Probably the reason. Most companies need people with experience in more than just one layer of a stack. Hard times for those who cant own a full stack, unfortunately.
Would you reconsider the stereotyping if I told you I’m a generalist who has worked up and down many kinds of stacks?
It’s proving hard to sell generalist-ness to recruiters this round. They often lock on to the most recent specific domain I worked in. If anything, they seem to be filtering for people with very specific experience in a specific layer of a specific stacks - because they are getting so many applications, they can be very choosy.
I think it has always been hard to prove generalist-ness to recruiters. I had one recruiter literally wanted react Vx.y.z. Ok I lie. She did not care about minor versions. I have huge respect for recruiters for sourcing but being the front-line for judging is ridiculous. It shows how much respect HMs have for candidates!
T-shaped is a good way to go, career-wise. Being a generalist with deep knowledge in some specific area (in my case video processing/computer vision/firmware) turns out to be very marketable if you apply to places looking for the area you've got deep knowledge in. The fact that you're ALSO a good generalist make you a very attractive candidate.
If you can, look at new jobs/companies as opportunities to get deep experience in a new area since over time, stuff you're good at now will sometimes go away.
Thank you. I think this is actually already me, but I need to get better (and/or more confident) at selling/marketing the “leg(s)” of the “T”. Particularly when it’s something I did more than a few years ago, but I know I still have expertise and good instincts there.
Sometimes the marketing is looking through the job description/requirements and thinking 'Oh, I know something that'd really help out in this situation' and tailoring your resume to that. (That sort of tailoring is somewhat reusable, too. :)
And cover letters are really good for this sort of thing as it lets you lay out some specifics that make you the type of person who can really help them out.
I look at FAANG experience as a negative for startup work. I’d much prefer to hire someone with five years of experience at three startups than five years of experience at Google.
This - over specialism is career suicide. Most places I've worked have a maximum of three tiers of skillset in their mix, namely devops to handle CI, prod, etc back end devs for caring about API side stuff, and frontend for giving a damn about the users.
I realise this sounds basic, but that's the point: almost all of those things are everywhere. Bury yourself in a tiny slice of one of those things and you've become un-or-over qualified for most of the market.
I am very good at all layers of the stack (except maybe just decent on the frontend), yet it's hard to stand out when any open position has 500+ resumes applying for it.
My self esteem and confidence is at an all time low. It is soul-crushing to have had a brilliant career and get barely 1% response rate. I can't only blame it on my CV being terrible (went through half a dozen iterations already)
This is what the job market has been like for non tech workers for the last decade.
You can’t take things personally, focus on the process and just understand that things are outside of your control. You’ll get bites eventually but it’s a slog.
I took their meaning to be that at any large company you work in a pretty niche area because there are so many other employees. You get used to "not my problem" which isn't an attitude that makes sense in small companies.
The problem though is assuming that the majority of jobs are with small companies. Although 99% of US businesses are SMBs, only 45% of employees in the US (from quick Google checks) work for SMBs. So the majority of jobs are at large companies and I don't think FAANG would be so much a penalty (except for that you might have compensation expectations that don't fit these companies).
The point is that an engineer at a FAANG likely owns a miniscule fraction of the stack, whatever that may be. The average company doesn't need or want someone who is so deeply specialised.
This is such a ridiculous notion to be that I find a hard time lending it any credence. The reason average companies pass on FAANG is generally that they can’t afford them. Not “oh, this guy isn’t Jack-of-all-trades enough, we’re really looking for a midrate web contractor that still uses jquery but also knows some SQL”.
There's an entire world between FAANG and what you described. Most places will want something like this:
"We need two or three seniors who, between them, can handle the fact that our cloud resources are split between AWS and Azure 80/20, who understand security well enough to enforce least privilege for users, can write reliable if inelegant code in bash, python, golang and - when we have embedded stuff - lua. We'd also like people to be cost aware since we aren't made of money, and to be able to take ownership of CI, observability, logging, k8s in the form of EKS, a few VMs, and some difficult to change legacy stuff. Plus, provide the devs with a sensible local environment to work in that is as prod-like as you can make it, mentor a junior or two, wrap everything into some kind of infrastructure-as-code setup, present options to architects who are sometimes operating outside their field of expertise, and run the standups a d retros when your manager is on holiday"
Probably the reason. Most companies need people with experience in more than just one layer of a stack. Hard times for those who cant own a full stack, unfortunately.