Is anyone actually hiring, or succeeding in hiring? I see the hiring market being completely fucked for the past couple years with lots of fraud happening on both sides - whether it's ghost positions that are never intended to be filled, or monkeys LLM'ing (or I guess we call it "vibe coding" now) their way through interviews, which just makes the interviews even harder to a level even seasoned engineers now need to cheat or be left behind.
It's become a market for lemons, with no good solutions. The problem is that it fundamentally requires a lot of manpower to accurately assess someone's experience (whether you use LC or just an open-ended whiteboard exercise) and companies who hire have only so many engineer-hours to dedicate to interviewing and the amount of inbound candidates exceeds that by orders of magnitude.
The way I see it, a lot of companies realized they have the staff they need and hiring more through "normal" channels is impossible due to the above - so either they don't need to hire more, or they hire informally through back-channels and word of mouth (because the front door is being DDoS'd).
The only way to win is not to play - the "front door" and typical hiring process is no longer possible unless you are a big name and have somehow publicly demonstrated your skills (past product launch, etc) in a way that can be verified in 5 minutes. For the rest of us, it's mostly a sales and networking game, and leveraging human & in-person relationships that are (for now) still immune to LLMs and hordes of boiler rooms spamming every single job with fake (but plausible) resumes.
It's become a market for lemons, with no good solutions. The problem is that it fundamentally requires a lot of manpower to accurately assess someone's experience (whether you use LC or just an open-ended whiteboard exercise) and companies who hire have only so many engineer-hours to dedicate to interviewing and the amount of inbound candidates exceeds that by orders of magnitude.
The way I see it, a lot of companies realized they have the staff they need and hiring more through "normal" channels is impossible due to the above - so either they don't need to hire more, or they hire informally through back-channels and word of mouth (because the front door is being DDoS'd).
The only way to win is not to play - the "front door" and typical hiring process is no longer possible unless you are a big name and have somehow publicly demonstrated your skills (past product launch, etc) in a way that can be verified in 5 minutes. For the rest of us, it's mostly a sales and networking game, and leveraging human & in-person relationships that are (for now) still immune to LLMs and hordes of boiler rooms spamming every single job with fake (but plausible) resumes.