Navigating the Complex Landscape of Tech Recruitment: Personal Insights and Open Discussion

MasterBlaster, 8 months ago

You are spot on. I’ve had Decades of experience and success in this industry. However this year I was laid off in one of those 6 to 10% staff lay off things. Since then I’ve applied to over 100 jobs I’ve had at least eight interview processes.

I go through two to four interviews some of them two to three hours long. And I get to the very end, and then I never hear from them again.

Some have me go through leet code type algorithm questions online with 20 minutes to solve the problem. For me, that’s pretty much impossible. Others have me spend several days creating a project from scratch, they review it and maybe they talk to me about it afterwards.

Others don’t do a very good job of hiding the ageism, e.g. insisting I tell them what year I got my CS degree.

Given the level of experience I have with new technologies as well as old, I find it hard to believe that I’m not fit to be employed all of a sudden.

First piece of advice, do not be over the age of 50. It won’t matter how good you are.

Second, even if you think you’re really good at interviewing and going through the application process take seminars and classes on the topic and keep tweaking.

Third, it doesn’t matter if you completed successfully one or more multimonth projects in a particular technology. If you don’t know every little detail when they interview you, you are immediately written off.

I had one not even bother to interview me because I did not have enough years writing React code.

Another wrote me off because it has been a few years since I tech lead an Angular project. My most recent company used React. The one before used Angular.

Apparently we must spend all our personal time continuing development on technologies not in use for our jobs at the expense of our families or we aren’t worth the trouble.

Oh yeah, and we must be able to succeed solving random algorithm problems in under 20 minutes on the spot. That means we basically need to be able to solve them all because we’ll never know which one will get.

akrot, 8 months ago

That’s some solid advice. If I may add, I had many instances during the technical interviews, where I just told them I don’t know or I don’t care or I don’ think it’s relevant for what I want to do. Few of them looked shocked and moved on to the next question, but it worked for the company I work at now. I’m based in EU though, maybe US culture is different.

MasterBlaster, 8 months ago

Here in the USA there is apparently a glut of unemployed developers as up to 300k were let go between last November and July.

I’m typically competing with over 200 applicants, so they probably just keep interviewing until they get exactly what they want. Plus, ageism.

akrot, 8 months ago

That sucks. But again US salaries are a whole different league.

scarabic, 8 months ago

All I have is anecdotal experience but I’ve been on the hiring end frequently over the last 5 years and this was my experience:

• I had to use the company template for parts of the job description. It contained some stuff that’s there for legal reasons, and a lot of stuff they just want on all jobs as policy, so we present a consistent face and have consistent hiring standards. But I could add as many custom paragraphs as I wanted, and I removed the 4-year degree requirement and no one complained. I’d say look for the “real” paragraphs from the actual hiring manager. They may be buried.
• online applications were pure noise - a flood of candidates not even remotely matching the qualifications listed or even having any relevant experience whatsoever. I’m sure some were total shots in the dark or even automated - basically spam. Others were probably cases where people thouggggggght their experience was relllllllevant because they were looking at it through the eyes of hope or desperation. Before you wonder why an employer never answered your application, ask how much time you spent deciding to apply there. If it’s less than 60 seconds, this is probably your answer.
• recruiters mostly brought me people they found through networking. Yes LinkedIn, but also through other contacts. In one case they brought me someone who was a close #2 pick for another open job at our company and did turned out to be great
• Every candidate we talked to was also talking to other employers, which is reasonable. People complain sometimes that they attended a meaningless job interview because “they already knew who they wanted to hire.” This also happens in reverse where a candidate will keep applying to new jobs even if they are negotiating an offer somewhere. Just in case that offer falls through. Reasonable right? Well, it’s also reasonable to keep interviewing candidates in case you don’t get that one you are hoping you will. If you do get them, you might have to tell others “sorry we have filled the position” and they might feel like they barely got a chance. This is just how it works. I’ve also seen people sign offer letters and then start work with us, and in week 1 accept another offer somewhere else and jump ship. Employers and candidates both betray each other and behave without honor. That’s just how it goes.

yessikg, 8 months ago

I applied for any job that mentioned anything I have experience in. Multiple interviews are stressful but it does make sense to keep each interview focused, rather than having one super long interview. My tips are apply to a lot of jobs and ask questions in the interview about the job\company. Good luck!

kennebel, 8 months ago

Asking questions about the company, tools, processes, and other aspects is the right direction to find out if you want to work at a company.

If your only question is “when do/can I start?”, you have utterly failed the purpose of an interview. Also, before you have finished asking that “question “, it is likely the interviewer has already mentally thrown your resume in the trash.

sbv, 8 months ago

I’ve been a technical interviewer. The process sucks from our side as well. I’m in a medium sized tech company.

The generic job description thing is due to HR. The job description is something like two pages, and we get to contribute two sentences in the middle. We’re trying to build a more diverse team, so we’ve been able to convince HR to remove some of the “candidate must have 20 years of Rust experience” crap.

I’m not sure if we’re offenders in the never ending interview process. We typically have two interview sessions. In a few cases we’ve asked seniors to come back for a tie-breaker.

One of the problems interviewers face is that it’s really hard to detect competence in an interview. In a couple of cases we’ve had people flub coding questions, but they seem good otherwise. In other cases we’ve hired juniors that did well on coding questions that aren’t great employees - they suffer confidence/motivation issues.

It’s frustrating because I haven’t been trained to interview people. I don’t think our process is particularly good (or bad), but I don’t know how to make it better. Most of what I read about it online is contradictory. We’ve hired some amazing developers, but we’ve also hired some people who don’t contribute very well.