I found a job as a developer after about 10 months of applying for 100 jobs per month. It was very weird this time round. Especially weird considering that my resume is exceptional (lots of experience; corporate, startup, back end, front end, full stack, distributed systems, open source). The list of technologies that I'm competent with is long and, for most of them, I've got open source projects to prove my claims. Air tight situation.
This time round, employers had all kinds of weird esoteric requirements which made no sense.
For example, I applied for a job where I matched every single technology in their stack (and it was a long list), I even had proven experience in 'Web Components' which was still niche in a professional setting (most jobs are still React, Vue, etc...) Anyway, they ended up rejecting me with the explanation "The head of engineering is very particular, even though this position is Node.js/JavaScript, he likes to hire candidates who have a background in C#." There was no mention of this on the job advert! Besides, I did use C# full time for 2 months during the summer break while at university which I mentioned after she seemingly invented this requirement but she responded 'He likes candidates who started with C#.'
There is no way they would find anyone who meets all of these requirements who also happen to know this completely unrelated technology.
Anyway, after 1 year, out of 1000+ applications I submitted, I got about 5 phone screens with recruiters and 2 interviews with actual company insiders.
The first company Founder I interviewed with seemed keen to hire me at first and kept leading me on; but they always waited for me to ask them about the next stage in the process before actually proceeding... They kept half-ass ghosting me until the last phase and then I was like "They can't be serious about hiring me" and I stopped asking about the next phase.
My sister works in HR and she told me that I only needed to match about 60% of tech requirements to get a job. It didn't correspond at all with my observations of reality...
Putting 2-and-2 together, it seems like they were giving all these high paying jobs to beginners and tossing experienced candidates' resumes in the trash... Probably the HR leads were not even seeing the resumes of experienced candidates coming in.
It all seems kind of conspiratorial if you ask me.
Another weird thing that happened (going 2 years back and which led me to being unemployed) is that the startup I was working for was getting very few job applications when I applied. They were super keen to hire me and I got a big salary, share package, everything... Then 6 months in, candidate applications started pouring in by the thousands... After sifting through thousands of applications, they managed to hire an absolute weapon; this guy was not only sharp, but he was churning out maybe 1K lines of code per day. Really impressive. I had not seen anyone code that fast before. He built features really quickly. I was doing peer reviews for the whole team, which was hard work and essential at the time, especially with code being churned out at that rate! Anyway I was laid off because the founders didn't see the value of my PR code reviews.
They didn't understand how important it was to have someone looking over this superhuman code churning to keep complexity under control. Multiple times, I saved the front end from memory leaks and rogue setInterval/setTimeout which were unnecessary or not cleaned up properly (among many other issues). Sigh. I feel like this situation would have been a startup founder's dream, surely combining the massive development speed with the safety/de-risking I was adding was worth the tiny sub-% equity I was set to receive 4 months later... Sigh.
I didn't say it was entirely a good thing, hence the importance of the PR review process. As I said, I found numerous bugs, sometimes nasty ones that are hard to identify/fix before they got merged. That engineer was building features really fast, however. Maybe it wasn't 1K lines per day every day, but definitely he did hit that mark on some days.
He was surprisingly skilled considering the volume of code and he had a solid understanding of a lot of advanced concepts and nuance so I know he wasn't blindly using LLMs. He did implement features really quickly and bug density was quite low overall.
I'm sure he could have implemented those features using fewer lines of code, but as the team lead, what can I say to a highly motivated 25 year old who is churning out new features faster than the rest of the team combined? Motivated people aren't typically very receptive to generic feedback like "This is great but you should try to reduce complexity"... Of course, I could provide slightly more detailed feedback, but that would be getting into my personal coding philosophy and didn't quite align with the broader practices of the company (a startup) at the time. There were a lot of things that the company was doing, which is standard (most companies are doing the same) but which I don't agree with and which would sound controversial. I could provide strong arguments for my positions, but humans are flawed, and carefully thought out, nuanced arguments that go against conventional thinking often tend to fall on deaf ears... You can only rock the boat so much.
Also, you don't want to de-motivate a highly productive person. Even if they're productive only in one narrow dimension. With me looking over his code, we could keep complexity under control at a maintainable level. Keep in mind, we were a startup in a competitive, growth sector. So developing features quickly was quite important and throwing away entire features to pivot was considered an acceptable risk.
Yes and doing that requires a solid non-stop and consistent 3 working LoC per minute for six hours straight. I don’t think a human is capable of processing that kind of volume unless it is pure boilerplate.
> This time round, employers had all kinds of weird esoteric requirements which made no sense.
I have often seen some jobs that sounded like a directory level manager mixed with principal engineer mixed with principal scientist all into one job with the title "senior engineer". It's just bewildering who these people are that they're looking for with such requirements that aren't even in the "nice to have" category.
> It all seems kind of conspiratorial if you ask me.
I agree that something seems very, very strange in this market in the past year or two. What it is, I don't know, but there is so much that doesn't make sense. It really makes me question if anyone really knows what's going on, in the sense that there are just a ton of companies out there that are near incompetent. Whatever is causing it, I think it's actually very bad for the U.S. economy. It seems like no one wants to do anything that's off the so-called rails. No risk. Do whatever everyone else is doing. Only find people who have no want to do anything except what you're already doing.
> It seems like no one wants to do anything that's off the so-called rails. No risk. Do whatever everyone else is doing.
Fundamentally that's what high interest rates will do, there's no need to take risk and there are no cheap loans to spend on moonshots that might not go anywhere.
I have long maintained that real knowledge is a well guarded secret.
<< in the sense that there are just a ton of companies out there that are near incompetent.
I want to say no, but I am old enough now to be able to compare to some of the previous positions and I can't help but wonder how much of all this is just posturing and bluffing ( fake it till you make it kinda deal ). I accept it was always there to an extent, but the current project I am a part of makes me question a lot.
This time round, employers had all kinds of weird esoteric requirements which made no sense.
For example, I applied for a job where I matched every single technology in their stack (and it was a long list), I even had proven experience in 'Web Components' which was still niche in a professional setting (most jobs are still React, Vue, etc...) Anyway, they ended up rejecting me with the explanation "The head of engineering is very particular, even though this position is Node.js/JavaScript, he likes to hire candidates who have a background in C#." There was no mention of this on the job advert! Besides, I did use C# full time for 2 months during the summer break while at university which I mentioned after she seemingly invented this requirement but she responded 'He likes candidates who started with C#.'
There is no way they would find anyone who meets all of these requirements who also happen to know this completely unrelated technology.
Anyway, after 1 year, out of 1000+ applications I submitted, I got about 5 phone screens with recruiters and 2 interviews with actual company insiders.
The first company Founder I interviewed with seemed keen to hire me at first and kept leading me on; but they always waited for me to ask them about the next stage in the process before actually proceeding... They kept half-ass ghosting me until the last phase and then I was like "They can't be serious about hiring me" and I stopped asking about the next phase.
My sister works in HR and she told me that I only needed to match about 60% of tech requirements to get a job. It didn't correspond at all with my observations of reality...
Putting 2-and-2 together, it seems like they were giving all these high paying jobs to beginners and tossing experienced candidates' resumes in the trash... Probably the HR leads were not even seeing the resumes of experienced candidates coming in.
It all seems kind of conspiratorial if you ask me.
Another weird thing that happened (going 2 years back and which led me to being unemployed) is that the startup I was working for was getting very few job applications when I applied. They were super keen to hire me and I got a big salary, share package, everything... Then 6 months in, candidate applications started pouring in by the thousands... After sifting through thousands of applications, they managed to hire an absolute weapon; this guy was not only sharp, but he was churning out maybe 1K lines of code per day. Really impressive. I had not seen anyone code that fast before. He built features really quickly. I was doing peer reviews for the whole team, which was hard work and essential at the time, especially with code being churned out at that rate! Anyway I was laid off because the founders didn't see the value of my PR code reviews.
They didn't understand how important it was to have someone looking over this superhuman code churning to keep complexity under control. Multiple times, I saved the front end from memory leaks and rogue setInterval/setTimeout which were unnecessary or not cleaned up properly (among many other issues). Sigh. I feel like this situation would have been a startup founder's dream, surely combining the massive development speed with the safety/de-risking I was adding was worth the tiny sub-% equity I was set to receive 4 months later... Sigh.