[throwawayc2020]

I think it's partly market conditions, but also I think the interview process changed a lot in the past five years and I didn't change with it.

There are plenty of jobs out there, but a lot of competition. One place said they received over 1,000 applications for one role.

[sdevonoes]

> There are plenty of jobs out there, but a lot of competition. One place said they received over 1,000 applications for one role.

I don't get it. (Tech) companies out there are paying a lot of money to hire developers right now. How is this possible if they receive over 1,000 applications? If that were true they were paying peanuts because at least 1 in those 1,000 applicants will say 'Yes'.

[peruvian]

Because it's not 1k qualified people applying to the job. Also, retaining engineers for more than one or two years is a problem our industry has.

Software Engineering jobs get applications from people all over the place. Our industry is "open" compared to similarly paid professions.

You wouldn't apply to a finance job without a relevant degree or experience, you need to go med school or pharmacy school for medical fields, you need to go to law school or at least pass the bar exam for law jobs.

Meanwhile I work with devs who studied Comp Sci, random liberal arts, other types of engineering, and some who dropped out of college entirely.

I think it's a net good that we don't gate keep the profession but a downside is that everyone applies to every job. For example, bootcamp grads are told to blindly apply to jobs. So are college seniors.

[angrais]

Can you expand on what you didn't change in the last five years? Or in other words: what should I focus on.

[joshvm]

I don't want to assume anything about the parent background. When I see things like "1000 applicants" I assume these are likely to be either generic roles, or well publicised roles. Even then, most of those 1000 people are unlikely to pass phone screens.

If you go for the long tail of jobs which need specific backgrounds or unusual combinations of tools, or are simply in "unpopular" or non-technical domains, there is much less competition. It doesn't take much to put yourself ahead of other candidates, but to do this well it's a long play and it make take a few moves to get into the job you really want.

Asking what you should focus on requires more context about you - what's your background and what job do you want? Are you currently failing to get jobs (and do you know why)?

I don't think anything has changed in the last five years in terms of what a whiteboard "structured" interview is. It depends on the company. It's well known that lots of places just crib from leetcode.