[coreyp_1]

The most important part of negotiation: Having an offer in the first place.

Unfortunately, I and a dozen other software devs (all of whom I know personally, and all of whom are amazing) are not getting any interviews, much less offers.

None of us have ever experienced a drought like this before, either. So... ???

Thankfully, we're all still currently employed.

[q7xvh97o2pDhNrh]

Any thoughts on root cause from your perspective?

I've been on the other side of the table recently, and I agree it feels like a buyer's market. But it still took a while to find good candidates, and a lot of candidates showed up to interviews weirdly unprepared on even the basics.

If it's a drought for you, then I'd have to add: It seems like an especially weird drought, as well. Supply and demand seem to be doing odd things.

(And, for the spectators of this comment thread, I can confirm: Yes, 2 people with 3 anecdotes each is enough to speculate wildly about an entire industry.)

[sotix]

It’s hard to extrapolate to the whole market, but I can provide my personal experience. I was laid off, and my unemployment benefits have stopped, so finding a job is a bit more desperate for me than it has been in the past.

Now I’m dealing with algorithms technical interviews, but they don’t mesh well with my style of problem solving at all. I like to quietly think on a problem by myself first. If it’s an exceptionally difficult problem, I’ll probably take a walk or the answer might come to me in the shower. If I’m working with someone else, a more collaborative process where we’re both trying to solve the problem and bouncing ideas back-and-fort is my style. Solving the problem in 30 minutes in front of a judge under the context of needing to land a job as soon as possible doesn’t properly test my abilities as a software engineer at all.

Yesterday, I was asked a leetcode hard in an interview from some no name start up. I answered how to theoretically solve it out loud with the interviewer but ran out of time implementing it. I got the impression the interviewer thought I was unprepared and a clueless engineer. I was rejected 15 minutes after the interview.

Overall, I’m not encountering interviews that actually let me display my competency. The interviews seem to all be tailored for a specific type of problem solver (fast in high-pressure test-taking environments) while eliminating every other type of person. I think it’s easy for the interviewer to lose context on the nerves the candidate might be experiencing.

The accounting industry doesn’t do this. If someone has a CPA license, companies trust that credential. If someone doesn’t have a CPA but has experience in Big 4 public accounting, companies trust that experience. If someone lacks those signals, companies may ask more technical questions. But they start from a basis of trust based on clear signals.

Unlike my accounting background where my past experience was based on trust, I have open source projects that can actually be reviewed. Some reviewers have gone through them yet still want to perform an algorithmic interview. Most have not. I feel that the vast majority of interviewers don’t really know how to interview in a more holistic manner.

[cutemonster]

When you say "a LeetCode hard", is that because the problem is literally on the LeetCode website, among the hard ones?

Or is it similar to LeetCode problems, although not actually on their website?

Does everyone remember all question titles by heart and that's why they say it was Leetcode questions, or is it more figuratively speaking :-)

I hope you'll find a place with an interview process that works for you.

[solarmist]

If you've done a fair amount of leetcode problems you can recognize them and feel their levels. Then afterwards you can search and confirm your expectations.

It is not uncommon to have either verbatim or lightly modified leetcode problems as technical challenges for interviews. I think Facebook now makes it standard you need to be able to solve 2 leetcode medium questions in a 45 minute interview.

[cutemonster]

Interesting, thanks! Good that at least this is apparently pretty well known, so everyone has a chance to prepare

[sotix]

It was a difficult problem, and I was genuinely interested in the solution. So I searched online after the interview and found that leetcode called it a hard problem.

[cutemonster]

Wow, so that problem was from the LeetCode website itself?

Was it with different parameters or different phrasing, ... Or everything was the same?

If same but different, I wonder how (un)likely it is that they came up with that problem themselves, independently, without knowing about the LeetCode version. (What would you think?)

(Nice that you found it anyway)

[coreyp_1]

I'm not sure on the root cause. Like I said, there's several people that I know who are all experiencing the same things. I have 20 years experience and a phd. Others in my friend group have no degree whatsoever, but have a decade of experience. Several years ago, we were all offered multiple jobs at a time. Now, we are not even getting requests for interviews.

EDIT: adding that, because we all live in a non-metropolitan area, we all have been remote, and are continuing to look for remote work.

[RestlessMind]

I think fully remote expectation in non-metro areas can be a big hurdle. I know many startups here in SF who are looking to hire good candidates. But they want in-office presence at least a few days a week.

Someone summed it up nicely for me - remote work gives you speed. Colocation (typically office) gives you velocity. A startup needs velocity.

[coreyp_1]

With modern teleconferencing tools, it doesn't matter.

If you feel that in-person time is important, then do what we did at my current company: They hired me. I know everyone at the local state university, from professors to students. We hired from that pool. Everyone is still remote, but our local group gets together once a week for lunch. For $100-$150 a week (yes, it really is that cheap in this area), the company maintains a culture and personal interaction for a team of talented programmers (from me, who has a PhD and two decades of experience, down to the best students who just graduated, and others in-between) without the cost of maintaining an office.

We all work on different projects in the company.

Velocity happens with communication. Communication doesn't need to be in-person, but it does need to be real time. So use Teams, Zoom, Hangouts, or whatever. We have the tools for this already.

Final note: The company didn't intend to have half a dozen people in the same city, they just intended to hire me. It just so happens that I'm really good at finding talent in the places that everyone else is ignoring.

[RestlessMind]

> With modern teleconferencing tools, it doesn't matter.

Speak for yourself? I personally find Zoom to be extremely lacking. No eye contact, no body language, people having problems with wifi or other device issues, no serendipitous chats around hallways or watercoolers etc all affect the quality of communication.

As I said, founders and CEOs are already voting with their choices. Most of the big companies have already embraced RTO. A majority of the new startups I am seeing insist on at least few days in office. There are a few which are fully remote but they seem to be a minority.

[ponector]

That is the key. By looking for a remote role you are competing with large pool of workers.

Are you ready to accept a new role as a contractor with 100k USD annual salary and no benefits? How about 60k? Many skilled developers will accept such offer for remote role.

[Suppafly]

Young people in the CS field consider any time period in which they aren't being actively headhunted and constantly presented with multiple offers from multiple companies to be a drought. r/cscareerquestions/ over on reddit is full of doom and gloom from new grads being unable to find jobs as software engineers at big tech companies.

There is definitely a down turn, because before you didn't need to be a good candidate, whereas now only good candidates are getting the interviews and ultimately the jobs but historically it still seems better than the downturns in 03 and 09.

[xandrius]

What I can say is that the interview process recently has become so impersonal and kind of automated even for highly skilled positions.

I have commented on this before but if someone is applying for Senior or above, seeing them live code a random algo with weird requirements seems less valuable to me than actually discussing architecture, previous projects and personality.

Even talking through a small project (with 0 code involved) would tell me so much about someone than what I've experienced in the last year or so while looking for a job.

So, in my opinion companies are what became weird. I don't know but even the smallest startup seems to feel they need to have their hiring pipeline be like Google or something.

10-15 years ago, I would just meet a manager and someone in the engineering team, have 1 hour chat with them and instantly know whether I'm hired or not. Now it's 4 interviews from the CEO to the HR and their grandmas.

[eastbound]

I’m from France where the market is still tense, so I have hard times understanding whether it’s a general trend or a local problem:

- How do you know it’s not just your surroundings (technologies, skills, area) which are dry?

- Are you maybe getting aged? (The programmer market is very ageist, hopefully I’m not turning the knife into the wound, but I’m not young either) and maybe you are experiencing the dry part of life for the first time?

- Or did you take the $500k+ post-Covid market as the norm? Here in France, beginners are at 38k€ gross annually, and the high end was 85k€ during Covid, but historically the high-end had been capped around 65k€ until Covid.

All in all, developers aren’t magicians. We deserve a high engineer pay, but look at electrical engineers, they have shit pay. We’ve been getting far too much money, for far too long. In normal office jobs, it takes a lifetime of sacrifices to get to higher pay grade. And this is the 3-year experience mark for a developer.

So, are you expecting Facebook-level pay, or higher-engineer-office-worker kind of pay?

[big_youth]

>We’ve been getting far too much money, for far too long. In normal office jobs, it takes a lifetime of sacrifices to get to higher pay grade.

I don't understand this mindset. We should all support our working class brothers to get better wages. Just because the custodian, accountant, and jr HR person are also paid crap doesn't mean we should all grin and bear because at least we're not the day laborers outside.

[coreyp_1]

Well I would love to have found a $500k job, that's definitely not my point of reference.

The problem is that I'm not even getting to the stage of asking about salary, because I'm not getting any interviews in the first place. Neither is anyone else in my friend group.

I am probably overqualified for a lot of jobs, but my friend group, which has a lot of variance in age and experience, would definitely not fall into that classification.

[eastbound]

Yes, I understand.

I hope I didn’t come across, my comment was not delicate but I was genuinely curious about the answer. I’ve created a product which luckily works for now, so I’m out of the job market, but I think everyone on HN knows that your situation is the normal one that awaits all of us in the second half of our career.

[Suppafly]

>We’ve been getting far too much money, for far too long. In normal office jobs, it takes a lifetime of sacrifices to get to higher pay grade.

Normal office jobs don't bring the value that STEM jobs do, that's why STEM jobs command more money. It's like comparing doctors to other careers and being surprised that doctors get paid more.

[neom]

From what I'm hearing/see, it's worse than 2002 by a long shot. :\ 2001-2004 was pretty bad (from what I recall Cisco laid off about 20% of it's engineering team), but it was clear by 2003/4 that the growth of dial up subscribers was going to continue, so people were able to find jobs again although senior devs moved to much lower paid jobs.