
Ask HN: Is it really hard to get a job in tech right now or is it just me? - Movo
I keep reading about record low unemployment but am finding it nearly impossible to get another job in tech currently.  It seems like every position I apply for gets a few hundred applications, despite the news saying the labor market is tight right now.  What&#x27;s the disconnect?
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chrisbennet
Getting the _first_ job in tech is fairly difficult I think.

Employers don’t want to invest in training anyone because (in their
experience) the employee will just go work someplace else for more money. It
seems to never have occurred to them that if they pay market rates to the
newly up skilled employee, that the employee wouldn’t feel the need to leave.

The “shortage” of tech talent is really a shortage of tech talent that will
work for below market rate.

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skate22
Tech is pretty general, what specific role / experience / location are you
looking for?

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modbait
Did a job hunt last year for about six months and only got one bite. So,
anecdotally, I'd say the market is quite thin at the moment.

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davismwfl
You said another job, so I'll assume you've been employed in your field. What
part of tech in specific and how many years? Are you in the US? On West coast
or East or middle states?

I mostly agree with @chrisbennet that a lot of the time there is a "shortage"
of people willing to work at cut rate prices, not really a shortage of
qualified people.

I will add to this, many companies will advertise less than fair wages for a
position intentionally and call it market, or take a senior position and mark
it as junior with junior wages to intentionally game the H1B and other visa
systems. This is because there are some basic (easy to game) requirements they
have to file to prove they tried to market and hire a US worker but were
unable to fill the position. As a consultant I saw this at almost every mid to
large organization I did work at, and I have seen it in a number of startups
that have reached a higher funding level over the past 5-6 years too. To be
100% up front, I have no problem with hiring a foreign born engineer, but they
shouldn't be paid less than what I would be if hired for the same job. That
isn't fair to me and isn't fair to them, if they have the skills to do the
job, pay them comparable for living and working in the US.

Another factor I have seen over the years. I helped a number of companies go
from not filling their open tech slots to filling them by changing the
interview process. I was at one company that literally had a guy drive 2 hours
to get the the interview, this is after successfully passing a technical phone
screen, for his in person interview with 4 individuals (me included). Within 5
minutes the hiring tech lead asked 2 technical questions about javascript and
then dismissed the interviewee from the interview saying he wasn't qualified.
Well fuck, talk about creating a horrid environment and destroying a companies
reputation. I was tasked to help fill positions with qualified people, and so
we worked on how to interview people. First and foremost, we got rid of the
ego driven interview that most tech companies favor and went to a human based
approach. We still asked the hard questions but it is about the persons method
of working through the question not whether they gave the right answer. Some
of the best engineers I know would flunk most of the ego interviews, but if
you get them talking about what they have done and have them describe the
details, challenges, coding issues etc you'll find out they are amazing at
their jobs and will figure out whatever you put them to.

Last point. In general, if you are in the over 1yr of experience but under 5
years of experience that is the hardest time to get a job in a lot of ways. It
is still where you need coaching, but also where people start to find their
own methods so it is a harder hire for a company to get right. Over 5 years
gets easier, over 10 easier still, then at some point we start tipping back
into the harder to get past the door category. For an engineer to stay an
engineer beyond 15-20 years, the ego based interviews are the worst because
they are generally based on CS questions people learned in school recently, or
based on things too easily looked up so not worth memory space. For example,
asking a web developer to write a hash table in the interview (seen this many
times) is fairly useless and will eliminate a lot of good web developers. But
instead asking them about the worst performance problem they solved and how
will show you what type of experience they have, how they think and what level
of understanding they possess. I usually ask a few versions of that question
scoped to data structures, loops etc, but I never care about something like
Big O overall, again too easy to look up -- what I care about is why they made
the choice and what tradeoffs did they consider. Lots of techniques here get
you way better data and let you see if you can work with the person, versus
just asking them to regurgitate knowledge that is within a few keyboard
strokes via a google search.

