Same, I noticed my decline about two years before I got covid (2019). Getting covid def didn't help. I've managed to work a pretty simple software dev job mostly fixing bugs and not under any time constraints. I think that helped, but then I just now got laid off because the company realized that they could outsource most of the software work to china and/or Philippines. That and the notion that along with AI, I don't think the American based software developer will ever be a thing again. Which that is making me depressed again...
I did over 120 combined interviews/phone screens/take home tests,etc for about 55 different companies between 2020-2022. Imo, unless it is for a big tech company, interviewing is just not worth it. Sadly I get too nervous to even try out for any of the big tech companies. Plus I'm white and in my 40's. Companies now really want people out of high school/code camp that can program in python or javascript and pay $25 an hour. If a smallish company is handing out take home tests they are only to waste your time. Most of the companies I interviewed for were looking for 3-5 new devs. In some extreme cases I was told they were looking for 10-30 devs in the next 3 months. Here we are nearly 2 years later and I browse the company linkedin page and the employees listed are still the same ones. They never hired anyone. I depleted my $60k life savings in my 18 months of unemployment. If it wasn't for my faith in a "God" and my family, I would have just killed myself via a stent of extreme drug use and homelessness. I haven't drank or smoked since high school. I did get a couple of brief contract jobs but was quickly fired/laid off. But that little bit of money on top of the stimulus payments are what got me into 2023. Then found a backend dev job for a porn site. There was no interview, I was the only one that applied. I now work with the worst code and the laziest people. But it is the coolest team. There are no "PC' police or HR nazis here. Money pours in. I work like 10 hours a week and feel like I'm in heaven.
Oh, but onto your questions. So yes it is frustrating. And as far as feedback. I stopped asking for feedback because it was always maligned. Nobody will really know why you didn't get hired, remember, these companies aren't really hiring unless you are young and cheap. In most cases my feedback sounded like it was almost for someone else. Like "needed more linux experience (I haven't touched a windows or mac OS since 2005). Or my favorite, after talking about a data warehouse I built to house 5TB of data and 15 billion rows, and all the different schemas I migrated through, their reason was they wanted someone with "more database experience".
120 interviews over the 2021 hiring boom and got nothing? I must say, this is quite out of line with most developer experiences in that time period. What area do you work in?
"these companies aren't really hiring unless you are young and cheap"
Nah, I think there are more factors at work (Also, cheap is relative, therefore dependent on other factors, and therefore somewhat vague)-- its a multivariate situation where you, and the many factors you bring, flow into a process and the many factors it brings. If enough of those factors line up enough-- you get hired.
If it takes 18 months to get hired, I'd analyze the factors you bring. Such as: Web portfolio & Online presence. Network. Resume posted on multiple sites. Appearance & Demeanor during interviews. Skills/Years Exp/Qualifications relative to the role's stated requirements. Etc.
I'm pretty burned out too with my work (mostly web dev stuff). I've been meaning to get "AWS certified" or learn Kubernetes, but like you, it all seems so crazy to me. I used to love old school "linux administration", but this new wave of tech gives me no interest.
Curious how you get an offer such as this? I've thought about changing job roles, but I really suck at leet coding so I've never really bothered. I figured that as a 40 year old male, no one would hire me for a role unless I was already experienced. Is that not the case?
Feeling the same. Tired of web stack. Don’t want to do Kubernetes. Don’t want to do ML. All I want is descending to lower level programming. Rust would be nice. C would do too. LLVM IR might be my ultimate language. I don’t waste time on Leetcode. I spend most of my free time on side projects on GitHub which helps me build up a portfolio for my next job. I also watch MIT courses to learn system programming. I don’t care about earning a degree. Just watching it for the pleasure of it.
Have you considered applying for entry level jobs of a different domain? As long as you are ok with a pay cut, there is not such thing as over-qualifying.
I feel what is underpinning this thread is a job dissatisfaction issues from the ratio between "using other people's software" vs. "writing software for others". The former is inevitably frustrating as I'd become a consumer of software, rather than a creator. Kernel programming, and low-level system engineering in general is more aligned with the latter where you have more creative freedom and less constraints from other people's abstractions. It's like driving an automatic vs. manual car. The latter is just more fun, despite its inefficiency.
Stuff is screwed up. I applied at over 80 companies last year, got interviews with about 60 of them, did about 110 individual phone screens/interviews. Got no offers. It seems the management paradigm right now for small shops or startups is to dedicate $350k or so per year for developer salaries. A single principle or staff engineer is hired. Takes $150k per year. And they in turn try to shove 4 juniors into the remaining $200k. I'm 40 years old with no lead experience and I'm not a junior. So I fit none of these roles.
Have you been a developer the whole time? ~16-18 YOE with no lead experience could be [incorrectly] taken as a red flag.
I will say we've been trying to hire two seniors for the better part of 6 months and most of the people we end up on the phone with either end up going somewhere (presumably for more $ but it's rare to get a reason), or they do so poorly on the technical screen it makes you wonder if they just used someone else's resume. Nothing in between the two - I've been in my current EM role for probably 3 months, have done maybe 20-25 interviews, and we've extended 4 offers. One accepted then took a different job two days before his start date, one accepted, two declined.
I've been doing some form of development since the age of 28. I look young for my age so I could probably pass for 35. I've made sure nothing giving my true age away is online or on my resume. I think the biggest issue is I have mostly been in the Perl ecosystem and most of those companies are self hosted, not using docker, etc. I do have requirements of only being remote, this worked fine in the perl world. But those jobs are mostly non-existent now and plus I was tired of the mindset that perl software stacks seem to harbor (never updating software, why use a framework when you can cowboy code your own, etc). Spent 2 years playing around with Django, figured it would be an easy transition. Hard to say why I don't get hired. I even did 7 interviews with one company. Several occasions I even celebrated early (buying stuff I didn't need with my dwindling savings account, going out to eat at fancy places with the family, etc) because I had 2 or 3 interviews ongoing and they were going so good and I was such a good match that I just knew I'd get an offer from one. But no... Slowly went from asking $130k per year to $120k, $110k, $90k.. That didn't help, the companies got crappier, the interviews just got longer and harder (the opposite of what I was wanting because I was so burned out by this time). Had a couple of perl companies reach out to me, but they are old legacy code and part time 1099. I can barely make myself put in over 15 hours combined per week with them though. Just feels like I am poisoning myself by going with them and want to do more interviewing but then the voice telling me it is pointless comes back so I just end up sitting in my home office for 12+ hours a day staring out the window.
I'm sorry to hear about your experience! It's really shitty to have applied so many times in a year and gotten nowhere. I can't help you out but for to encourage you that interviewing is always a numbers game. I find it depressing and have to apply to tons of companies and I'm not your age. My only trick is to take breaks when I need them and keep trying.
I'll share my personal experience, in case it helps. I only apply to small startups (less than 50 employees, but I usually get hired in places with <10 people). These have much more straightforward and short hiring processes. I find those companies solely from HN Who is Hiring thread or AngelList. I never got anything from a job post on Linkedin (much less Indeed and etc). I am a frontend developer, but I do see a lot of Python positions.
If you filter for companies based in the US only, the pay is pretty good.
There is a lot of luck involved in getting hired (especially after going through an interview, since from there the process is very subjective). It sucks, but you just have to keep trying. One day you will be the lucky one. Good luck!
Is the TC at these small companies (particularly taking into account the risk of any stock options) comparable to the TC at Big Tech (notwithstanding the recent sell-off on Wall Street)?
Or do you give up some TC for the other benefits of working at these small startups?
I don't think it violates any rules here, so sure. The company is called ServicePower, we run a handful of apps in the field service, insurance, and warranty industries. My teams are NodeJS, AWS, Kafka, but there are other teams (some with open recs as well) that do C++ or Java if that's more your thing. All teams are remote-first and all teams are US or UK. I added my email to my profile if you (or anyone else) is interested in discussing more.
Hey—I saw some of your past comments on your interviewing experience. Have you contributed to any open source projects? It can be helpful as a reference point in interviewing.
If you want to drop me an email, the least I can do is offer some feedback on your resume / online profile(s).
I can't help but feel like the "software industry" is in a slow decline (or race to the bottom). Back in 2007 before I even knew how to "program", I was a linux admin at a small start up. We found someone that we trusted enough to build us a basic webpage. But he wanted $75 per hour. Couldn't find anyone else so bit the bullet. It was written in php, took the guy a few weeks to do, and we paid him somewhere between $3k and $5k for the work. For the other side of our business (our actual product, taking GPS coordinates via SMS and displaying on top of a google maps like interface), same thing, we could only find one other person that we actually trusted to build our actual product. But he wanted $75 an hour. We bit the bullet. Two weeks go by and and he shows us a mostly working demo. A back end Ruby script writing the SMS to a mysql DB, and a Rails app displaying the coordinates with mapnik. Another week later and he is finished and invoices us for $16,000.
I was in college at the time and couldn't wait to graduate and start rolling in money. I mean, these two programmers didn't even have degrees and I was about to have one. That meant I could do the same thing only charge $100 an hour right?
My first "IT" job out of college I made $54k a year. After three years I got my first promotion to $64k but quit a few months later. Did a couple of 1099 contracts at $50 an hour over a year. Got hired by Apex and sent to AT&T for $35 an hour. Did that for a year and then back to 1099 contracts again. This time at $55 an hour. Moving on up! After 4 years of that, quit cold turkey and figured with 10 years of experience now under my belt that I could easily find some better contracts or full time work.
22 months and 110 interviews later, still nothing.
I wonder how come I was lucky enough to get a high paying job at a FAANG company when other people struggle for years and do tons of interviews and got nothing. Are you stuck in a state with not many jobs? Is it because FAANG companies only hire people who went to really good schools? Maybe the commenter above is actually not very good at interviewing and doesn't realize it? Something else?
At least two FAANG companies hire from my Kroger-brand just-beyond-community-college alma mater, so I'm gonna guess that's not it.
I have dark theories about how much harder it would have been if I'd taken even a single other job and then tried to be hired in, because of how split-brained the "university hiring" and normal hiring seem to be..
I'm not moving, I've been working remote only since 2015. That is the biggest factor to going to a FAANG. I am near Austin, TX, there are many SaaS startups there but the dev teams are always people under the age of 30 for the most part. They live in small apartments, not married, no kids, some didn't even have a car. I'm 40 and live on 20 acres of land and even though I personally live and breath code, it is clear I would never "fit" on any of the Austin teams even though I am perfectly fine being around modern yuppie types.
How does this have anything to do with the article? Sounds like a long rant about how you can't get a job in a thriving tech industry where salaries are actually going up by a lot.
> Sounds like a long rant about how you can't get a job in a thriving tech industry where salaries are actually going up by a lot.
You say it is thriving, I say it is not. So who is correct? Every job I applied for was django development with a remote team. Once I'd get rejected, I'd keep an eye on the company's linkedin page and see who got the position instead of me. In two cases it ended up being someone much more senior than I (like 10 years experience in pure django), and in 3 other cases it was someone with less than two years of experience and who recently graduated from a coding bootcamp (and I guarantee they are paid no where near $100k). And in about 10 other cases, the linkedin page has stayed the same, so not sure if they hired anyone at all or what. But I've only really been paying attention to the pages for about 15 different companies versus the 60 or so I interviewed for.
Edit: Oh and about the wage thing... forgot to mention for many of these smaller software shops they are now doing most of their hiring out of South America. Fullstack labs, consumer affairs, just to name a few but the list goes on.
It is very much thriving. I started with internships at ~$40/hr in 2016, I will make $680k this year W2 (I code in C++ and Python). You should brush up on some recent tech stacks and move to Seattle or Bay Area if you're having trouble finding remote work.
The median dev job is like 100k in the US so I don't think your experience (though unfortunate, not disputing that) is representative of the market. Salaries for experienced developers are climbing even now and there is a general shortage.
Curious, what is the "wrong" person? I've worked with some co-workers before that were clearly not a fit, but it was so obvious. One time I was asked to help a new hire with a project that was falling behind. He had spent 2 months trying to get some javascript (that he copied from a project I had done) working. He didn't even know what the web console was. As soon as I opened it and saw the javascript errors the fix was simple. But he spent 2 months just smearing random javascript around... Surely it would be easy to filter that person out during interviewing.
But on the other end... I've worked with some people that are pretty good at leetcode and very fast coders. But even though they write many pages of code every day and tons of commits, their code is absolutely horrible, full of bugs, impossible to read. They got stuff done, but it was at great cost in the future. That was mostly why I left my original job in the first place (looking for work now for 18+ months). We hired a couple of new people and they were pumping out so much code I couldn't keep up with all their commits. Bugs started rolling in and they were too busy working on the new projects to fix their old crap. Boss had me hunting down and digging through their garbage code while my projects were getting behind and I was the one "under-preforming". I started going insane, unable to get out of bed, staring out the window for 12+ hours a day unable to look at their code. Mostly walked out. Those new people all quit after I left as well but the company's market crashed due to covid so we would have all be laid off anyway.
If it’s tough to fire the obvious dead weight, just think how tough it is to fire your second category. Both seem “wrong”, unless the latter examples are being judiciously messy, e.g. build revenue first perfection later.
Best of luck. I have no idea how to get hired. I jumped shipped from my last employer in May of 2020 thinking I'd take a 2 month break and then start interviewing. Over 18 months I submitted over 80 applications, and got interviews at 40-50 different companies. Total phone and video interviews ended up being over 110 before I basically gave up. I was trying to transition from a full stack dev mostly with perl backends into a full stack django dev. But I don't think the fact that most of my experience being in perl was the issue, as in some cases my past experience was not talked about much or not mentioned at all. Plus I've re-written my resume and linkedin to mostly only mentioned python and django projects that I've worked on.
The interviews were all the same mostly. Do a take home project or do leetcode problems while the interviewer stares at you. Sometimes I did bad, sometimes I did alright, and other times I did great. It didn't seem to matter. The funny thing is as I got more desperate, I started applying to crappier companies and more junior positions for lower pay. As I went down the ladder, the interviews got even more complicated and challenging!
A couple of years ago I got interested in HVAC technology after having my HVAC unit replaced and researching options. As I'd mostly depleted my savings, I started debating on jumping ship to be an HVAC tech. I could cram for an EPA certification test over a couple of weeks and get a refrigeration cert and then be nearly guaranteed a position at a couple of local HVAC shops for $15 an hour. The only reason I haven't done that (yet) is like you said because of my kids. My life story would be I went to tech school out of high school and was an avionics tech for 3 years, followed by 5 years to get through university, followed by 10 years of software developer experience and then 2 years of no work followed by becoming an HVAC tech working with high school drop outs as co-workers. There would be no telling my kids to get an education when this (forced) path I'm on shows how worthless it is. I've never felt so lost and useless in my entire life.
The other reason for not jumping ship (yet) is that I feel so qualified on django/python stacks. You could drop me into any dumpster fire of a django project and I'd be fine. It is extremely insane that the only people getting hired in that space are people with under 2 years of experience or people with over 10 years of django only experience. There is absolutely no middle ground (which is where I fall in).
I'm now debating jumping on a difference language with a smaller community (similar to how perl used to be) like golang or elixir. But there is no guarantee there but I feel like hiring in that space would more likely respect past experience or at least know that if you graduated college and have years of experience that you would be able to "mostly learn anything" and be reliable. Dunno...
Thanks, and best of luck to you as well. Based on all these nightmare stories I'm hearing I'm half tempted to start a "island of misfit toys" consulting company. Seems like a lot of amazing talent going to waste in the pursuit of being trendy or feigning sophistication
I've thought this same thing. I've done interviewing for a small shop inside a big co., and I managed to have about an 90% hit rate and a strong percentage of excellent talent without doing ANY of this bullshit. No leetcode, no 7 interviews. HR screen, tech discussion, senior manager interview, done. It's not that hard to hire great people if you have the slightest inkling of what you're doing and HR and corporate processes don't dramatically get in your way.
Goodness, you and the OP have really hit the nail on the head.
I spent the last 5 years quite happy at a simple dev shop. Then they hired a bunch of people, paid them more than me, and allowed them complete free reign to write what ever kind of code on some brand new projects. After a year of this, one person quit mid-project, another died mysteriously (covid?), and then another just recently quit. My boss expected me to just pick up the slack on these three projects that were written in the most arcane and buffoon way possible. I basically just said no, and left. I had already been driven half insane over the year just trying to figure out the crap they were committing.
This was in the spring and I'm still unemployed. I'm mostly Java and some older languages, and was really looking forward to jumping onto python and django. But it's been a struggle really learning django good enough to interview for without any good experience behind me. I have a family and on top of covid issues and this year in general, sitting at home trying to learn a giant web framework is not very motivating when I could be spending it with my family (which were already severely affected by all my time I "wasted" going above and beyond at my last job for 5 years).
I just recently did an interview for a small django shop that didn't even test on django. Instead, I was given a half page of python code and asked to "fix" the problems. No requirements or tips. There was a syntax error, a bug, and a few cosmetic things.. I managed to find 8. All this while being stared at over Zoom. I was informed that "junior" devs can find 10-12 "problems", but they only hire those that "find" more than 18 (apparently 25 is the max).
I still got the code and look at it every now and then. Half a page of code that does nothing but take a list of "item" objects and print out an aggregate of a total price by item type. A loop over nothing but:
total[item.type] += item.cost
Of course there was some random data mangling above and below that, but that is the logic. Find the problems?! Should I raise errors or use a namedtuple or defaultdict? Half a page of code that could have just been a Select/Group by in SQL. No senor dev should be summing data like that. Sadly they said the code was from "production". They have "interviewed" over a hundred people in this year and hired only 1. All this for $45/hr 1099.
In the beginning, I briefly thought I could use my savings to start some kind of business, not sure what. But I've blown most of that just paying the bills while I "interview".
I used to love software and would dream and breath it. But I've never been so unmotivated over these last 6 months. I'm debating on just applying at a local small town municipal IT job for $30 an hour. Giving up basically. Just show up at 8am, answer the phone mindlessly for IT "problems" and tell people to try restarting their windows machine (at least 3 times minimum) and screw of playing solitaire the rest of the day. But it seems so pointless and waste of a life. But even that doesn't motivate me, but just makes me more depressed and even slower going.
Your comment highlights so many problems with our industry so poignantly, and at the same time is an extremely sad personal story...
I don’t actually know what to say as encouragement but I do feel for you :(
I was in a similar position to you on your last job, and after looking at every single company I could think of in my city (London) I ended up finding just one that seemed good in all possible counts...
Maybe there is a company out there that you’d like to work for? My approach was to filter by the product, and only look into working for companies whose end product I thought was good and interesting.
The Django shop test had nothing to do with your skills as a developer, and everything to do with language gatekeeping. It's just overcompensating for boring work and poor pay. It's no different to how the gaming industry exploits workers.
Don't give up. And for the love of all that is holy, don't work municipal IT, it would only demotivate you further. Keep at it, improve your skills and keep applying.
> Giving up basically. Just show up at 8am, answer the phone mindlessly for IT "problems" and tell people to try restarting their windows machine (at least 3 times minimum) and screw of playing solitaire the rest of the day.
You have a very holier-than-thou view of small scale IT work. There are a whole lot of problems to be solved at this level, many of them created by the people working the positions you're currently interviewing for.
Yeah, this echoes my experiences interviewing. Spent 6 months looking a few years back
It’s just incredibly demotivating to hear all the self-professed hot shots shit all over your past 10 years of delivering unambiguous value because you don’t know that [] === ‘’ is true in Javascript.
I finally found a position that’s financially great, but it’s more in spite of their dev process than thanks to it.
Is there anything you're passionate about? If so, why not spin up a website on that subject?
Django is pretty easy to learn. Model view Etc in Python instead of Ruby. Not rocket science.
Building something you care about will force you to dig into the details and become enough of an expert in a few weeks to get in the door somewhere where your skills will be appreciated.
That probably won't be Facebook, Google, or the next Silicon Valley unicorn. But there are a lot of other places and other Industries where interesting things are going on.
It's a numbers game, learn from mistakes and continue to the next interview. Eventually you have seen them all and you will pass the gatekeeping. Steel in forged in fire. After hundreds of bullshit interviews, nothing surprises me anymore and it's just all automatic process now.
I haven’t had anything quite that bad, but I’ve had an interview where I was being tested on SQL, but the interviewer didn’t actually know the SQL keywords I used.
It happens. It’s a strong sign you want to work elsewhere anyway. The problem is one of finding the right Elsewhere.
This sounds exactly like a job I interviewed for a couple of years ago, a Django shop. I'm skilled at Python but the questions were ridiculous. I feel like you probably dodged a bullet and don't want to work there anyway.
