
Unraveling of the tech hiring market - luu
https://blogs.janestreet.com/unraveling/
======
p4wnc6
I've been facing the opposite problem. I've been in a lengthy job search and
despite being in a situation where I really need a job, I've been forced to
reject all the offers that have been made -- because the working conditions
are just too unhealthy.

The article mentions that a side effect of exploding offers is that you don't
get to see the full landscape of opportunities and trade-offs you're facing
before you make your decision.

On the other hand, after a year of job searching, hundreds of technical phone
interviews, dozens of take-home & interactive code tests, and a significant
number of job offers that I have turned down, what I can say is that I think I
have a pretty good picture of the overall tech job market, and it is
exceedingly depressing.

For instance, I have a mild case of misophonia, and so being seated in an
open-plan office layout is simply not doable for me, physiologically, and
listening to headphones obviously doesn't make sense if the problem is
misophonia.

Many companies have been excited about my skills, experience, work ethic, and
my ability to communicate.

But they have been 100% no-questions-asked outright indignant at the idea of a
candidate negotiating the ability to work in a private office.

Even if I explain that it is related to misophonia, and the extreme aversion I
have to ambient noises, conversations, small movements, and so forth, they
don't seem to care. In all previous jobs, my teamwork ability and my effort
spent collaborating was always praised as one of my best attributes. But in
today's job market, collaboration == sitting in an open-plan office.

Far from worrying about exploding offers, I am worried about the overall
industry shift that has happened to make it so that it is effectively
impossible to work in a private space as a developer.

I feel bad for all of the intrinsically introverted people who are nonetheless
excellent collaborators and developers -- the very nature of physical
workspaces is harmful to their cognitive health, yet employers outright, under
all circumstances, refuse to negotiate about it.

I've never been very interested in the idea of a software union. But the
egregious lack of privacy in the workspace has made me start to feel like a
union would be truly the only possible solution.

~~~
littletimmy
Do noise-cancelling headphones not work for you?

~~~
p4wnc6
Not even close. For one, listening to actual sound like music or a podcast is
even worse for me than the dull ambient backdrop noise. On rare occasion I can
listen to music for a brief period of time, maybe 1 hour. But any sustained
sounds longer than an hour and I start to feel the type of tiredness you feel
when you pull an all-nighter. That's just how sound affects me. I can't "tune
it out" like most people can ... it just grates on me and, whether I choose it
or not, induces me to be hyper attentive to it, especially to human voices.

Noise-cancelling headphones can take away dull background chatter that's far
away. But in open-plan offices, usually without even so much as differentiated
desks or cubicles, when the person sitting next to you decides it's cool to
bring a remote controlled helicopter to work and his friends are all laughing
about it with him 2 feet behind you (true story), it just doesn't help.

But even in less extreme places, where it's just normal, good-intentioned
colleagues chatting about their weekend plans or something, it's still a huge
disruption for me, and noise-cancelling headphones don't solve it.

Actually, I can remember one of the most insane attention triggers I had to
deal with was when I actually worked in a cubicle setting and the person in
the cubicle next to me had some kind of smart phone that must have doubled as
a sex toy or something because when it vibrated it was insane. I could _feel_
his phone vibrating in my forearms resting on _my_ desk while I was typing.

That one drove me absolutely insane.

There's also a huge component of this that is just based on natural human
fight vs flight reflexes.

If you have a bunch of vague, large mammals kind of walking around right
behind you where you can't see them all day, it just causes anxiety. Some
people (especially many extroverts) can deal with this without a problem, and
it can even be comforting to them.

But for others (especially introverts) the constant triggering of the "what's
that, who is walking behind me" reflex is extremely exhausting, and it gets
stimulated by pretty much everything, noise, casual movement, ping pong,
whatever, going on in an open plan office. The office layout in and of itself
is just intrinsically unhealthy for these people.

And I fall very, very far on that spectrum towards the introverted side. It
doesn't mean I'm shy (I actually love public speaking) ... what it means is
that little unplanned social interactions or _hints_ of social interactions
are a huge, constant energy drain for me.

I talked to one former boss about this and his immediate reaction was
something like, "Look, you are really good at getting your work done. You
don't have to worry if someone's walking by and they see you've got ESPN
pulled up on your monitor or something ... we know you're getting your work
done."

And I'm just like, "umm ... it doesn't work that way. I don't give a shit if
you see me playing Minecraft on my computer during work hours. It has nothing
to do with that. It's a _physiological_ response to the environment itself. I
can't just "switch it off" because you try to assuage my anxiety."

When it comes to this introvert/extrovert spectrum, I think it truly
represents a component of workplace discrimination that really damages a lot
of people, but for extroverts and managers, it just never even crosses their
mind that it could even be happening at all.

~~~
ebiester
As someone with a similar issue, I have settled on a combination of brown
noise and indistinct human-like voices. (I use babelbabble on iOS but would
like to find a webapp equivalent. I hope you can hold out for the right job.

~~~
p4wnc6
This is remarkably similar to the set up that David Byrne describes in his
book _How Music Works_.

------
aptimpropriety
"But this year it seems like the seal is broken, and we've seen major
companies delivering internship and full-time offers with 2 week (and less)
hard deadlines. Other companies now routinely deliver expiring bonus offers
for signing early. Many of these offers circumvent or outright break the
guidelines set down by schools, and if past matching markets are a model for
this one, next year will come with even earlier offers and worse conditions."

Will you name the companies, and give further specifics? Otherwise it's hard
to tell what really has changed.

I'd say this is not new, nor unique to tech. Finance, consulting et. al have
been dealing with this for years - both with new grad offers, and with
banking/consulting to PE/HF offers (often analysts have their next job within
6mo of starting their first job).

~~~
Arcten
From personal experience, I can say that Google was only willing to extend an
internship offer a week past their initial two week deadline. This is despite
the fact that I was still interviewing with other companies at the time. From
speaking with my university's career center I am not the only person this
happened to.

~~~
erehweb
Interesting. From "Work Rules" by Google's head of People Analytics. "I think
they [exploding offers] put a lot of unfair pressure on the candidate, who
should be free to make the best decision for herself without duress. After
all, companies have lots of employees, but each person holds only one job. It
should be one they are sure of."

------
minimaxir
Helpful context, since Jane Street may be an unfamiliar company to HN users:
Jane Street is known as one of the companies with the most technically
difficult interview processes, so that gives then a unique perspective
regarding tech hiring.

~~~
akhilcacharya
Not only this, but they are well known to only recruit at a very particular
set of top schools as well.

~~~
vram22
Meaning they are very selective? Their blog post says they consider anyone who
applies.

~~~
rhizome
The word "consider" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

~~~
caseydurfee
Considering how much the school you attended is a proxy for your race, gender,
veteran status, socioeconomic status, etc., it would be incredibly dumb for
them to say anything different.

~~~
rhizome
Yes, but "consider" also implies a lot of things not so sinister. In that way,
the discriminatory aspects you bring up are being euphemized and _hidden_
within an otherwise positive or innocuous term.

------
golemotron
> In a matching market each person wants only one of each item, each item is
> unique, and each item can be given to at most one person at a time. Jobs are
> a classic matching market, and just like any market, matching markets can
> work well, or poorly.

People may be unique but the dynamics of unraveling are showing either that
they are fungible or that recruiters can convince themselves quickly that they
are seeing someone better. The latter psychological dynamic is more of the
problem but fungibility is too.

Unraveling probably happens in dating too. Dating is a matching market. Maybe
the job market is Tinderizing.

~~~
nostrademons
"Unraveling probably happens in dating too."

Absolutely does, but in my observations, this has lead to the dating market
bifurcating. There are some people who are seemingly always in a new
relationship, two weeks after they got out of the last one, which often
exploded in flames 1-2 years after it started. And then there are some people
who are really picky, who go years single before finding their soulmate, who
also went years single.

The two groups largely don't intersect. When someone from the latter meets
someone from the former, the former person tends to end up in a relationship
with someone else well before the latter has made up their mind.

I wonder if something similar is happening in the job market. One set of
candidates can't afford to be jobless long, and so they will pick the offer in
hand without waiting to see if a better one is around the corner. Another set
can afford to be picky, so every job search involves multiple competing
offers, and they'll hold out for the job that they really, really want even if
it means passing up good immediate opportunities. Oftentimes, because they
hold out for a job that both compensates them well and makes them happy, they
can afford to be picky in their next job search.

I wonder if Jane Street is trying to position itself in the latter camp and
attract more candidates who are picky about their employer with this article.

------
roymurdock
For anyone interested in a deeper dive into how labor matching and
employee/employer bargaining is taught in macroeconomics:

[http://coin.wne.uw.edu.pl/wincenciak/adv_macro_made/adv_macr...](http://coin.wne.uw.edu.pl/wincenciak/adv_macro_made/adv_macro_lw_lecture_5.pdf)

------
pklausler
Is this not a self-correcting problem? The companies that impose the
unrealistic deadlines are going to be more likely to miss out on the better
candidates, who are more likely to have other offers, and in the long term
that will be self-defeating for those companies.

~~~
browseatwork
You would think. I remember reading about how finance firms and maybe also
consultants increasingly interview and make offers earlier to college seniors.
If you have lots of debt and the company is a good enough name and they're
paying good enough money, people take the offer. People are increasingly
anxious, and this helps them know they have a pretty good job, for sure, next
year.

This trend helps bigger, more established companies. E.g. Google or Microsoft
know they will need many someones next year, and they have the resources and
hopefully the desire to train up the people they hire. Startuply Inc may not
be around in 9 months, and doesn't really know what they'll need then. Maybe
the current sentiment of startups = good helps counterbalance this a little.

------
joshavant
This has always been a difficult challenge when job hunting for me, and I'd be
curious to hear how others deal with this in their careers.

Nearly every job offer I've encountered expects a response within a few days.
In practice, I'm usually interviewing at multiple places and at different
stages of the interview process at each. The 'exploding offer' system makes
applying to multiple companies near impossible for the job seeker.

Sure, I see how it creates leverages for the job offerers to get candidates to
accept. However, the flip side is that turns the hiring process into a game of
forced, snap decision making, which doesn't necessarily seem to be in
everyone's interest, either.

~~~
bcbrown
The one time I've been offered an exploding offer, I told them that I couldn't
respond in the next two days as I was interviewing elsewhere, and that I was
also concerned at the level of compensation. They came back with a higher
offer with a longer timeline. I would suggest refusing exploding offers as a
matter of principle, and if they merely "expect" a response soon, it's totally
fair to push back, say you're still interviewing elsewhere, and give them a
rough timeline as to when you think you'll be able to give a response.

------
stegosaurus
The idea of an 'exploding offer' seems a bit odd to me.

What makes it one-sided exploding? Are people being asked to actually start
work in three days time, or just accept the offer?

What happens if you say 'yes' and continue interviewing? Does a big guy with a
sword turn up at your front door and chop your head off?

Are people just trying to be polite and not burn bridges? Why would you want
to be polite towards such a ridiculous employer?

'Negotiating' in this situation just feels really odd to me. Reply: "Okay, I
can start in a few weeks' time". Phone down.

I am exceedingly uninterested in bending my life around employers - that's a
world I left behind when I left my job as a retail clerk.

~~~
chipsy
This may be the best advice in the whole thread. Once in the Real World, you
are free to be an asshole about how you negotiate and just...not stick to your
statements of obligation. You suffer consequences only if you have to deal
with the exact same person again. But if the org is big they won't really
notice.

We're just all so used to schools setting up all the obligations for us and
monitoring everything, that taking a more freeform approach is unsettling at
first.

------
bradleyjg
If anyone wants to do a case study into how a matching process can utterly
break down take a look at how federal judges select clerks and how that's
changed over the last 15 years or so.

------
hackaflocka
The blogger is writing about what's happening in maybe 4 (top) schools. The
rest of the country doesn't have this "problem."

Why the downvotes?

~~~
busterarm
It's happening outside of schools. In my own network I know roughly 100 or so
junior to mid level devs who have sought jobs in the last year and roughly 25%
of them have dealt with exploding offers from NY and SF companies -- most
frequently from the smallest and/or lowest-paying companies.

One of my friends saw an offer explode in less than an hour. They had emailed
him at 3pm on a Friday and had made another offer and received an acceptance
from somebody else by 3:45 and didn't tell him till he emailed his acceptance
around 6pm. I've never seen someone so pissed off.

~~~
kafkaesq
What makes it really fun sometimes is when a company ignores you or just
dithers for months and months... and then out of nowhere comes at you with
"Ummmm, so we'd like to hire you, can you decide in the next 48 hours?"

~~~
busterarm
Yes!

Even better than that is when you turn them down (for offer or interview)
because you have another job already and then a month or two later you receive
_their_ rejection letter saying that you're not the right candidate.

And I was an employee referral that time -- thanks Mattermark!

