[sokoloff]

Given the trouble we have hiring, it’s hard for me to imagine someone qualified to be a median talent software engineer would have trouble easily finding new employment elsewhere. (The median interview candidate is much, much worse than the median engineer because the worse you interview, the more frequently you show up on interview loops.)

If you’re median or better and in a city with a reasonable tech scene, you are probably going to have a straightforward path. If you’re median or better and not where tech is, look for remote jobs (admittedly harder) or move where tech is.

If your skills are notably below the median, staying put and working on your skills might be the most sensible course and changing jobs once you can interview and place well.

[FZ1]

How many people respond to your job ads? Where I live (major US metropolis), it's about 200-700 per job (according to linkedin, anyways).

The biggest trouble for a soft. eng is getting to a real person. Once that is done, convincing them that you're median or better is the easy part. Most resumes are just screened out by a machine, or reviewed by a clueless HR dept that has no idea what a median-talent software engineer looks like.

I have taught hundreds of CS undergrads in this city, and have had some of the very brightest tell me they've put out 500-600 resumes, and never heard back a thing. Many do get jobs though - even some of the worst performers.

It's very hit-and-miss - not nearly as deterministic as you make it sound.

[sokoloff]

I totally agree with your points, especially the last, and didn’t mean to suggest it was deterministic at all.

Interviewing is a lossy, semi-random practice for both sides. Candidates and firms take different approaches to address this randomness, but it’s still ultimately not a digitally precise (repeatable) not even especially accurate system. You could be the next Jon Carmack and fail to get an offer from 10 straight interviews for relevant positions. “Too experienced; we don’t really do what he’s interested in; bad culture fit; too good culture fit-we want more diversity; simply preferred another candidate; decided to not move forward with the role; lost the budget; existing employee transferred; never was a real open position anyway but we legally had to advertise it...”

[CathedralBorrow]

Do they just sit and wait to hear back and then give up when they don't?

[FZ1]

What else are they supposed to do? Apply to the same job again? There's little you can do if you never make contact or hear back. You just apply to other positions. But what if you don't hear from those either ... ?

Open to suggestions here - but no stalker advice, please - I do not condone friending hiring managers on linkedin/fb, or some of the other creepy tactics we've seen recently.

I think the skillful students generally believe that investing effort to become skillful is all that's needed - and that doing so will eventually pay off.

This is sadly not really true as a general statement.

I have had many 'successful' students - who got more than one offer to choose from. Once, I asked one - who now works at a major investment bank - "so, great job - any advice I should pass on to other students if they ask about job-hunting?" (taking note for myself also - as I am a soft. eng mainly, and only teach part-time).

I expected something like "invest in your skills" or python, or java, or databases, or interview questions ...

The response was: "yeah - copy and paste the job description to the bottom of your resume, and turn the font color to white - so humans can't see it, but the machine will still read it and label you a good match for the job".

My point here is that the current system seems to work best for those who 'game' it to behave in unintentional ways - as opposed to filtering for actually skillful applicants.

[inertiatic]

My experience is that people are rejected for no good reason apart from somebody not liking something, usually not well defined, about them.

That's what I've observed for very competent people around me as well.

Most of the companies I've worked for also rejected candidates for arbitrary reasons and also had "trouble hiring".

[UncleOxidant]

Are you sure that many resumes of qualified candidates aren't screened out prior to making it to your desk? Hiring websites are awful. And there's absolutely no quality control - how do you even know who's not making it through who probably should be? Is anybody actually doing that kind of testing?

> (The median interview candidate is much, much worse than the median engineer because the worse you interview, the more frequently you show up on interview loops.)

Not sure I understand what you're saying here. People who haven't needed to interview in a long time are probably not good at interviewing but good engineers nonetheless. Conversely, people who are good at interviewing might be because they've had a lot of practice.

[sokoloff]

If you assume some correlation, even imperfect, between SWE effectiveness and interview performance, the least effective SWEs are likely to both be looking for work more often and require more interviews per successful job search, so will be way over-represented in the “who applies to interview” pool.

Joel Spolsky said it well: “A lot of companies think they're hiring the top 1 percent because they get 100 resumés for every open position. They're kidding themselves. When you fill an opening, think about what happens to the 99 people you turn away. They don't give up and go into plumbing. They apply for another job. There's a floating population of applicants in your industry that apply for nearly every opening posted online, even though many of them are qualified for virtually none of these positions.“

[Gunax]

I'm having a hard time getting a job and this hurts :(

[thiagomgd]

Don't pay much attention to what Sokoloff said. In theory, he's kinda right, but that's not how it works in the real world. And I don't know if you and him/her live in the same area/country.

I've had a rough time looking for jobs, due to 2 main reasons: not getting it right when adapting the resume to a job posting. Many ATS just discard resumes that doesn't have the exact words that they use on the job posting. Even if you are saying the same thing with different words...

The other was the phone interviews, made by a HR person looking for who knows what. For most applies that I did, I didn't get a phone interview. After phone interviews, didn't hear back.

I only got 2 technical interviews for like, 100 applications. One was for the job I'm currently in, the other I declined because I got the job offer to my current job. Both I got through recommendations, even if the people recommending me didn't know me. But they looked at my resume and put it stray to the HR manager for them to talk to me.

I also had a friend (not in IT) that was not getting anything. I told he to look for recommendations. She went to LinkedIn, found someone that worked or used to work at a company she wanted to go, and talked to the person, got recommended, and got the job.

edit: this in Canada

[rgoulter]

I hope this helps: https://danluu.com/hiring-lemons/