
My Mid-Career Job-Hunt: A Data Point for Job-Seeking Devs - luu
https://www.philosophicalhacker.com/post/data-point-for-job-seeking-devs/
======
say_it_as_it_is
It's alarming that there's an idea among a people -- possibly bay area -- that
mid-career is six years of experience. You are your own worst enemy with that
kind of belief. People reinvent themselves and their careers many times over a
lifetime. It's hard to return to certain types of technical work but never
impossible, especially for those who are sufficiently motivated. You will
reach the limit of a pay scale, but everyone eventually does, in all
professions.

~~~
sails
I like the framing of a career into thirds of 15 years.

20-35: Find and build your skills/industries/networks and start to align that
into a career. Don't be afraid to make mistakes to enhance learning.

35-50: Double down on the skills you have in the industry you know, build your
personal brand, achieve your career goals.

50-65++: Give back to those earlier in their career, pay it forward, pass the
torch etc.

With that framing in mind, mid career would be at least 15 years. I think what
is interesting is most people underestimate how long their career is.

ps - I think the above notion is loosely based on a book I probably didn't
read completely []

[] [https://www.slideshare.net/BrianFetherstonhaugh/the-long-
vie...](https://www.slideshare.net/BrianFetherstonhaugh/the-long-view-career-
strategies-to-start-strong-reach-high-and-go-far)

~~~
Cthulhu_
I think in "our" line of work you tend to see at most 30-some year olds
actually talk about the job; I don't know what happens to people in the tech
industry beyond that, they seem to have a lot less "presence".

Mind you, maybe there's just less of them because access to education and work
in tech has improved so much over time?

~~~
5cott0
I think most people in SWE jobs by the time they hit their late 20s move to
engineering management, product management, or burn out.

~~~
surajrmal
While I agree that many switch onto adjacent roles, most SWEs do not do it by
late 20s.

------
Thorentis
Is it true you still need an "open source coding resume" by mid-career stage?
I can understand using that to give you an advantage for entry-level roles,
but by "mid-career" shouldn't your experience and achievements in past roles
speak for itself? Or do companies still want to see engineers spending their
spare time doing unpaid coding? By mid-career, many people have families to
support, that they also would like to spend time with in their down time.
Surely this is considered during the hiring process? I don't think I would
want to work somewhere that expects a married with kids mid-level engineer to
spend their weekends and nights contributing to open source, just to land
their next job.

~~~
MattGaiser
> By mid-career, many people have families to support, that they also would
> like to spend time with in their down time.

I have never hired anyone, but anecdotally from a team lead dev who has hired
a couple dozen people, that is the exact kind of thing they want to avoid.

If someone was a "star" working 90 hours a week in the past but now wants to
work 40, they stop being the kind of "star" some companies want.

~~~
smt88
That team lead (and companies with similar thinking) need to learn that
obsessive/workaholic devs are not more productive.

If coding consumes your paid and free time, you're generally not cranking out
new CRUD features requested by the marketing team. You're doing pet projects,
learning new languages, or getting lost in bikeshedding, like writing a new JS
framework because you think the current list sucks.

That means your workaholic employee is burning out on things that don't help
your company, and their actual paid work is probably a distraction from what
they really want to be doing.

By contrast, someone experienced with a family and/or hobbies working 40h will
often do their work well and have ways to detox from work problems before
getting started again the next morning.

A lot of that is my anecdata, but hiring people who want work/life balance is
working so well that those are the only devs I have (14 at the moment).

~~~
ramraj07
Generalizations galore on both sides? There are probably as many 40hr Devs
that just want to phone it in as there are effective ones. It's possible youve
learned to weed out the former but they do exist. Similarly I'm probably one
of those Workaholics, but I make an active effort not to waste time. However I
do work with good effective 40hr devs and I try to make sure that we are all
on the same velocity. The remaining time I spend on pet projects for sure, but
I do hope they are not a waste of time for someone, be it my personal growth
or my company.

~~~
watwut
90 hour a week means that the person is either not sleeping enough. Sleep
deprivation means you cant be performant fully. Or the person did not had a
single free day in weeks while working 12 hours a day. There are the people
who do stupid decision just out of being tired.

Just about the only way I have seen people work this much and not be overly
tired drag was when significant bulk of time was spent socializing and playing
around. Otherwise said, it was not actually work, but it was clocked in as
work.

And at this point, there is enough evidence that crunch is productive for few
weeks and then productivity fails.

~~~
ramraj07
Not sure where these numbers come from. I come from acadrmia. The expectation
(and for the most part, reality) for someone in track to become a successful
tenured professor is to maintain 80 hr weeks for a couple of decades if not
longer. My professors maintain this still, it's how they live now. They have
kids, but they had them when they're in their 40s after getting tenure. And
they are not working below optimal intellectual abilities.

You would be surprised at what your mind can do if you want it to. I made the
jump to tech from academia because while I was ready to do that insane work
ethic I wasn't convinced that academia as it is today was worth it.

Turns out I can't just switch off this style of working though, and hence I
end up working harder than I should. I'm not wasting my time though.

What I have observed though is when engineers who are in their twenties just
Naturally go into an insane work ethic without mentoring on focus and time
management typically waste their time. But it is possible to be 2-3x more
efficient by increasing the hours you put in as long as you are smart about
it. Many of the smartest people in the world do. Of course this should be a
personal choice. 90 hours is a bit much though. 80 is probably the sustainable
maximum for any normal human.

~~~
watwut
> 80 is probably the sustainable maximum for any normal human.

Not according to research. I know that academia features long hours. I never
heard of academia as an example of efficiency through. Game industry is
another hours high occupation (and the studies about crunch are from there).

Also, having kids after 40 is not exactly advisable for women. You are getting
into risk category health vise.

People who work 80 hours a week and have children simply have spouse who does
all childcare related work and career sacrifice (if they had career).

~~~
ramraj07
This was a couple lab, both professors were intense, but yes once they had a
kid the husband started working from home more. But that didn't mean he worked
fewer hours. We would typically take turns being on phone with him till 10 pm
every day.

I'm not advocating it to anyone who hates this. I just want to say that I
didn't mind it, I liked it as long as I was working on exciting things, and so
did my professors and most other professors that I knew for that matter. My
professors didn't have burnout or mental breakdowns, I didnt. Some of my
labmates did though, and they quit.

I do not condone how my professors did things, they were abusive for sure. But
that was fairly independent of the work ethic if you ask me. Most biology labs
that went on to produce Nobel laureates or path breaking vaccines are similar.

Also please go revisit your literature on women having kids after 40. It's not
nearly as bad as you might think it is.

------
ivalm
I am curious what counts for “mid career”, he started coding ~6 years ago.
Presumably he is in his 20s.

Here him talking about leaving philosophy:

[https://www.philosophicalhacker.com/2014/04/22/why-im-
glad-m...](https://www.philosophicalhacker.com/2014/04/22/why-im-glad-my-
dream-job-didnt-work-out/)

Edit: LinkedIn ~agrees with this estimate

~~~
ido
I was also curious, as they didn't mention their age.

As the age of retirement is currently ~67 (depends on the country but unlikely
to go down in the future) and we assume you start your career after college in
your early 20s - let's say 22 - you get ~45 years of work.

Let's say the above is closer to a maximum than an average & "generously" go
with a round 40 years of work; Then mid-career would be in your 40s.

~~~
bradleyjg
A baseball player might well do something after the majors—coaching,
announcing, hawking life insurance—but it’s still reasonable to talk about a
“mid-career shortstop” six years in.

~~~
virgilp
In baseball the average retirement age is 32, maybe slightly more recently -
so yeah, 26-27 is "mid-career". For your analogy to work, there would have to
be no programmers that are 60years old, and very few that are above 40.

~~~
bradleyjg
What percentage of people whose job duties are entirely or almost entirely
programming would you say are: <40, 40-60, >60?

~~~
virgilp
Don't know - and I suspect it's heavily dependent on location.

Also, if I may add, it's heavily influenced by "production" of programmers
(it's really not that old of a job, 40 years ago not that many programmers
were graduating from university, compared with 10years ago). Also in the case
of my country it's heavily influenced by emigration (basically everybody older
than me who could emigrate, did; I'm one of the first generations where it
made _some_ sense to stay in the country if you were a programmer).

I definitely agree that programmers tend to skew young. But both in my current
& previous companies I've worked with plenty "old" programmers - 32 is
definitely not retirement age, as it is in baseball. But yes, I also admitted
that many tend to move to management, too.

------
georgeburdell
I look at that resume and I wonder if it didn't hurt more than it helped; it's
form over function, and a bit corny. The fact that he got multiple offers in
two months shows how strong the software job market is.

I'm several years younger, but a staff-level hardware engineer at a second
tier company (top tier being FAANG). I've had an incredibly difficult time
jumping companies --- 2 years and counting. Despite being twice promoted since
graduating with my PhD, most recently this past review cycle, I have yet to
get past the first interview stage* with a top tier company, even with close
friends at those companies referring me. It's quite frustrating and I wish I
knew what the successful candidates had that I didn't.

* Note that for hardware engineering, the initial interview is a meet-and-greet with a technical question or two, so more laid back

~~~
nnoitra
Could it be that you are overqualified?

How was your PhD experience, do you think it has helped your career
considering the opportunity cost?

~~~
georgeburdell
Not over-qualified (see other posts). At this point in my career, a PhD has
been a net financial loss even though I managed to graduate in four years. The
jobs are more interesting though. I wouldn't recommend it, honestly.

~~~
texasbigdata
Do you have more terminal career optionality though? It feels like a PhD
should be at least relatively valuable as a promotion signal, or are you
arguing the 4 years of lost work experience outweigh any positives (ignoring
debt and foregone income).

------
lynchdt
Some perhaps unsolicited advice from a hiring manager in a company very
similar to the great ones in which this writer was unsuccessful.

\- Rare programmers won’t identify themselves as such.

\- Most great companies hire for humility as a trait.

~~~
mettamage
I want to ask a silly question. I know there are no such things as silly
questions according to some people. In any case:

What happens if great companies do not hire for humility as a trait?

Is it truly as simple as: too many unkind people get into the company?

Or could one be more cynical and say: it's easier to not have humble people
negotiate tough salaries?

Or is it something completely different?

I honestly don't know and have no reference.

~~~
lynchdt
Maybe I was a little terse in my response. Humility often comes hand in hand
with a growth mindset and a real eagerness to learn. Not hiring for that
limits the long term upside of the hire ie you get what you get right now.

~~~
mettamage
Is that what humility is? I find the word so confusing (non-native English
speaker). When I look at the definition of it [1], I can't see that it means a
growth mindset and a real eagerness to learn.

From the definition that I read, could as easily mean having a mindset of that
whatever you know now is something one should be grateful for, and you don't
always need to push yourself so hard.

[1] : freedom from pride or arrogance : the quality or state of being humble
accepted the honor with humility The ordeal taught her humility.

------
t_1589165433
How on earth do people have these experiences? I have to submit multiple
hundreds of applications to get one interview.

Throwaway because it could turn into multiple thousands if that fact is linked
to my identity.

~~~
silveroriole
Is America completely saturated with developers or something? If so how are
their salaries still so high? In the UK I can safely say I’ve gotten an
interview for every job I’ve applied for. I’m not an amazing programmer, it’s
just that the general quality of applicants is very low (I’ve been on the
recruiting side before). Yet I see this “I’ve sent hundreds of resumes”
problem on HN frequently.

~~~
mywittyname
I'm not batting 1.000 for interviews/submission, but probably over 0.800. I'm
also not a terribly great developer. I think this is more a measure of risk
tolerance than developer skill.

I don't generally apply for highly competitive jobs, nor ones which I'm am not
clearly qualified for. My strategy is normally to find jobs that are looking
for candidates with a specific skillset and focus on that. Recently this has
been AWS/Cloud development skills.

I think some people are not so reserved and conservative. They either want to
break into a specific field for which they are currently under-qualified (like
data science), or just apply for jobs that have a significant number of
excellent candidates in the application pool.

------
troughway
Should "mid-career" software developers still be focused on low-balling
themselves with having to do "career growth" things like this fellow, or
should they plan their exit strategy to get out of that career trajectory
entirely?

Assuming mid-career is actually mid-career and not the ageist SV type of mid-
career.

~~~
aswanson
The latter. Build up cash and invest in a career path that values experience.

~~~
ChuckNorris89
Depends. In Europe, dev salaries and taxes don't allow you to build enough
cash for an exit path unless you plan on staying childless.

~~~
badpun
It's doable in Switzerland and in London, at least until the tax laws around
contracting change.

~~~
oblio
And that's probably 10% of developers in Europe, at best. More likely 1-5%.

------
vmception
I gave up on my midcareer job hunt once COVID19 hit because it was obvious
that it would be a crowded pack, and salaries would go down, and desparate
visa holders would be waaaay better at leetcode than me.

I think I also did 16 companies or so but being exposed to them took longer
than before.

In the past I've also gone through 16 companies in one month through one
recruiter before, fielded one or two offers and landed a job.

I think this took 6 months. 3 months of trying for the wrong higher position,
and then the final 3 months getting serious about leetcode.

Regarding the article, I would say there isn't much to say about coding
challenges, except be ready for them at all interviews now. The article
mentions that it is a good test if the company can afford false negatives,
which doesn't explain ANY of the startups. The signaling at all the companies
is arbitrary but especially startups.

I'm just taking a cooldown period so that all the recruiters stop passing my
old/current resume around (there are also SO MANY new non-tech opportunities
during COVID19 war), with regard to tech I'm going to redo all my resumes to
show less experience instead of trying to hit top of market in startup
salaries and big tech comp packages. I get callbacks pretty instantly, which
was reassuring but something about me wasn't hitting like it used to, even
after I was solving the leetcode easy problems in 5 minutes.

~~~
dominotw
I think market now has moved on to leetcode DP/hard in ~30 mins.

I got this in my last phone screen at tier 2-3 shop

[https://leetcode.com/problems/split-array-largest-
sum/](https://leetcode.com/problems/split-array-largest-sum/)

~~~
vmception
DP?

and yes, I got good at the easy problems, which would be all that appears in
some interviews. In other interviews I could tell or got feedback that I was
close to the bar, which is about 30 minutes.

Or if I had an opportunity to finish a harder question later after the
interview, I could tell that writing a working solution would have still taken
me MUCH longer.

~~~
dominotw
> DP?

Dynamic programming, for the problem I linked.

Oh maybe I am having bad luck

I got hit with another DP/Hard ,

[https://leetcode.com/problems/word-ladder-
ii/](https://leetcode.com/problems/word-ladder-ii/)

at company called ' The Trade Desk' , which i believe is no where near Tier
1/2 tech companies. Exhaustive graph search ins't an acceptable solution.

~~~
vmception
what is an acceptable solution? what criteria does the acceptable solution
solve such as computation time and space, or is that a factor at all?

~~~
dominotw
Not sure. Thats what interviewer told me before he failed me. I am guessing he
was expecting some sort of caching, memo soln.

------
jldugger
> For some of these companies, I applied with a non-traditional, branded
> resume. ... Since I only used these types of resumes with 6 applications,
> I’d say glowing compliments on 3 out of 6 is pretty solid performance.

If we view the purpose of a resume as getting an interview, then that's how we
should evaluate changing them. By my reading Matt scored an interview 4 out of
6 times, a 66 percent success rate. Assuming the rest are the control, that
leaves 10 applications and 3 interviews -- 30 percent!

That's pretty great really, but we have to wonder, did Matt randomly choose
which companies got the experimental treatment, or were certain companies 'too
risky' to try something new with? Or did he try to match up his application
style to the companies somehow?

------
austincheney
The mid-career sentiment that I commonly see on HN is that many developers
have almost entirely stopped developing despite remaining in a developer role.
That’s really damn depressing. These people, myself included, want out but
must sacrifice greater than half their income to move into something of
greater interest or less depressing and that is a very tough choice to make.

The most common reason why these mid career people have stopped developing at
work appears to be that they are well experienced while their peers are not. I
suspect that instead of a nurturing environment where talent is developed the
mid career people just sit there, because it only take one junior to be
offended at not being prized with attention/praise to ruin any sort of
mentoring experience.

~~~
CalRobert
"The most common reason why these mid career people have stopped developing at
work appears to be that they are well experienced while their peers are not"

Everyone's different, but I used to spend a lot of my free time in the
evenings and weekends hacking on side projects, learning the odd new tool or
language, etc.

Now I spend them wiping vomit off my back, cleaning crap off of underwear,
reading bedtime stories, singing songs, and making crafts. The side project
time has gone down a lot.

However, it means I might be less competitive than others as time goes on.

------
ganstyles
Note this is for a PM role. This isn't mentioned for a long time into the
article. I found that slightly annoying personally, as most people on HN seem
to be engineers. But I don't think the experience generalizes, as someone who
has received eng and pm offers from FAANG companies.

~~~
Shoop
I'm pretty sure the applications he discussed weren't for a PM role. Check out
the first footnote which talks about that experience separately:

> [1] I actually did also apply to 3 product manager positions. None of them
> panned out. Made it to an interview stage at one company, and I thought it
> went quite well. Apparently, it didn’t go well enough. I’m glad. I’m happy
> where I wound up.

------
cletus
So I'd say anyone looking for engineering work should aim to have at least one
(and just one is fine) of the following:

1\. A good (and well-known) school. MIT, Stanford, CMU, UW, Waterloo, you get
the picture.

2\. A good (and well-known) employer. FAANGs in particular. Ideally as an FTE
but internships are good signals here too.

3\. To be known for something you've done. Well-used open source project,
well-known blog, that sort of thing.

(1) and (2) fall into the category of "social proof" [1] and whether you like
it or not, social proof can take you pretty far in life. Like in my case, it
didn't take that long from working at Google to getting cold-called almost
constantly (and I guarantee you there's nothing special about my situation).

My own job seeking experience (pre-Google) tends to be pretty similar to the
numbers in this post (applications to interviews to offers). For those of you
sending out hundreds of applications let me offer you some advice because I
see a lot of people making easy-to-fix mistakes.

Hiring is a popular topic on HN and you see the same comments. There are
always people who call a hiring pipeline a failure because a good candidate
got rejected. This is the wrong way to approach this. The process is
asymmetric.

A candidate is trying to get through each stage of the pipeline and get hired
by somebody. Ideally they want multiple offers to boost the offer they end up
accepting. "Success" is accepting an offer.

Below a certain size, a company wants to fill a role. It'll have N
applications and the pipeline is designed to have filters along the way to
winnow down that number to fill the role. "Success" is filling that role with
someone sufficiently good. They don't have to be the best. Technical skills
matter but usually only to a point. You have to bear in mind that you are a
cog that needs to fit into an existing machine. Each step of the process gets
increasingly time-consuming so the more you can weed out at the earlier stages
while still filling the role, the better.

Large companies are similar except you don't tend to be interviewing for a
particular role. There is a constant hiring pipeline. Recruiting may well be a
separate org. You can use this to your advantage.

So, let's make up some numbers for our waterfall:

\- Recruiting receives 100 applications

\- The 20 best get sent to a hiring manager

\- They may well eliminate half for various reasons passing on 10 to one of
their engineers

\- That engineer may well filter out half too meaning 5 will get called

\- 3 of those will get interviews

\- 1 will get an offer, another will be the backup

Like I said, completely made up but still instructive. And I'd say it wouldn't
be too far off the mark for a mid-sized company.

The first thing is you need to get through a company's recruiting/HR filter.
Well they look at the requisition ("req") they have and try and see if the
application seems to fit the criteria and I really do mean _seems to_. This is
what I call the buzzword filter. Anecdote: I once had a conversation with a
recruiter who said--and I'm not making this up--"I can see you have 6 years of
Java experience but do you have any J2SE experience?"

Some of it isn't buzzword related. Like if the req calls for leading a team,
they'll look to see if you've led a team in the past. Depending on the
company, the seniority of the position and so forth, factors like your school
and previous jobs may come into play. Length of employment is a factor here.

So how do we approach this to pass this filter? Well we need to cater our
resume to the job posting and see how it fills the criteria. We need to have
sufficient buzzwords but not too many and not any we can't back up. This may
hurt us later. Then again, it's completely valid to try and pass through early
stages and deal with that problem later.

One point to consider is that the half the applications the hiring manager may
never see. To be fair, a lot of job applications are garbage. My numbers are
actually pretty generous. I've had people tell me that 90% of applications can
be immediately rejected.

The hiring manager will have their own criteria and biases. They're trying to
judge if you're someone who will fit on the team. Here lots of short jobs can
hurt. There are cultural factors too eg in the UK I found having contracting
on your CV would really hurt you for full-time roles (this was years ago; I
can't speak for the current conditions).

Basically the hiring manager is looking for red flags.

The engineer will typically be looking for technical suitability. It's from
this point onwards that various (ideally cheap) negative filters are used to
try and reduce the numbers further.

And this is what a whiteboard coding test should be: a relatively easy problem
just to see if you're not an idiot. FizzBuzz is easy for a reason. Engineers
fall into the trap of thinking the problem needs to be hard. This actually
reduces the effectiveness of the signal as you've turned a useful negative
filter into a crap shoot of whether or not you know the "trick". For example,
I had whiteboard coding problem once to reverse bits. Turns out (I found out
later) this can be done in O(log n). I had never had need for such a trick so
didn't know it. So what did that test accomplish exactly? Bit-fiddling is
applicable to certain classes of programming, just not any I had and (more
importantly) not the one I was interviewing for.

An early stage startup may simply be the hiring manager responding to emailed
applications and they'll hire the first suitably qualified candidate they find
because they really don't want to be doing this. A larger company may filter
everyone through and then pick the "best" to extend an offer to.

So when you apply for a position, I would encourage you to think about what
process that company has for hiring and treating it as a waterfall that you
need to get through. Find out what you can about their hiring process. If you
can't find out, make up something that seems reasonable given the type of
company they are and their size.

The most important step for your application is to make it through the first
1-2 filters as those tend to be pretty dumb. Your CV needs to stand out from a
hundred others in some way. A known school or employer is a good one. Absent
that, allowing them to see some evidence that you can communicate in written
form and/or actually code is a big plus.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_proof](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_proof)

~~~
bradlys
Education isn’t enough on its own for social proof. I know because I thought
it would be. I couldn’t get a job to save my life after college even with UW
on my resume.

Also, education is wildly localized. Turns out SV doesn’t care about anyone
except those from UCB and Stanford (big emphasis on Stanford). Same with UW.
Outside of Seattle, no one even knows about it. (I should know - I went there)

Maybe prestigious colleges are more well regarded outside of the Bay Area - at
least here, everyone and their mother went to an Ivy League or similar.

~~~
strgcmc
Yeah, SV is really just the bubbliest-of-bubbles. It attracts so much talent,
and is funneled so aggressively in so localized a market, that your anecdotal
observation of "everyone and their mother went to an Ivy League or similar" is
probably more true than most people might expect. Such is life, and it ain't
fair.

UW is a great school. UW is what most people should realistically aspire to
(as that caliber of school). It's upper-middle-class; it will most likely give
you a great education and a great life.

UW is not Stanford/MIT/Harvard/etc. though. Those are not upper-middle-class
schools; those are upper-upper-class schools. And it's not really the quality
of education content either, at least if we're talking about average outcomes
(but at the margins, ~2+ standard deviations away from the mean, it's no
contest).

If anything, this should signal that SV has gone too far and the labor market
is acting irrationally by competing so much for educational branding. However,
just like the old adage says, the market can remain irrational longer than you
can remain solvent.

------
urlgrey_
I enjoyed the write-up. Iteresting that you say you invested too much time in
writing. What are your readership stats if I may ask?

------
_448
You have a C program on your 404 page. That program should return either -1 or
EXIT_FAILURE :)

~~~
eequah9L
The job of that program is to write "404". If that succeeded, returning 0 is
reasonable. It should be checking the return code from that printf though!

------
DrAwdeOccarim
Does grad school and post doc count toward "years of experience" lol

------
sp527
The ‘wannabe philosopher to wannabe entrepreneur’ line in the Gradle resume
was incredibly cringey. I suspect the author has a very poor understanding of
how best to sell himself and this also at least somewhat explains his results
(in addition to the factors he mentions).

------
quickthrower2
I am working on [https://tryjobalerts.com/](https://tryjobalerts.com/) to help
developers look for work, at the first stage to find jobs.

------
Nextgrid
Maybe it's just me but I think that "branded" CVs come across as desperate and
could be considered red flags that either the candidate is trying to make up
for something else (lack of skills, etc) or is unaware of the performance of
the job market (I guess if the market is _really_ bad you might try a branded
CV out of desperation, but software engineering is still very much a seller's
market).

Branded CV is something I could see coming from someone fresh out of high
school that is working off poor advice they've been given and to try and make
up for the fact they basically have zero experience to show, but for someone
with experience I'd expect that _experience_ to speak for them instead of
their word processor skills, and if that experience is not good enough then
the branding wouldn't save it (unless you happen to be interviewing for
designing print documents?).

~~~
borplk
I largely agree with you. However one thing to note is that different people
are different. Some are easily impressed and not all have the level of
sophistication you may expect in their decision making. If such a person is
present in your way as hurdle it pays to give them what they want.

That's a big part of the difficulty of job hunting and hiring. Whatever advice
you try to implement is a terrible idea for some subset of
opportunities/people.

------
mlthoughts2018
This is terribly useless for anyone else. I’d go so far as to say it is not,
in fact, a data point for anyone.

\- 65 days is a very very short time to be on the market

\- the coding interview experience of this applicant and requirements of the
companies appears to be far more lax than most experiences in tech hiring

\- it took place right around the pandemic / unemployment / layoff time period
which is a nasty confounder to everything

\- it focuses a lot on start-ups

\- doesn’t give specifics on negotiation or salary numbers

It seems like a fine write-up and all, it’s just critical to emphasize this
experience is not translatable to other people. If your experience happened to
be similar to this, total coincidence. If you’re trying to predict a future
hiring experience for yourself, this won’t offer you that.

If you just want to read about someone else’s experience knowing it won’t be
related to yours for any reason aside from coincidence and don’t mind it is
light on specific salary details, this is fine.

~~~
meddlepal
> 65 days is a very very short time to be on the market

Wait what? Is this just an SF/Valley thing? 60 days on the market is a long
time IMO. Long enough that my experience with east coast recruiting is that by
the time you hit 30 days offers start evaporating so it makes it difficult to
play them off of each other for negotiating purposes.

~~~
scarface74
I’m on the east coast and over 20 years and 6 job changes (first one was based
on an internship). I’ve had multiple offers within three weeks maximum after I
started looking. The shortest was 4 days.

None have required any serious algorithm/LeetCode type of interview.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
Your experience is such an extreme outlier as to necessitate ignoring it when
considering how general job searches go.

