@patio11 has written a bit about this: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1086379271415713792 @tqbf and Erin Patek https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/

I think this leads to a lot of false negatives when interviewing. but if you are applying you obviously want to increase your chances of succeeding so, you have to know how to 'play the game'.

My recommendation to you would be: 1. spend a lot of time preparing for these tech interviews. Study how they are structured. There is a lot of material online (blog posts) as well as books documenting what it takes to succeed. 2. there are some people that do paid courses on "how to interview at FAANG style companies". they may be worth depending on the upside. Note that not all companies have those types of interviews but if you are aiming for them it makes sense to prepare the best you can.

They seem to be quite easy and after solving some, it feels like I’ve ‘seen them all’.

You cannot be doing anything fancy in a short interview afterall.

If this is really how they filter programmers, it does not seem like a really good way to measure one’s ability to create true value.

And I say this as someone who doesn't particularly like the modern tech interview style, I think actually trying to build something is better. However, it does have some merit in measuring a candidate's ability even if it's not necessarily that great.

dailycodingproblem.com

I never had any problems with passing technical interviews, so that's not what bothers me. My gripe is with the job ads, that are 100% relevant to my experience on paper, and yet somehow my applications seem to go into a black hole.

I'm not comfortable with carpet bombing 100s of companies and hoping that someone will hire me for some _arbitrary_ job. I want this _specific_ job. I have pretty specific professional interests (in an area that I'm quite experienced in) and aiming high, so there is not a lot of vacancies, that I'd be willing to consider. After filtering for remote-friendliness, what I'm left with is just a few positions. And yet, the seeming randomness of the process makes it unlikely, that I'll be even considered to be put into the interview loop.

One friend of mine, who happens to be a head of the HR at a medium-sized company, told me, that for each publicly posted SWE job ad they get several 100s of applications. So they don't even bother to review the submitted applications anymore (!). Instead, they merely wait for the recruitment agencies to pick up the ad and find some reasonable number of "vetted" candidates via their own channels and bring them in to an interview.

Overall, I think that the "market" for jobs depends a bit too much on the middlemen lately. Needless to say, that most of these middlemen are not interested in catering to candidates' aspirations, nor are they going to spend too much time looking for a perfect match. The end result is (a) total mess with regards to matching jobs to people and (b) little hope for proper career progression, because the whole process is pretty much random.

Lately? This industry has been full of dudebro "recruiters" since I've became a part of it. These people shouldn't even be needed because they're completely inept at interviewing for technical skills, and they're pretty easy to game if you use the correct lingo. The vast majority of them are a waste of time; I've only ever met 2 that either actually got me a job or at least intended on actually getting me one.

I was applying for jobs last year at around this time and didn't notice the black hole that you're talking about, but I guess it'll be something for me to pay attention for next time.

Then again, I doubt I'm going to rely on traditional job searching techniques the next time. I've realized that bypassing the recruiter and HR, as well as networking at meetups and conferences, are much more effective than shotgunning dozens of online applications.

I’m betting close to 100 with recruiters over two decades. The external recruiter’s purpose is not to access your technical skills. Their purpose is to see if you are the product that their buyers want and to make you look as good to the buyer as possible. You are not “gaming the system” by making yourself an attractive candidate that they can present to their client.

If you are looking for the standard median, commodity job , you have kept your eye on the market, done the correct amount of resume driven development, and you live in a major market, with local recruiters, it usually isn’t hard in my experience to find a job.

I won’t fit that description when I’m looking for my next job - I’m not looking for either the commodity job or to be in the 3rd quintile of pay for my local market. Networking will be required.

(I have no connection to LinkedIn, other than being a free tier member.)

One thing you do have to look out for is that recruiters get paid after a period of employment (3-6 months in my experience). So that can create a perverse incentive to fire someone you’re on the fence about. This really shouldn’t happen unless you’re working for an extremely cash-strapped place though.

All of the applicants he brought were better, than the ones that applied via an online job portal. Even tough some ask 20%-40% over our budget, we are still considering them.

I am conscious of which roles I offer to outside agencies, but once I do, I stop worrying about the cost and focus only on the value I can get from the candidate. Those agency roles are some of the most competitive positions; I don’t expect to be able to hire the best who happen to not realize that $0.75x is smaller than $1.00x for positive values of x.

The recruiter I used to get my last job reached out to me about 7 months before I was on the market. I told him that I wasn’t looking for a job until I closed on my house in October, even then I was so busy with life, I wasn’t about to go through all of the hassle of randomly blindly submitting resumes. I told the recruiter that in 6 months, my criteria as far as pay, responsibility, location and technology.

He called me 6 months later with a list of jobs and within two weeks I had a job that met all of my criteria and was the Dev lead of a medium size company with a small software development department.

On the other side, when I needed to ramp up the department fast with contractors, I worked with him to find qualified contractors.

* I want this _specific_ job. I have pretty specific professional interests (in an area that I'm quite experienced in) and aiming high, so there is not a lot of vacancies, that I'd be willing to consider. After filtering for remote-friendliness, what I'm left with is just a few positions. And yet, the seeming randomness of the process makes it unlikely, that I'll be even considered to be put into the interview loop.*

If the job is that specific, carpet bombing resumes isn’t the way to go, you’re right. At this point, my next job in two years, is also very specific. While my external recruiter network has been a godsend for the bog standard generic roles I’ve had in the past, I’ve got to start building a network now to get the job I want.

Of course if I walk up to the office tomorrow and the doors are closed and they go out of business (not likely), I can reach out to my long list of local recruiters and get the “right now” job or contract quickly that will pay more than enough to support us.

There's your conundrum. Having specific professional interests in an area you're experienced in is great...assuming that specialization has enough market demand liquidity for you to not be in this situation. If that's no longer the case, perhaps it's worth asking if you'd be willing to negotiate on what you're looking for?

I've done a variety of things so as far as what I have been looking for with my current search, it's really more a high growth company that places a premium on backfilling senior talent, which likely means I'll get (read: have already gotten) a very attractive offer. It's true that this means I am somewhat compromising on picking specific things that I want to do, but the reason I do it is because I'd rather bet on a company than a role, and if I do it this way, I only really have to find one company that has more to lose by not hiring me than hiring me.

I guess that's probably the advice (perhaps unsolicited) I'd give to you -- are you flexible with what you want to do but want to be well compensated and work with a company that has defensible growth? In that case, it might make more sense to take a position that might not be ideal today but is in a growing org where you can make it closer to something that would have the specifics you like. Do you want to do a very specific role? Well, unless it opens your pool of potential companies rather than closes it, you'll have to work within the diminished market demand for it, which leads the the sort of frustration you express.

> One friend of mine, who happens to be a head of the HR at a medium-sized company, told me, that for each publicly posted SWE job ad they get several 100s of applications. So they don't even bother to review the submitted applications anymore (!). Instead, they merely wait for the recruitment agencies to pick up the ad and find some reasonable number of "vetted" candidates via their own channels and bring them in to an interview.

This is kind of a poor analogy, but I think a lot about parallels between talent agencies and the entertainment industry. Prima facie, there shouldn't need to be middlemen involved, right? And yet, there are, and they vary in quality from being horrible to being stars that the talent absolutely prefers to have. Interestingly enough, plenty of companies that try to disintermediate them can end up getting reputations as being talent unfriendly (IE Spotify), to the extent that the disrupting competitor inevitably plays ball.

I guess what I think is fascinating is that your anecdote may reflect this. Frankly, I think the job application is not useful. Creating the equivalent of an effective "spam filter" or ranking for job applications is challenging, so there's no reason to expect it to always be clogged with poor match applications. Having been a hiring manager before, it's really, really time consuming to go through low quality applicant leads. It's time consuming enough that your job is nearly intractable unless you have an in house or contingent recruiter that does a good enough job at separating the wheat from the chaff. I've had to play recruiter and hiring manager at the same time before, and it was more than a full time job. Good recruiters are worth their weight in gold, and then some.

What you want as a hiring manager is a lead, not an "application" and in order to get that, you need some kind of a pre-qualification process. I've had some really awful experiences with recruiters, some of whom will join my LI network, have an intro with me about a position, never respond, and then re-post that same position on LI. Then again, I've had professional recruiters that are extremely well informed, shephard me through the process with very well defined expectations of timeframes, and timely communication at every step up to and including a potential rejection. What I'm trying to get at is that you seem to think that the problem is too many middlemen, but I think the problem is not enough -- that is, the middlemen have an important job to do, but there are too many incompetent ones that are costing both companies and candidates valuable missed opportunities.

Can't agree more. That said, there are so diminishingly few good recruiters, that it seems like we all would have been much better, if there weren't any recruiters at all.

At the past few companies I've been at, I've had the chance to work with some really thoughtful, practical and productive recruiters. Secondly, at companies I've worked at with great recruiters, we overwhelmingly were able to build a great organization of engineers who I genuinely enjoyed collaborating with. I think getting to the root of there being so few good recruiters requires a bit of reframing -- why are there so many shockingly subpar recruiters out there?

If you think about it that way, there's so many shockingly subpar recruiters out there for the same reason there are so many shockingly subpar companies. The internal economics of a company allow it to "remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" -- but just as equally, it could force to company to hire in a savvy manner to arbitrage an edge in the talent market that bigger, more complacent actors are leaving untapped.

There can be a lot of problems with VC funded rocket-ship companies that can end up being pseudo-cult like entities that crash and burn like WeWork. And yet, I've consistently had great luck getting amazing opportunities at growth stage startups that would be very hard to get at established companies that could really care less about losing me (or anyone else) as a candidate -- with a recruitment process that belies that apathy in a very palpable manner. Conversely, these growth stage startups actually fought to hire me, as well as the organization that I saw develop around me. I know that not every such company is like this, but I guess what I'll say is that I've had better luck with them than with the big companies.

Maybe I can - they're asking for the moon, and a pony?

I see job ads that as for advanced mssql with SSIS/SSRS/SSAS data analysis, good c# and/or python, some web framework, powershell, some visualisation tools, some no-sql db experience[0] and often big data frameworks (hadoop, spark) on top ("and some knowledge of statistics and data analysis would be helpful!"). And OO, and FP. And they often ask for domain knowledge on top.

(edit: and I forgot, they often want data warehousing as well).

I think some of these are just added by clueless HR drones to pad job ads out (some of HR really are clueless).

[0] why ask for SQL & no-sql?

  > why ask for SQL & no-sql? 

Also keep in mind that hiring tends to be seasonal. Companies are generally very aggressive at the top of the year, and by Oct-Dec things do slow down a bit (but this is not always the case, for example if a company raised some $$$ in that period). In the past I've avoided applying to postings which are more than 3 weeks old.

You could also try services like TripleByte, which flip the funnel, and help you go directly go to onsites (there are some caveats though).

For the tech rounds, it's just more practice. Unfortunately the interview process is heavily biased towards people who practice, and has little to do with your actual abilities - and you are competing against such folks. For that I've found Pramp, interviewing.io, leetcode, educative (the grokking algorithms and system design courses), GH system design primer, (our even services like Outco.io) etc. to be very useful. The good thing is that atleast in SV these bits have become fairly standardized now, and if you spend time preparing, it significantly increases your hit-rate with everyone.

First, I got a multiple-choice quiz, which wasn't too bad except there were at least a few of those "spot the problem with this code" questions that actually had multiple problems but you could only pick one. That sucked, but I still passed it.

After that, I got a technical interview over Skype with some stonefaced dude who asked me almost nothing but computer science questions. I applied as a web developer, so it really shouldn't have been surprising that I know the difference between a binary tree and a binary search tree. The interviewer was stone cold and had no sense of humor. The following day, I got a rejection email.

Seems like yet another SV startup run by bros who want to disrupt an industry and have no regard for their "human capital".

Hopefully that was a fluke or they've changed since. Keep in mind that my experience is from 2 years ago.

All in all, I'm glad that I didn't get hired through Triplebyte because I probably wouldn't have gotten my current job, which is an awesome one in terms of the kind of work, the benefits, and the people.

Here is an abridged version the sake of brevity:

Hey [Ravenstine]

Unfortunately, we're not going to move forward with your application right now.

You did well in the Kanban problem. You talked well about HTTP. You write really nice, idiomatic front-end code. You understand how to build the front-end of a web application, and explained it well on our used car API problem. And you were friendly and we enjoyed talking to you.

We didn't see the depth of knowledge that we look for in front end programmers: you didn't show very deep knowledge of security or data structures. On the used car problem, you didn't seem very knowledgeable about backend web systems.

You might benefit from studying some of the following topics: Classic algorithms and data structures. Basics of HTTP. Advanced Javascript things like the ES6 features, async/await.

We recommend you study algorithms more deeply.

We think you're really high potential, and we'd love to talk to you if you're still job searching in four months (we of course hope for your sake that you're happily employed by then), or next time you want a job.

Best,

Triplebyte Team

---

Again, the fact that they provided this kind of feedback is actually pretty good.

My problem is not only that I believe I was interviewed on the wrong things(over half my questions were CS and algorithms but I was applying as a web developer), but the feedback also isn't entirely accurate.

Could I shore up on algorithms? Sure.

But look at this:

> You talked well about HTTP. [...] You might benefit from studying some of the following topics: [...] Basics of HTTP.

What the hell? Not only is that feedback contradictory, but it's horseshit. I wasn't stumped on the HTTP questions, and all my answers about it were accurate. I've written HTTP servers and have done some interesting things cutting together audio and streaming mid-roll through HTTP, so don't tell me I don't know enough about HTTP. HTTP isn't complicated.

> Advanced Javascript things like the ES6 features, async/await.

I'm not sure whether this is related to the question about promises in JS that I was asked, but I don't see how because I explained their function accurately.

> you didn't seem very knowledgeable about backend web systems

This one blows my mind. I had way more experience doing backend than frontend at the time. I don't know what I could have told them that would have suggested that I effectively know nothing about how HTTP and backend programming works.

---

Maybe my diction was poor, idk. If it was, it didn't seem to stop me from getting jobs outside of Triplebyte.

Perhaps I wouldn't have been as miffed about this if they had included algorithm and CS questions in the initial multiple-choice quiz. I shouldn't have gotten to the point of the interview only to find out that I didn't have the knowledge required.

1. You actually get feedback from their interview. In an interview at a company, if you're lucky, you'll get which interview you didn't do well at. Triplebyte sends you feedback like "Finally, $QUESTION[3] was probably his worst: good knowledge baseline, but gave the impression that this is an area where he doesn't feel at home. Didn't lead the conversation, and most items were shallow in details, especially when talking about scalability." This is one of many parts of the feedback I got from my interview.

2. They send you Cracking the Coding Interview. And a light jacket. For free. At least, they did when I interviewed. I think it was post-Triplebyte interview, so at that point they were sending my profile out to companies. They might not send it if they don't accept you; I don't know.

But even #1 is a very good use of your time. You get feedback about your interview that isn't just binary. They also send you links to specific references for the parts you could focus on.

I happen to work in a bank doing boring banking-like things and did not attend university. My experience has been that even if one passes their resume-blind interview, the companies are not resume-blind and are still looking for the hot-topic skills and experience du jour.

The people with that kind of skills/experience probably don't need Triplebyte anyway. And my guess is that if you are being turned away from hundreds of online applications that you do not either--despite whatever programming chops you actually possess.

Also, you would be given an option to schedule a practice mock test for the final interview.

It does not work like that.

Almost half of all jobs are filled through referrals by existing employees, so if you're cold applying to a company you're at best, cutting your chances in half and wasting your time.

You're also forgoing important information _for you_ if you don't know anyone at the company you're applying to. How do you really know what it's like to work there?

"The whole thing makes me feel increasingly insecure..." Don't get discouraged! There are tons of really great opportunities out there.

From my own personal experience, I got incredibly lucky finding my first job, with a bunch of extraordinary people, through what was essentially a cold call. Since that job, I haven't had a job that wasn't through some kind of referral or secondary connection.

This has been a huge part of my job finding experience. Most of my work has been found through previous connections. Keep in touch with these folks and help them when you can. It's a good thing to do, and will pay dividends in the future.

Other things that were useful (beyond my network):

* Contracting, because this lowers the risk on both sides. Of course you have to be able to handle the difficulties of contracting.

* technical meetups and getting to know hiring managers through these, which again lowers the risk because you're a known quantity (or at least more known). This is a long play, so join a Meetup now, way before you need to switch jobs.

If anything it should be increasing it.

They are, in general, scum of the earth though, so tread lightly and hold no loyalty.

Don't give them your CV in word format unless you feel like finding modified versions of it in the interview.

And please replace referral contact/ name info with "referrals available on request" unless you don't mind your old boss being hit up for new work behind your back.

What you're describing is pretty unique, in my experience. Looking at my current team, significantly more than half of the folks here worked with someone else on the team at a previous gig.

“I worked with this person for 2 years and they always produced quality work” is way more of a confidence inspiring piece of evidence than “we interviewed this person for 30 minutes and they sounded like they’d be able to do the job”.

Hiring managers aren’t dumb. They know interviews are not super reliable measures of a person’s future performance. All hiring managers have stories about people who were bad at interviews and great at their job, or great at interviews and horrible at their job. A trusted referral decreases this risk significantly.

Remember the goal here is to get through this with a job offer at the end. You only need 1 offer. Also remember this is as much about the company as it is about you. The companies/groups you have not had success with might be a total mess.

Another thing to do is, if you have an opportunity, is to ask a lot of questions about the interviewer in a social, friendly way. Be genuinely curious about others. People love more than anything to talk about themselves.

-- Also Apple and even Google have noted that their best individual performers tend to be self-taught. I think that means that if you have the skills and interest to learn programming you tend to be pretty good at programming.

Finally, it's a bit like finding a girlfriend/boyfriend. If you approach the exercise as some way of validating your worth, then you get a bit of a stink to you. Nobody really wants to start out a relationship that way. On the other hand if you are just keeping your eyes open for opportunities that are mutually beneficial things will go much more smoothly.

What you should worry about is whether the hiring process continues after the first interview. You moved on to tech interviews in more than half, which is decent. Again, if half of them needed something different than what you are, that is fine. Let it go.

But you only moved to an onsite about a quarter of the time - it sounds like you may have a disconnect in the tech screen. It is difficult to say what isn't working there without more info, but I'd focus your attention on that step of the process.

And one side piece of advice - your blog posts, open source contributions, speaking engagements.... those all are commendable. But mean little when it comes to hiring you. Hiring managers want to know what accomplishments you had in your work. How did you improve the business results of your former employers?

This may very well be true. But I will say, as someone looking to break into the industry, this is very surprising to me. I guess I should focus on acing the technical interview?

If you can bring this up during the interview I'd greatly appreciate it otherwise don't assume these things (open source contributions, blog posts, talks) will help you get interviews. What they may give you is the ability to network with people who are hiring which gets you an onsite.

Do you have any suggestions for experienced devs that aren't free to answer that question with any detail?

When I was hiring, there was one thing that made candidates really stand out: when they had previous experience that matched the job description exactly.

For example: I was hiring for a Mac app developer, and I got an application from someone who had developed a Mac app and published it on source forge. That's pretty much an instant hire.

The important part is not hide your relevant experience in a long, generic CV. Once you have a few years of experience, you probably have a lot of stuff in your CV, and most of it is probably irrelevant for the job you are applying to.

So it might be worth it to shorten your CV, and strongly emphasize only the parts that are relevant for the job you are applying to. Don't waste time talking about stuff you did a few years ago when it's not relevant for the job you are applying to.

any company that is always hiring is equivalently never hiring.

As for the rest of your funnel, these seem like typical numbers. I assume this is over the course of a little more than a month.

The biggest problem with interviewing self-taught programmers, is that their vocabulary is often weak. This makes it very hard to test their practitioner skill from a conversation.

If you are doing post-mortems on each of your interviews, I imagined that you will land a position soon.

Would you mind explaining/elaborating this point?

For example:

- intuitively applying SOLID without knowing that there is a set of principles

- knowing how to play with closures without knowing the dictionary definitions of “closure”

This makes interviewing a bit harder and might lead people to (falsely) assume that the candidate isn’t any good.

Very much like bike shedding: zealously insisting on <acronym> for every triviality, never doing so for more complex situations.

(Not to mention they are, in essence, very subjective principles)

[x] closures

[ ] solid

Candidate had 1/2. Rejected. Now back to shitposting on HN.

Closure don’t seem to be widely discussed outside of certain areas, so be it.

SOLID is rather surprising though. It seems to be quoted and (supposedly) adhered to religiously. Though I suspect it’s akin to people preaching TDD in public while we all know that’s rarely the case.

SOLID sounds nice but I don't think I've ever seen anyone adhere to it religiously. Easy exercise: take any Java program, and imagine the spec changed the width of integers it needs to support, from 32-bit to some other size. How many files would you need to touch to make this change? Clearly, no class in the program has the Single Responsibility of this. The first letter of SOLID is already violated.

It sounds like they're just describing recursive data structures? When most people talk about closures, aren't they referring to this (from Wikipedia)?

"In programming languages, a closure, also lexical closure or function closure, is a technique for implementing lexically scoped name binding in a language with first-class functions. Operationally, a closure is a record storing a function[a] together with an environment."

EDIT: My SICP quote was actually from somebody's notes, not the book itself. But the point remains.

I'm sure the opposite exists too, interviewees who can rattle off the names and principles at interview, but don't actually apply them in their code.

Provided many candidates fall on one side or the other, what does one prefer?

When I talk to a person who studied algorithms in school they know phrases like amortized analysis and big O notation for time and space complexity. For self taught programmers they can often tell me an expected runtime and expected runspace.

For concurrency persons often use words like counting-semaphore, threads, and blocking operations may not be universal

Self taught programmers may know about unit and regression tests and code coverage, may not be thinking about execution paths as a graph problem.

The understanding is usually there. It is often even the case that a self taught programmer have no standard words for a particular pattern they use regularly. It becomes the interviewer responsibility to decide how much of the vocabulary is important for the job.

----

This is a different problem than not knowing how to use a domain. Things like SOLID, I have never been asked in an interview. I have never studied them in school. I would be subject to the same interview challenges as someone who was self taught in these topics despite my degrees

- It's an imperfect system but a closest thing to a functioning one.

- Referral is the best way in.

- Apply early, within 24-48h of job posting. I setup a Tuesday/Thursday morning schedule to check and apply for new jobs. Ignored stale job postings (> 14 days).

- Apply to jobs that fit your profile. If you want to switch to a different stack, work on a project/course and add that to resume. That should get you through recruiter's filter.

- Spaced repetition is the real deal. The more interviews I gave the better I became, primarily because I got more comfortable. It also helps internalize all the concepts and bring it to your system A. Also experiment during your interviews to see feedback and engagement. Most results are canned responses so you have find signals elsewhere.

- It's a search problem (numbers game). It's akin to finding a partner. Wider the search the better. When it clicks it makes a world of difference.

The way I rationalized rejects, which is defeatist, was by thinking they know what they are doing and it's better to be rejected than to be hired and be miserable from being a bad fit. If nothing works, I for one know my worth and will build something I value.

Don't underestimate how many firms rely on academic degrees for their initial filter. It makes no sense, since few university programs turn you into a good programmer, but it's true. This differs per geography but I'd say 50 to 80% of companies will skip CVs without a proper degree if they have the luxury to do so (i.e. sufficiently many applications). Quite some even when they don't have the luxury.

This works in your disadvantage, but in the end it'll just skew the numbers and that's it. Don't take this as "get a CS degree first!" kind of advice, more like: here's an explanation for at least 50% of your rejections (probably even some you did multiple interviews with).

In other words: if you have no CS degree but can otherwise code as well as people with a CS degree and similar experience as you, then this affects you like so:

- on the job: not at all

- when searching for a job: you need to apply 2x to 4x more than others

It's not fair, but others might counter that having to spend 4-5 years in college + be in debt for decades (if you're in the US) isn't fair either.

A final observation: I've found it satisfying to recognize that job hunting (or employee hunting for that matter!) is essentially just sales. And the thing about sales is that it's a numbers game. Reach out to 100 leads, get 10 talks, land 1 customer. Job hunting is similar. It's a shit job but you just got to bite through it. Think about the years of college you saved and how much less time the extra job interviewing is costing you than taking a CS degree would.

I found this increasingly an issue when applying for remote jobs.

Locally though, degree's don't matter because there aren't enough good programmers, when there are lots of options it seems people will look for degree's as an indication if you are "good enough".

Aren't programming salaries much lower in the UK than the US? If there's a shortage, why don't companies start paying more?

If you are from around here, you're main options are Nottingham (quite a good city for programming jobs) or move away to a bigger city with more opportunities, that isn't to say it's necessary and I have been forunate to find good jobs where I live.

The success of applying between local vs remote jobs is staggering, and have been told many times by local companies they really struggle to find decent programmers (maybe salary is the factor here as you say!)

Can you define "much much lower" please? Is that by purchasing power (i.e. university, housing, medical coverage)?

"Still, even with the declines, Facebook continues to generate by far the most profits per employee among the Big Five tech companies—$141,552 in the third quarter. In second place was Apple, with $99,898 per employee. Facebook’s core advertising business carries significantly higher margins than Apple’s business, which is based primarily on hardware sales."

That's $140k of average annual profit per each and every one of Facebook's ~40k employees, not just engineers.

However Apple still takes the lead when looking at revenue rather than profit:

"On a different metric, revenue per employee, Apple tops the list at $467,445 in the third quarter, higher even than Facebook’s $410,225 in revenue per employee (see chart above). Apple’s headcount for the quarter was 137,000, including workers in its retail stores."

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/after-hiring-binges-...

None, in my experience, produce universally good programmers. I think all that can be said is that some studies have a higher chance of producing good programmers, but in the end it's up to the student to learn to code while they're there (either using the university's material or not).

> I'd say 50 to 80% of companies will skip CVs without a proper degree

And the companies that claim they look at skills instead of degrees will want a super amazing candidate before they take the perceived risk of hiring someone without a degree. And then you get to HR and they offer you a salary 30% befitting the work you're hired to do and 70% befitting your "social status" (e.g. high school drop-out).

1. I always work with recruiting agencies. Might sound odd, but they have a direct line to managers and their incentives align with yours. To that end you only submit a handful of resumes. I’ll submit some outside of the recruiting agencies as well, but generally they get the bulk of my interviews.

2. I always interview a few times a year (2-5), so I always have offers on the table. This let’s you negotiate and keeps your skills up.

3. Regarding your pass rate. You may not be applying to the correct roles and / or there are some other key-words you’re missing in your resume. Try to pack keywords where you can, because NLP is used to filter resumes as a lot of places.

4. Find someone to professionally review your resume. A recruiting agency will do this for free!

5. Practice coding interviews on leetcode (website), cracking the coding interview (book), etc.

6. Practice mock white board interviews if you can, I actually have a 6ft white board at home (for general use, but good practice)

7. What you’re seeing is normal, you’ll always face rejection. If you’re a dev, facing 50% to 90% rejection is fairly normal (From top of funnel) depending where you apply and you’re skill set.

I for one always apply to the best jobs I can get. This means I face probably higher rejection rates than average.

Note, none of this is really about your skill at the job. That can come into play for high-end niche jobs, but full-stack developers will always face the same default problem set, found on leetcode and the like.

I’m genuinely curious

In my experience, looking for a (good) job takes a lot of time and energy, and OP's experience reflects this well: you do have a lot of calls, emails, interviews etc. that lead nowhere.

You may do the onsite interview to learn that their pay range is way off or that the office is just not a good workplace physically.

Even if everything looks nice in the benefits package, you can end up having a bad manager, teammates or too chaotic/boring/legacy/complex/(insert your nightmares here) projects - these are risks that you take on with any job switch, not just the risk of the job search itself.

Our idea is to offer a tool that - at first - aid the job seeker to keep track of job applications, cover letter and CV variations and also provide some insights about the process. Or saying in another form, we want to give you a understanding of your job search. For later we are aiming to have more and profound insights, allow the user to compare his journey with similar population and maybe do some predictions before hand.

Our product is for the final user, the person living the experience of sending 100's of job applications, we felt that the market for applicant tracking system is now really widespread, and we are aiming to give back some control to the applicant.

Feel free to check our page: https://www.voorjob.com we are really interested in any feedback that you can provide given you recent experience in job seeking.

Ps. If anyone have doubts we would be really happy to answer back, but since this is literally our launch, first we are going to drink a bottle (or two) of champagne :D

Selling data to headhunters, HR companies or agencies is completely off our plans of given back the applicant some control over the hiring process.

It takes luck, skill, and a personal match between you and a set of people at a company. At the end of the day both parties must feel like they have a good match.

Re: Tech interviews, unless you pore time into things like leet code and "cracking the code interview" tech screen will always just be psudo random.

Just because they didn't say anything does not mean they didn't look. I look and take notes about what I see, but in the actual interviews I very rarely talk about their GitHub. I mostly just stick to the script.

Small, disruptive companies benefit from having a handful of really great individuals that can give them a competitive edge.

But as FAANG becomes the norm, hiring has shifted towards desiring good but ultimately hot-swappable engineers. Being a talented individual developer with something unique to offer has shifted from the ultimate asset to being a liability. On small teams at companies that value unique skills, you being featured on the front page of HN is a source of team pride. But on a team of generic engineers it's a source of jealously and resentment. I've had more then a few posts on the front page here and have personally witnessed these two extremes.

As the Misfit's once sang "Is it time to be an android not a man" and the answer is right now is leaning toward android. What can you do with this information? There are two things you can do:

The first is to make yourself the shiniest android you can. Practice leetcode (it's honestly a lot of fun) and get really good at technical interviews. Learn to think like a robot: creative answers at non-creative places will hurt you. Being an expert will hurt you. I have personally worked at a place (fortune 500 company) where a case study was technically wrong so answering with insight and understanding would cause you to fail. Instead think "how would someone with less experience answer this?" because someone with less experience wrote it. And realize that for robots this is a very stochastic process so just keep applying.

The second is even better: target interesting, smaller companies that benefit from you being the developer you are. These interviews will be easier and the job will be more rewarding. The only catch is that currently the number of these jobs is much smaller than it was 2-3 years ago. Compensation might also be less (but doesn't have to be).

Don't let the occasionally negative comments here get to you. People have a lot of anxiety about the job market so they'll want to make this your fault to reduce their own anxiety.

Good luck! It will take more time than it used to but you'll get there!

If you are someone who is not good at networking and hence finding referrals is hard, there perhaps other things you can look at.

After spending about 9 years working for myself, I decided to go back to work for others. I was in a completely new country, and hence zero network. Strategy I used was just find 5 employers and figure out what exactly they are looking for. Be very knowledgeable about their culture, tech, people, and work. Having (some) sales background was quite useful, as doing research on prospects was a known quantity.

I used a copy writer to help me write my resume and 5 different cover letters which target these companies. All of them were a great match for me. Out of 5, I was able to get technical tasks for 5. Successfully complete it for 4.[1] Land interviews, pair programming sessions with all. I rejected two companies, and got offers from other 2.

If you are dealing with external recruiters, remember it is in their best interest for you to land the job. So ask them lot of questions on what to expect in the interviews. See if they can connect you with someone who has gone through the interview process or better yet is hired by the company.

If internal interviewer, then you can still ask lot of question. Specific questions like which skills do you expect me to demonstrate during the process? Is there any specific background reading about the interview process you can point me to?

Glassdoor also often has lot of interesting information on interview questions and process at large companies.

And do not worry about rejections. I know it feels really bad, but sometimes you have to see that they are rejecting you because you are not a match for them. And hence they are not a match for you. Creator of homebrew was rejected by google in a technical interview. :) Sometimes companies value one type of technical knowledge (say abstract/theory), and you might value different type (getting things done).

[1] The company where I failed technical task - reasoning was too many comments in the code and checked in generated files in git. Hardly something I personally would have worried about as an interviewer, but again everyone has different criteria. I have seen people give bad reviews for programming tests because formatting was un-java like, or overuse of the final keyword.

> I can't figure out what the problem is

Companies don't know what they want and are incapable of hiring the best talent.

My advise is to find the tech you want to work on, and apply to those jobs. If you're short on skills in those areas, github and personal projects with go a long way if you already have general programming experience.

> feel increasingly insecure about my ability to build a career

This is a real problem for the industry. If you're focused on the front end, you're disposable I think. That area is completely commoditized and easily done by outsourcing. Focus on the infrastructure and the backend if you want to be in high demand.

I suspect that something about your resume is throwing people off. Definitely have someone technical review it.

From your interviews, do you have some sense of what's going wrong? Is there difficulty in getting through the technical challenge? Is the code possibly messy in some way? Or maybe you aren't hitting it off well with the interviewer? If you can't figure it out, then maybe a friend will be willing to mock interview and give some suggestions.

Finally, if you perform well on the job, then interview at a place with a coworker who thinks highly of you. Their reference can help get you through any bumps in the interview process, and they might even be able to pass along more detailed feedback.

In the two technical interviews I failed, one was an algo question that I bombed. I choked and everyone understood it was no-go. The other was a practical coding exercise that I failed but I didn't get any feedback. I can guess why but I'm not sure what was expected. I don't think anyone could have done the exercise perfectly in the time given, so I went with one set of trade-offs. Maybe I'm wrong and I'm just too slow, or maybe I chose the wrong trade-offs.

https://zety.com/blog/hr-statistics

    1 in 6 candidates who applied for a job were asked for an interview.
    (Jobvite 2017 Recruiting Funnel Benchmark Report)

Also, as a recently returned American expat. It was really, really hard. Things that were important to me while working in Europe, like GDPR, had no equivalent in the US. I turned to old alumni friends to get me in the door. That proved more effective than spraying resumes.

As people progress in their careers, some have valuable experience and acquired skills to show for it, others only have a few additional gray hairs to show for it. That's why there's always skepticism about people no matter what stage their career is in.

The questions all of us need to ask ourselves is: "What in my resume shows that I'm in the former category rather than the latter?" and "How can I prove it?"

Listings intended to show investors, current employees, and others that the company is growing.

H1B required listings that are effectively taken.

Positions that executives want filled so the manager lists them with no intention of actually hiring anyone.

I’m sure there are many other reasons why applications are not getting a serious review.

Maybe there has been a cultural shift back to viewing "job hopping" as undesirable. After all, given the generally improved market, more people than ever are quitting jobs, so maybe there is a backlash. Or maybe people just kind of implicitly feel like the job market is good for now, and it won't last, and maybe the people who are out of work or underemployed should be preferred over those who are just climbing the ladder. This could be considered exploitative [by employers looking for cheap hires], but it also could be a moralistic thing.

Everybody says applying to 50 (or hundreds) of jobs is normal, but I don't think I've ever done that, including when I graduated from college. The last time I was unemployed, it took I think ~a dozen applications and maybe 3 or 4 interviews.

I've made an effort to connect with recruiters on LinkedIn for years, but I've never gotten a job that way, although I've gotten phone screens at Google and other interesting places. Dice only produces recruiter spam these days for me, although I got two jobs from corporate recruiters finding me there in the past.

Your stats make it unclear what happened after the technical interviews. If you were not rejected at the technical interview 7 times, and you got to the next step twice, then what happened to the other 5 instances? Were there any offers that you rejected?

I’ve always used the approximate rule of thumb: 10%-10%

Out if 100 applications, you'll probably get 10 interviews, and out of 10 interviews you’ll probably get one offer. This has been approximately consistent with my results for 20 years.

This is an enormous red flag to me. Submitting dozens of applications almost certainly means you're not putting the required thought and attention into each one. For any given job application, you should be spending a good amount of time analyzing the job posting and researching the company and tweaking your resume so your accomplishments and responsibilities match what they're looking for.

You did PHP and JS at your last job but you're applying for a JS job? Cut down the PHP mentions and emphasize your JS-related accomplishments. You worked on e-commerce but you want a job at a content/publishing company? List an accomplishment or responsibility related to the handling of product content.

If you're doing it right, you should not have time to submit 50 applications. The shotgun approach is lazy and ineffective.

For the record, you're far from the only one who suffers from the shotgun approach. It seems extremely common, and as such, the "why isn't it working" question is very common.

I was recently looking for a position in a new area where I had virtually no network connections and had to deal with the current hiring system. At first, I used the tried and true tailored approach, but after being completely and utterly ghosted by what seemed legitimate and reasonable postings after investing hours into each, I reverted to the shotgun approach across groups I had some interest in and finally had success landing interviews.

Now, after working in the area awhile and establishing some connections for a small network, I have multiple projects and more interesting opportunities than I have time to give popping up. If you don't have a network, it's a complete mess to deal with right now.

Granted, I can at least get interviews. But with each rejection, even when I make it to on-sites that seem to go well, I just walk away feeling like I suck or should do something else.

It’s really hard to keep going like this at times... painful to see new grads out leetcode me / interview into FAANG right out of school :(

[1] https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/middle-aged-ma...

I feel like it's a numbers game. Technical interviews are a mess all over the board. It's sort of the joke where someone knows something is done wrong, so they do things differently, which is just as bad.

You'll probably have to keep trying your luck, hoping you find a company whose star developer just died or started a startup and they're desperate to fill the spot. Or someone who has this perfect vision of an engineer which fits you exactly.

I tried to optimize my job search the same way, and what worked for me were the things I hadn't optimized for. Like I've fine tuned my script for YC's job listing when I was actively searching, and yet two of them offered an interview when I wasn't searching. Maybe people who fine tune their resumes and cover letters feel 'off' somehow. It seems to work a bit like dating - the more stats you collect, the weirder you seem.

https://rezi.io

If you're a good developer you likely have developer friends who work for different companies. These can also be people you've collaborated on open-source projects with, or met at conferences. If you've made a good impression on them, tell them that you're looking for a job. Either they'll be interested in getting you hired to their company and getting a reference bonus, or they could hook you up with friends of them who are looking for developers.

1. Set up online profiles in as many "resume" websites as you can find and let it work for you, i.e. let recruiters find you and contact you.

2. Get out there and meet other people, and not just online but also through in-person activities that you enjoy. I was referred to and subsequently got hired in one company because the drummer of a band I joined is friends with the CEO.

And now that I'm an interviewer, I've made it a project to promote questions and processes that make people feel (1) they had a chance to demonstrate real skills that are important to doing the job (2) they experienced what it's like to work on my team and feel excited about it.

Happy to chat in more detail if you're interested, even if our firm is not the right fit for what you're after... contact info is in my profile.

- which country are you based in? (each country's job market is wildly different); are you native of that country?

- do you apply in response to job ads, or find companies you like and apply even if there are no openings?

If I can advise something regarding no responses: finding a recruiter (on LinkedIn etc.) and talking to them directly might yield better responses than applying via a blackbox website (although this is just my gut feeling).

I've been working with a recruiter but they haven't done much for me. Very generic resume feedback (e.g. "Here's an example of a good resume. Just compare yours.") and no feedback from recruiter when companies turn me down.

As for your stats, they look normal. It's a numbers game and the interviews have a large element of luck - some will click well, most will not. In the end, its just a shit job!

For context I am 30 year old french, had my one and only job for 6 years doing PHP (sf2, postgres, redis, solr, rest), I have a 2 year degree where in europe most people have a 3 to 5 year degree.

Here is my statistics to applying to ads on indeed:

France: - application: 40 - noreply: 20 - phone screen: 7 - interview: 3 - landed: 1

Luxembourg (french speaking): - application: 18 - noreply: 9 - phone screen: 5 - interview: 1 - landed: 1

Remote (europe): - application: 7 - noreply: 5 - interview: 0

Spain(5)/Portugal(2)/Uk(2)/Switzerland(1): - application: 10 - noreply: 1 - phone screen: 5 - interview: 3 - landed: 0

My takes over are:

- Cover letter doesn't increase my chances of having a reply.

- Changing my CV after the feedback of a recruiter (he asked me to lie by omission) didn't improved my chances.

- I don't apply to company I recognize the name. If I do lots of people do too therefor there is a lots of better candidates than me and the company can afford to run me through many interviews.

- I don't apply to company that do more than 1 interview, they have too much time on their hands to find a reason not to hire me.

- I don't apply to company that specifically ask for a 3 to 5 years degree even if I fit the rest of the requirements.

This last job search (the one that landed my first job 7 years ago wasn't a bliss either) made me feel extremely under-confident in my capacity to grow my career even having a job.

Other interesting observations: one company called back for a second interview after six weeks. I thought they had ghosted me.

Another company (highly qualified) called for a second interview after three months.

There was a company that listed reasonable requirements on their ad, and then in the phone interview they wanted someone with extreme talent. Why waste my time? Why waste their time? Don't put hard requirements in the "nice to have" section please!

That said maybe the ratio is because you are aiming high, so it could be a good sign. A 1-1 ratio could show going for too easy jobs.

Regarding the companies rejecting you right away, my experience is that a lot of times it is either some particular key word that is missing or some other little detail they don't like. Hard to tell so as I don't know which companies rejected you.

The more important question is whether these have been your dream jobs and employers. If not, just keep in mind you do not need dozens of job offers but the one you really want.

May I ask why you want to change jobs? Seems like you are rather appreciated where you are right now.

You never mention what exactly you did, but it sounds like JavaScript and nodejs from your username. I don’t know how often you switched companies but if you switched more than 2 times in your 6 years, there might be a risk of „you build it but you don’t want to maintain it“.

I also got a similar vibe from some of your comments. Some of them sound like „I know the concepts, I build my own better React“.

It’s really not something I would like to hear in a technical interview.

There is less info in this post than on your CV, so please excuse when I read too much into it.

Consultant shops build things for businesses all the time without maintaining them (and businesses pay lots of money for it, way more than an individual candidate), so that shouldn't really be on any hiring manager's mind. Job hopping is a rational response to tech companies unwilling to give raises that match market salaries.

Plus if you have someone that can build things but hasn't maintained them, your company can be their first experience.

I understand the reasoning to want to make more money, but to me job hopping regularly with less than 2-3 years stay, it's a bad sign. It can happen, and I also have seen people who realized two month in a new job that this doesn't work out for them. This is nothing to be ashamed of, but when I see a resume of someone having 5 jobs in 5 years, I probably would pass on them.

But I'm in Germany and maybe that's just me and in the US it's very different.

Also these numbers look very reasonable to me. 9 technicals out of 50 is a good rate, esp for coming from an overseas company as you said you did.

Finally, are you using the modern tools like Hired, etc? Do you have LinkedIn gold? Are you actively networking and getting internal referrals? Are you going to meetups, esp those run by companies of interest?

Getting a job is not just about sending resumes into the void and waiting.

have you been leetcoding? if not, start now. read teamblind threads on job search.

forget about your github projects, blog posts, conf talks ect. Almost noone will look at those.

good luck.

My recent job search adventures:

https://medium.com/@arctansusan/my-adventures-in-job-searchi...

Rants and Ruminations From A Job Applicant After 100 CS Job Interviews in Silicon Valley

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzz5AaCWMps

75% of my attempts to find my own via job applications result in no response (your stats are better than mine), with zero feedback at one point or another (ghosting).

If you're not using recruiters, you should be. The discussion you get let's you sell yourself a little better than you can with a paper application only, and they often have additional info you won't find in the job descriptions

It seems like you went for quantity instead of quality. The opposite seemed to work well for me (personally, not trying to say its the only way).

I'd be happy to chat more, feel free to reach out. my email is my username at gmail.

Regarding your issue, I won’t overthink it. A lot of things can go wrong that just outside of your control.

I'm experiencing this as a college grad with 1 year web dev experience (similar accolades as you but then 1 year) and 1.5 year teaching experience.

IMO it's the interviewing thing that's completely bullshit.

Also if any company on HN is reading this, please reach out to interview this person for a frontend position.

10 years experience as Full Stack Dev, passed all the tech interviews also for some of the FAAMG group, but I was rejected after the "behavioral" interview.

I don't know what to think. I believe it is an excuse to reject candidates with higher compensation requirements.

sounds like they're doing it for compliance, so that they can hire H1B people at super low wages

Just focus your energy on the things that work, and apply for jobs where you think you get what you want.

Triplebyte is also good. Also ask around with ex-colleagues for referrals.

1. Do you have a LinkedIn profile, clearly listing your skills, accomplishments, and experience? Also with a clear, professional profile picture? Do you link to your Github page (and vice versa).

2. Do you have an account on StackOverflow careers?

3. Does your resume look crisp and clean (using a good template), with readily available information about skills and experience?

After this, remember that straight-up _applying_ to companies is well known to be the LEAST effective way to get a job.

The better way is to let companies - or at least recruiters or hiring managers at specific companies - approach you (usually LinkedIn, StackOverflow is better). This involves a lot of tending to your professional social-media profiles, love it or hate it.

The best way is of course to get hired by someone you know from prior successful professional collaboration who makes an opening at their company specifically because they want YOU.

TLDR, give a lot of attention to LinkedIn, GitHub page, StackOverflow careers profiles. Let people approach you. Don't fling out resumes to hundreds of companies like a frisbee.

Here are some tips:

- call them on the phone and pretend you have some relevant question about the job. Then slightly introduce yourself so when he/she goes through the candidates you will be remembered.

- the recruitment people are like you and me, nobody wants to see a boring CV and a application text that screams "please hire me". Sometimes I dont even upload the CV, I just link them to my github and linkedin profile and instead write short but mesmerizing applicant text. Keep it short. Its like when you read the comments section on HN or news papers. You skip the long comments because its just too much and instead read the one-liners. The same applies here.

-this is optional but having published projects are bonus. Like if you have app on appstore or websites/startups and things to show for it certainly will catch their attention.

Going off my sample size of three, yes, that looks like the average experience.

It's just a numbers game/funnel like anything in sales.

The 50 applications thing is one of the reasons I get really annoyed at people who claim software Devs have it so easy (we do) but when asked how many jobs they applied for last week it's like, oh I applied for 5 jobs over the last 6 months.

Here I am writing and sending 10 unique, researched cover letters every day. No wonder I get hired in under two weeks.