[ansy]

Bigger, name brand tech companies have way more applicants than they can accept so they have a crude recruiter funnel that is tossing out resumes for any reason they can find. They're literally trying to turn thousands of resumes from hundreds of schools into curated packets of dozens of candidates. But recruiters don't know a thing about software engineering. At best they can keyword match a few buzzwords they got from some VP of engineering who hasn't actually coded anything in 20 years (if ever). If you don't have the right 3-4 signals (school and program prestige, internship number and prestige, GPA) it's in the bin you go. The actual front line hiring managers won't even see your resume.

Try applying to smaller companies. Smaller companies aren't going to land the candidate from a top 10 school who already interned at multiple Fortune 500 companies. But small shops need to hire talent too. They're digging deeper and they have to read the resumes more closely. There isn't much of an HR department, and the hiring manager might be sifting through the raw resumes themselves.

If you still want to land a big company job, you're going to need to bypass the HR filter by finding a direct line to the hiring managers. Maybe you have some friends or alumni you've met who are at the company and can refer you directly to a team. You can meet these people at networking events, recruiting fairs, or other social activities. Creativity, determination, and luck play a big factor.

[NetToolKit]

> Try applying to smaller companies. Smaller companies aren't going to land the candidate from a top 10 school who already interned at multiple Fortune 500 companies. But small shops need to hire talent too. They're digging deeper and they have to read the resumes more closely. There isn't much of an HR department, and the hiring manager might be sifting through the raw resumes themselves.

This describes my situation when I'm hiring entry-level developers: I, the hiring manager, am reading each application that comes in. However, I think this is probably more true for smaller companies that are not venture-backed; venture-backed companies probably have enough funding to hire senior developers (and are probably more rushed to do so).

For the OP: I'm not hiring developers at the moment, but if you'd like to send me your resume (you can reach me through my profile), I can offer some feedback.

[Hermitian909]

As a note: With recent spike in salaries, many venture backed companies don't have the cash to pay the salaries of good seniors. Spoken with a dozen founders in SF facing this problem over the past two months.

[epicureanideal]

This doesn’t seem possible. Startups are raising Series A rounds of 15-20 million routinely. A quarter of that would cover a reasonable number of senior engineers for a year or two.

But just in case it is possible…

Maybe they should try offering meaningful stock packages, rather than 0.1% and less?

Meaningful as in 0.5 to 1% for a senior engineer, 4-6% for a manager, until salary improves.

Also, try offering stock with no vesting cliff. It’s not smart to trade salary for stock when you might leave before the cliff through no fault of your own. So smart candidates often round the value of stock to $0, especially before the cliff.

[sokoloff]

You shouldn’t be giving managers 6-8x what you offer senior engineers at a startup, at least not in a startup where engineering matters.

If smart candidates are rounding the grant value down to zero, smart companies will not seek to give grants that are multiples of the current size. (That’s giving away $100 bills to someone who values them at less than your cost.)

When you’ve raised a $20M round and have an employee pool that is 10-20% in total, you don’t have many 1% grants to give…and you have exactly zero 6% grants to give.

[Hermitian909]

> When you’ve raised a $20M round and have an employee pool that is 10-20% in total, you don’t have many 1% grants to give…and you have exactly zero 6% grants to give.

This is true, but the percentages illustrate how silly many investors are being about the resources necessary to put together a good engineering team.

I've had offers from startups with well known VC backers who wanted me specifically. They'd tell me their upper bound on cash, and then assuming I thought they had a decent chance, I'd calculate how much stock I'd need to make for the expected value for working for them to be at least as good as at a big tech company. Generally the calculation came out to 4-6% of the company per year.

That number could be lowered if I had access to the cap table or were being issued some kind of preferred stock, but no one's willing to do those things either.

Cash is cheap and labor is expensive but investors still want a way better deal than any engineer could dream of.

[xyzzy21]

This is why I left Silicon Valley and founded my last company FAR, FAR from it. Silicon Valley is 100% OVER. It's jumped the shark. It's overdone and needs a fork stuck into it.

I sold the company 3 years ago. My latest company is doing so much better than it could ever be possible if in Silicon Valley in terms of "R&D budget/Investor capital".

It means we'll attain things that Silicon Valley startups with exactly that kind of personnel compensation requirements NEVER WILL.

[swman]

Where u based now?

[Hermitian909]

SF a good senior can run you 350k/year not including overhead, add on overhead and you can quickly be looking at costs of ~500k per senior per year.

Vesting cliff isn't the only problem with stocks either. Common stock holders can easily get screwed over when raising or during any liquidation event that isn't an IPO or direct listing. The disparity in treatment means as an engineer you need to value stock at 1/10th face value as a rule of thumb.

[AJ1998]

The offer you handed out was not for me but is it okay if I send you my resumé as well? I am in the same boat as OP except it’s been a month since I graduated.

[NetToolKit]

Sure, no problem. I actually would not be able to distinguish between you two, since the OP used a throwaway handle.

[jjav]

> They're literally trying to turn thousands of resumes from hundreds of schools into curated packets of dozens of candidates.

This would indicate that there is a severe oversupply of candidates eager to work in this industry.

Which may well be true, but conflicts with the narrative that there is a severe shortage of people.

[unicornfinder]

I would say there's a shortage of skilled mid to senior level developers, but at the junior level, not so much. That's not to say even decent junior talent is easy to find though.

Keep in mind those large companies can be very desirable to work for - many people don't want to work for these smaller companies, including myself at a younger age, but in truth I think smaller companies can be better to work for depending on what kind of person you are.

[Retric]

It’s not that mid to senior people are rare, it’s the expectations get high enough most can’t stay in the field. Mid is generally generally viewed in term of years of experience not talent.

Someone that’s good but not great with 7+ years of experience is going to have a rough time as are any senior people that picked the wrong software stack.

[filoleg]

> Which may well be true, but conflicts with the narrative that there is a severe shortage of people.

It might seem this way, because the narrative is almost intentionally simplified to the point of being vague enough to support almost any narrative.

Shortage is real, but what often is omitted is the fact that it is the shortage at the senior level. At the entry level, shortage isn't really a thing. It isn't an insane oversupply either, unless we are talking the few popular FAANGs, but it isn't a shortage at the entry level.

[jjav]

> Shortage is real, but what often is omitted is the fact that it is the shortage at the senior level.

There's more possibility of shortage at the senior level and in more specialized areas.

Still, I'm not entirely sure how real it might be. Depends how it is measured. I'm in very senior and somewhat specialized roles, so that's my perspective. I see lots of companies opening reqs in my area and never filling them. The same job posting will stay open for years, sometimes.

Now, is that a shortage? Obviously they are continuing to do business just fine for years even without filling that position. Presumably they are interviewing tons of people and never hiring anyone, because they don't really feel any pressure to fill the position (otherwise, they would).

So it's worth considering, does that opening even really exist? Technically it's posted, they might be interviewing, but if nobody is ever good enough to hire and they continue to operate without ever hiring anyone... it feels more like a phantom req. Should such phantom reqs even be counted towards stats of companies trying to hire?

[filoleg]

I 100% agree with you.

Just a generalist qualified senior engineer alone is something that is in shortage. If you dive into senior specializations, the shortage is even stronger.

My point was that the media and people tend to forget about the whole senior/entry distinction when it comes to shortages, and loudly proclaim "there is a shortage in tech" without specifying at which level, and then get a ton of entry level fresh grads yelling at them "no, there is no shortage, we struggle to get jobs".

>Should such phantom reqs even be counted towards stats of companies trying to hire?

If they are genuinely trying to hire someone for that position, but just have been unsuccessful to find a qualified candidate, then yeah, absolutely it should count. And I don't doubt they are trying to actually hire. Because why else would they spend tons of engineering time and money on interviewing people with zero intent to actually hire anyone.

Even where I work, we get tons of applications due to the company's high profile. And even when my team was desperate to hire a mid-senior level, we had to interview close to 50 people just to fill one position. It wasn't a competition for a single slot either, we were just looking for someone who was baseline qualified. If more than one emerged, we would have hired them all and just rerouted them to our sister teams who were looking to fill some positions as well, or to elsewhere in the company. But getting that one baseline competent person (we ain't talking about some 10x rockstar engineer type) was already a struggle.

[jjav]

> Because why else would they spend tons of engineering time and money on interviewing people with zero intent to actually hire anyone.

Not so much zero intent, but I see groups who keep job postings open for ages just perpetually holding out for that perfect unicorn that doesn't actually exist and can't exist (you know, the person who has 20 years experience in low-level kernel development but is also a UI design god and a full-time devops guru on the side; I exagerate but only slightly).

So technically they can claim shortage of experts, can't hire anyone. But meanwhile the team continues operating just fine for years even though this magical person can never be found.

So to those job postings, I consider them essentially fake. They just inflate the count of positions that can't be filled by a position that never will be filled.

[ARandomerDude]

> This would indicate that there is a severe oversupply of candidates eager to work in this industry.

Not the industry as a whole, but certainly there is an overabundance of people trying to land a job at very specific companies (FAANG, and a handful of others).

There would be an industry oversupply if this situation were widespread, but it isn't. The industry has a shortage, certain famous companies are the exception rather than the rule.

[epicureanideal]

There is an oversupply of candidates, as evidenced by the fact that engineers have very little bargaining power about the terms of employment with any particular company. The negotiation for 90% of engineers is very one sided.

[habibur]

And then how does that compare with other jobs? That possibly can be said for negotiation for 90% employees in any field too.

[pathseeker]

candidates != qualified candidates

A shit ton of people apply to FAANG companies because of the money on the table despite having no professional experience as a software engineer nor writing any code.

[zerr]

It's about the price - there is a shortage of people willing to work for 5-figure.

[sealeck]

Although some places do find talent hard to source, at any price (see Microsoft's Bing team who have _really_ struggled to hire enough people to compete with Google)

[OJFord]

And they've tried 'any price' (even not taking it facetiously literally)? What makes it so unattractive?

The prospect of working on Bing or at Microsoft wouldn't exactly excite me perhaps, but it'd only have to be the best paying (by some non-trivial but not massive amount) offer. (Or everything else less exciting!)

Perhaps you mean search engine experts, not grad entry or 'at any price' in that sense, so the pool they're looking at only wants to work on the biggest most exciting one, which happens also to be willing to hire all of them?

[sokoloff]

It indicates an abundance of applications for sure. That doesn’t indicate an oversupply of applicants nor of qualified applicants. How many times have we read the advice to apply for hundreds of jobs and only apply to those that take little effort? I think there’s a lot of people out there applying to every long-shot job because the prize is large enough.

[xyzzy21]

Also of the "near zero information" value of resumes.

Tufte compared PowerPoint presentations to having the information density of Soviet-era propaganda posters (i.e. nearly zero).

You can validly claim similar comparisons with resumes!!

[Decabytes]

There is definitely a shortage overall, but not at the top companies

[nl]

Almost all these people will get jobs at non-Faang companies.

[throwawayjobs]

> Smaller companies aren't going to land the candidate from a top 10 school who already interned at multiple Fortune 500 companies

One thing I have worried about though is they might require someone who is more experienced. I have noticed there are not many small companies on my school's job board. Would you know of a place where I could find these?

Another commenter mentioned checking the website of VC firms for start-ups. I think I will give that a shot.

I appreciate all the help from everyone in the thread, I am reading all the comments.

[ansy]

> I have noticed there are not many small companies on my school's job board.

The few small to medium sized companies on your school's job board are actually great opportunities. Those companies don't have the resources to recruit many places so they might not even be looking at any other schools or programs. There is probably a very strong alumni connection to your school or program. They likely know exactly what they're getting with those new grads and wouldn't be recruiting there if they weren't comfortable with that.

> Would you know of a place where I could find these?

One problem with small companies is that they tend to not advertise their job openings everywhere. You can usually find different ones everywhere you look. The worse they are at advertising the job, the less competition you have and the more likely you resume will be considered. So it does pay to look beyond any one job board.

> One thing I have worried about though is they might require someone who is more experienced.

This varies company by company. Some companies founded by new grads or college drop outs exclusively hire new grads. Some big companies exclusively hire experienced engineers. And there's everything in between. If they have a job posting for entry level or new grads, go for it.

[zelphirkalt]

Also in a smaller company, chances are, that you need to touch a larger variety of the systems, as people are not in as specialized roles. At least in my experience. This is great for people starting out, because they will learn a lot on the job.

[rcfaj7obqrkayhn]

too bad a lot of smaller companies try to hire like they're big companies and hand out unrealistic assignments for the applicants