

Ask HN: Anecdotes about the current job market - smanek

Some of the discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=385368 got me curious about the current job market (either in the US or abroad). I was just wondering what sort of hiring practices/offers people are seeing?<p>Personally, I've found a lot of the big companies that I would have liked to work for (Cisco, Sun, etc) have hiring freezes or have drastically cut new hires. Oddly, the hedge funds were still hiring, with very good pay. A lot of smaller niche companies (healthcare, defense, manufacturing, etc) were hiring, but I got the feeling that competition was a bit more fierce than usual.<p>Just curious about how others found the market now.
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jgrahamc
I'm hiring for a new start-up in central London and we are having a hard time
finding very good people because many candidates are deciding to hang on to
the jobs they have. Most seem afraid to leave for something unknown when the
economy seems to be tanking.

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pclark
what are the roles you're looking for at the startup?

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jgrahamc
I'm looking for two people:

1\. A Java developer who's done lots of back-end work. Ideally someone who's
built a server in Java that's had to scale to either a large amount of data or
a high number of transactions. Someone really familiar with multi-threading.

2\. A UI developer who's done stuff in Ajax and/or Flex. Would be very
interesting if there's done extensive work on data visualization in a web
browser, or on web-based applications that do fast real-time updates.

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pclark
re: #2: got a degree in comp sci, I studied UXDA primarily -- good head for
AJAX stuff (ruby background) and currently have serious interest in : a) data
viz of data (Nytimes have gorgeous stuff) b) on the fly news processing and
algo development for rapid filtration - project I've been toying with that
filters a few hundred incoming RSS feeds and does magical organization with
them.

no stuff on the web yet, but am deffo curious. Got a detailed spec?
peter@omgponi <!dot> es

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jgrahamc
Sorry, didn't see this until you tweeted it. You can email your CV to me.

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kaens
I am currently working for what could be considered a startup based in the UK
(I am in the US). It's a fairly interesting problem, but not normal
"startupish" stuff.

I have no formal education, no credentials (other than code).

I landed this job by doing what I had been doing for a while: going to the
bottom-of-the-barrel freelance sites like rentacoder, and skimming through the
job postings each day until I found things that didn't look painfully boring,
weren't asking for way too much for way too little, and weren't "OMG FIX MY
PHP CODEBASE" - because I had done a few of those, and they are _far_ from
fun. That's another story though.

I did (and still do) have an ace up my sleeve - I live really cheaply. This
meant that I could grab up the interesting projects that got put there because
the company doing the interesting stuff overloaded one guy, or because they
couldn't afford a "consultant", do them for cheap, and do them well - which
gained me repeat customers.

My current employment happened when after finishing one project, the client
asked me to do another, very similar project. I inquired about what he was
doing, and it turned out that he was doing a _bunch_ of these really similar
projects, that would be better implemented as one kinda loose project.

Wheee.

I guess I don't have much experience with the actual "job market" - but I can
say that if you're a person like me, the jobs are there. You just have to be
willing to work for cheap, at least for a bit (I'm not even _close_ to rolling
in the dough, but I have enough to pay my rent and bills and save some money
for trying to attend college next year).

With the bottom-of-the-barrel freelance sites, just communicating well and not
being a bot puts you in the top 95% of bidders for a job. It's really that
ridiculous. If you don't have much official prior experience, you'll probably
have to do some real crap work real cheap - but once you've got a few "this
guy is good" bits of feedback, you pretty much have your pick of the lot.

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kumpera
Hiring is getting harder here in Brazil. Too many openings and too few
available professionals.

Most companies, even the ones on consulting, have an increasing number of
openings and it's only getting harder to find qualified people.

Quite a few companies will take English speaking only professionals, just in
case.

If you are on a large city and have some marketable skills it's trivial to get
a contractor position in less than a week.

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byrneseyeview
I recruit for some mid-size software companies, and they're getting really
great people without trying too hard right now. Trying to get in touch with
some startups (I convinced the higher-ups at my company that it makes sense to
accept a portion of the recruiting fee in equity rather than cash).

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truebosko
Here in Waterloo, Ontario I still see a lot of hiring going on. RIM and other
big names are still posting job listings. Small companies in areas like
Montreal and Toronto are cutting, but others are hiring so it seems like a
mixed bag.

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huhtenberg
Where did you get your info from ?

Job listings does not mean the company is hiring. This is especially not true
for large companies. Their HR depts routinely have few generic job postings in
rotation to keep internal candidate databases updated. This was the case after
'01 burst and I'm sure it's still the case now.

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truebosko
My info was from my own general viewings. That's why I didn't give any raw
numbers or anything. I follow various blogs and sites that post those jobs and
it's just what I'm seeing in general.'

You're right though, I should have not said "hiring" and instead "job
listings" .. Unfortunately I cannot edit my post anymore :)

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prakash
I am helping a couple of my friends in India get a job, mostly Bangalore, some
Mumbai & Delhi. Most of the companies have a hiring freeze, quite a few are
laying off people (but don't publicize it), only a handful are hiring, those
are all startups.

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plinkplonk
Here in Bangalore the big outsourcee companies (Infosys, Wipro) are cutting
back/ going slow on recruitment. Companies like Yahoo are still hiring. It is
hard (but not impossible) for folks just out of school to get a job.

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gaius
Not odd at all - hedge funds thrive on volatility.

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darose
Here in NYC I'm seeing a tough market all around, but especially with large
companies, banks, brokerages, etc. Most of the interviews I'm getting are with
smaller companies and startups.

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jroes
have you tried HUGE? I am considering applying there.

<http://www.hugeinc.com/careers/>

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known
Start-up jobs in India
<http://www.venturewoods.org/index.php/venturejobs/?cp=all>

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pjharrin
What hedge funds are hiring? I would love an internship with one

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coliveira
Add Google to that list.

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nostrademons
Not true, at least on the hiring freeze front. I just got an offer from them.

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time_management
Most companies that are not publicly laying people off or frozen are still
"hiring", but they are _extremely_ selective and conservative in their hiring
practices. This is true of all major US markets. It's a decent time to be an
established programmer, but it's probably utterly terrible for a 22-year-old
CS grad.

For aspiring hedge fund quants, it's bad (bad all around) but not _nearly_ as
bad as the financial news would have one think. Talentless, unskilled IBD/M&A
kids are toast and will never earn that kind of compensation again, but quants
and IT are still in high demand.

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potatolicious
I feel very lucky right now - I got an offer after an internship this summer,
before everything imploded. Am I glad I did that!

As for my anecdote: there were some rumors that the company I had the offer
for wanted to renege on it, but that didn't end up happening. I'm still
personally a bit worried, since they didn't knock down my pay, and maybe that
puts me on the fast track when the layoffs start happening?

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ConradHex
I can't imagine things would be so bad that companies would be eager to layoff
interns. You'd have to layoff like 10 interns to equal one reasonably
experienced employee.

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potatolicious
Ah, my bad, they're not laying off interns, I got a full-time offer after
concluding my internship.

