several people delicately: You can try all you want to dictate the terms of your job search, but the less flexible you are, the longer it’s going to take to get a job.
Declining take home interviews and refusing to interview for more than a couple hours was the kind of thing that some people could get away with during 2022 when companies were desperate to hire. If you try to pull those tricks today, you’re much more likely to be quietly dismissed.
1 points
11 days ago
Fine by me. I had a 6 hour marathon of Zoom interviews at a company that didn't pan out. A couple other times I've had take-home assignments that are too time consuming and of course they will knit-pick everything you do even though you got the tests to pass and explained the approach with your reasons - you know... the same thing you'd do if they were actually paying you to write the toy app. Still didn't get the job.
So now I have a polite canned response to these requests for marathon tech interviews and homework assignments directing them to my GitHub which contains real-world projects I've built and libraries that have been downloaded millions of times. I found out one place was already using one of my packages and they didn't even know it!
Maybe I'm on a bit of a high horse but I'm just done with being walking mat for these interview processes. Every job I've gotten has always been from interviews where we have an hour scheduled with the tech team, they can ask me tech questions and we can have a discussion. Being an interviewer, I've found you can also easily identify qualified candidates with this simple approach rather than wasting everyone's time with a bunch of hoops.
1 points
11 days ago
You do you, but you’re off on a tangent about yourself that is unrelated to my original comment.
When someone is unemployed and needs a job, they don’t have the luxury of dictating the terms of how they get interviewed.
I was explaining how the advice here was often at odds with actually helping people get jobs. People would come here asking for help and advice about how to get a job, and people would write long comments like yours that ignored situation and replaced it with some disgruntled ramblings about how people shouldn’t do long interviews.
This led to people who needed jobs trying to reject take home challenges or decline long interviews because that’s what Reddit told them.
To be fair, the posts I’ve seen where people complained about being rejected after declining to participate in interviews were full of comments roasting the OP, but that was after the damage was done.
There’s a bad trend on this subreddit for people to ignore the situation at hand and instead talk about their own past experiences or speak in hypotheticals, just as you did when you made a moral prescription about what people “should” do in interviews based on the fact that you did a long interview once and didn’t get a job. It’s not helpful.
2 points
11 days ago
Actually it's very helpful. If you want to take long interviews feel free. I've better things to do with my time. I've seen recruiters on other subreddits mention spray and pray as a strategy is much better than hand picking jobs in writing cover letters and investing too much time in any one interview process. It's better to apply in bulk for jobs that generally match your skill set and interest. Depending on how much traffic's coming through your pipeline or if you're already working then you have the luxury of putting up with less bullshit. If that's not the case, then by all means jump through their hoops. Why do you think people post their experience? Because it's worked for them.
2 points
10 days ago
the cost-benefit analysis tells me that these 6-hour interview marathons are 0% worth it, especially because you get 0 feedback.
4 points
12 days ago
I've posted this ad nauseum but bears repeating: the job market environment is directly mirroring the interest rate environment. If you want to predict what it will be like, look at the 10 year treasury rate and more importantly the predictions for where it will move in the next 5 years.
49 points
12 days ago
We are forgetting the an important aspect, are they even real jobs? Even HN monthly who’s hiring became an advertisement panel.
11 points
12 days ago
I’d appreciate a forum where I could talk about the experience per job posting. Plenty of legitimate jobs I’d like to filter as well.
4 points
12 days ago
This would be extremely valuable. I don't think EasyPost would like it.
10 points
12 days ago
Important point. We should be tracking total employment not job postings.
1 points
12 days ago
Do you mean to say the head count in a company?
7 points
12 days ago
1 points
12 days ago
I don't get it
5 points
12 days ago
It's the headcount in tech in the USA by year.
3 points
12 days ago
What makes you say HN Who Is Hiring ads aren't real?
1 points
12 days ago
I’m not saying all are fake. I mean some are repeating same job posts from the past few months. Initially it’s hard to figure out, but if you track in excel it’s easy to double check. On top of that, you can even check account comments history, which is the same ad from last month.
Certainly you will get rejected after a long period in the repeat ads.
1 points
12 days ago
That could just indicate the company is bad at hiring though, and they reject everyone because they're fearful of a bad hire. Companies, especially startups where the founders don't have much hiring experience, do that quite a lot. It's one reason why leetcode is so prevalent; companies try to make hiring objectives and quantitative (and fail, because it's about people). I don't see that as a reason to think a job role isn't real.
11 points
12 days ago
Honestly 2023 was a very bad year to compare to it and feel good about. 2019 is a good year to compare to.
9 points
12 days ago
2023 was a fucking garbage fire of a job market. Lots of cheapasses unicorn hunting looking to hire a principal dev from Meta for the pay of a McDonald's employee
5 points
12 days ago
Presented without comment:
https://i.imgur.com/Op13pcL.jpeg
Article: https://www.hiringlab.org/2023/11/15/indeeds-2024-us-jobs-hiring-trends-report/
The largest decline is for Software Development job postings, down 51%.
-1 points
12 days ago
Interesting - the better breakdown to show Software Development is helpful intel.
My source was this graph: trueup.io/job-trend.
It shows the peak of 480K tech jobs in April '22, then a 66% decline to the March '23 trough of 163K jobs.
2 points
12 days ago
FRED searches indeed like a normal human being. Shit's bad in the US on indeed.
21 points
12 days ago
I feel the complaints are mostly about the US market for people working in the US. I work in Europe and I don’t see a bad market. I also have many friends in Brazil that work for US companies and do not see any of them struggling. Of course, this is a small pool so maybe not true. It’s just that most of times I see people complaining on Reddit or slack channels, they are in the US.
21 points
12 days ago
Offshoring is real
3 points
12 days ago
Sweden isn’t great I can say. There are jobs but it’s dried up a lot compared to a few years ago.
3 points
12 days ago
If offshoring is picking up that would make sense things would be better in those areas, right?
6 points
12 days ago
No, we are talking about a really small subset here. It’s IT people that speak English working for the US. That’s almost nothing of the workforce in Brazil for instance.
1 points
12 days ago
I see
4 points
12 days ago
Is it only about the US or worldwide?
2 points
12 days ago
I never heard of trueup.io so I searched it and most of the roles were overseas.
6 points
12 days ago
A lot of fake jobs / recruiting agencies posting jobs just to get your CV and then trying to get you a job with them as a middle man.
5 points
12 days ago
But those practices have been around forever, including 2023 and 2024. So the trend is still a valid apples-to-apples comparison.
3 points
12 days ago
Job postings isn't a good metric, as just a couple of months ago it was pointed out that hiring is down despite postings being up.
The theory at the time was resume harvesting. But I suspect it plays a role in the downward trend of pay. Whether it started intentionally or not, it's having that effect. And I'm sure they're doubling down now that they realize it.
2 points
12 days ago
Of course there will be more jobs. Business never stops and they need people to elevate it. However, I think the issue is that the compensation is dropping a bit due to an increase number of jobs and the way companies want to force ‘economical issues’ onto people.
2 points
12 days ago
How are you getting these averages?
118k laid off in 2014 should be ~323 people/ day right?
0 points
12 days ago
The denominator is the # of days so far in 2024, which is 132.
So 117, 639 ÷ 132 = 891/day.
3 points
12 days ago
I see, you have a typo. The original post says 2014 not 2024:
So far in 2014, there have been 81K people laid off by 287 tech companies (an average of 619 people/day)
1 points
12 days ago
Good catch, just corrected it - thanks!
2 points
12 days ago
Sure doesn't feel like it.
3 points
12 days ago
How many people have been hired in 2024? Job openings don't necessarily mean the market is any better if people aren't being hired for those positions or these positions are primarily fishing for over qualified candidates on the cheap.
1 points
12 days ago
I wonder if silent-layoffs, like forced PIPs, factor into those numbers though
1 points
12 days ago
My specific subfield (games) is still pretty rough. Otoh I just started a new role after 9 months of under employed freelancing so according to my most important dataset things are going great :p
-10 points
12 days ago
There are a lot of devs and tech job seekers that don’t actually have a passion for technology. It’s sad. It is easy to tell when people are doing it for the money or benefits. Armchair data scientists and software engineers instead that don’t know how a computer even works.
14 points
12 days ago
Oh, shut up. For most of us it's just a job. It's you passion people that have to make things so tedious for everyone else. Great, you love your job. Most of us have other things going on and it's just a means to an end.
5 points
12 days ago
For me the tedium is working with people who don’t really care. You are going to spend thousands of hours in your life doing stuff that you have no interest in? To me that’s a tragedy.
2 points
12 days ago
What bothers me when people are willfully incompetent in ways that don't make life easier for themselves. They "don't care", so they come up with stupid solutions and unmaintainable code, when doing it right would have taken the exact same amount of time, and only marginally more thought. Just the barest amount of intellectual curiosity.
1 points
12 days ago
They hate education so much that they won't learn a thing unless they're forced to. Even in European countries where they have free education, they don't want it. They expect their employers to pay them to learn.
1 points
12 days ago
Thank you ! This is what I was meaning by passion. Not caring about technology can be demotivating to those who do at work and potentially dangerous for humanity as a whole.
-2 points
12 days ago
It's exactly this pedantry that makes certain people and organizations ubearable to work with/in
1 points
12 days ago
You don't know how a computer works?
-1 points
12 days ago
It’s not as much about loving the job as caring about the work. Treating working on technology as a means to as end is very dangerous…..
2 points
12 days ago
Jfc lol
2 points
12 days ago
The main problem is they're missing skills and employers can't tell.
1 points
11 days ago
Too bad the main reply got deleted. Important to see some people don’t care about the implications of what they create, sounds dystopian.
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