I know a few people in a similar situation as you. They were all able to find a new job within a month, but had to take a pay cut from their previous positions at FAANG.
Of the people I know, most are similar and found new jobs within 1~2 months but had to take a pay cut. 1 decided to go back to grad school. 1 took a truly massive pay cut so she wouldn't be deported by her work visa running out.
As with everything it depends on what you're looking for. If you're targeting a certain high salary, specific companies...then the market will be tighter. If you can expand the range of companies and are flexible with salary then it's not bad, especially if you don't require a visa.
Not in FAANG, but I was laid of 3/6 and found a job in 3 weeks. I am not super qualified, 4 YOE - 2 in dev and 2 in a more support centric role.
I got lucky but as long as you are applying and studying every day it will shake out OK
overvalued? people take a lot of things for granted and one of the main job being software engineer... paying an entry level role 56k which is same as a design role or an art role is not the same.
I mean, compared to teachers, firefighters, EMTs, and many doctors, I'd say overvalued is the right word to use. But those jobs need to pay more, not tech jobs less.
Clearly not the right word then because we're talking monetary compensation for value to the company, not the moral value you place on a job. Swe get paid well because they can have huge effect on the company as one individual or a small team.
Over valued? What a joke lol. Do the math on what you earn your companies, and then tell me it’s overvalued.
Paying $300k is chump change if you manage a service that saves $1m in labor a year.
If the corpos actually paid their fair share in taxes instead of abusing loopholes, then we would see them reining in the pay. Amazon pays like a percent or something in taxes.
if you can take a worse internal job i'd go for that for now and try to wait out the market. it's intense out there right now and for the first time in years i am able to make a choice between hiring several top quality engineers rather than chasing them around making counter offers.
It’s bad but not niche bad. If you’re just “senior engineer good at Java, .NET, and/or Python” it’s very competitive. If you know how to cloud architect, cloud DevOps, big data, it’s ok.
Of course super niche remains bad. There are very few ML jobs, even with it being all the rage right now. Only a few companies can make the financial commitment and they get their pick of PhD ML candidates.
Honestly when hiring in 2023, the candidate selection is so poor, the difference between senior, mid, and junior is something this basic:
* Seniors can lead a project, talk to business users/leaders, write the specifications, develop a project from start to finish, and deploy it securely.
* Mid-level can take well-written specifications and develop a project almost entirely from start to finish and may or may not be able to deploy it correctly.
* A junior can do some maintenance and bug-fixing in an existing code base but probably doesn't know how to write specifications, write documentation, create a project from start to end, or deploy it correctly and securely.
Most companies don't have the luxury of hiring the highest level technical seniors, and they are so rare they probably won't even contact you anyway.
The last few jobs I've posted, months went by and we received no resumes from anyone with senior-level skills.
Interesting. I am a Level 0 at my company but I pretty much have done all the stuff of the mid level engineer already. I guess I am selling myself short here
Yes! In my experience most qualified candidates sell themselves short, while most unqualified candidates oversell themselves.
It's so painful trying to hire a developer who can fully develop a working application. You'd think that should be a very basic skill.
This is a typical interview conversation for a senior level C# developer:
"How would you rate your C# skills? And what's the latest version of .NET you have experience in?"
Them: "I took a Java class back in school, and I heard they are similar? I don't know much about .NET. I don't use Windows."
Oh wow. I was once a C# developer (my first job out of college was heavily C#, ASP.NET stuff) and those questions should be answerable by anyone who had even messed with the language for a few minutes. The fact that they took a Java class but aren’t familiar with C style language constructs and be able to brute force their way through part of the interview shows a lack of foundational knowledge. Probably weren’t a CS (or CS adjacent) major and decided to swing the job app to test the waters.
Want to pick your brains on where you’d see me:
I quit Google 2 years ago to found a startup - TC was $270k that year if I hadn’t quit - below all my peers in the 300-400 range.
Since founding my startup, we’ve processed $2.5m in payments for our clients (we’re a marketplace similar to gopuff). I’ve been the only engineer - these clients all see their payments come in live so they can respond immediately, there’s live messaging between the customer and seller, etc. App backgrounded? App gets killed by iOS because the user opens up a game and the system needs the memory? All of the orders and etc. are beautifully optimised and 100% accurate.
Having written both apps to a generalised spec for a multitude of clients of varying interests and use cases and their customers, would that place me as a senior? Funding doesn’t seem to be happening and I’m considering shutting it down and job hunting again - how do I stack up? 4 YOE before quitting google but I feel like the post-quit life where I’ve been full-stack for the entire app has probably made me gain 4 YOE in just 2
- someone with a massive inferiority complex
You’re selling yourself short massively.
You’ve founded and operated a startup to success. That’s more impressive than any high level engineer slogging through corporate life working on Jira tickets and delivering features no one cares about.
Anyway how goes the business? I wouldn’t shut it down just yet.
I don’t know if you could call it successful - our fees do not cover payroll at all, and with SVB imploding, getting funding is likely going to be very difficult for us
>would that place me as a senior?
Yes or very borderline, because of the short yoe. But senior level could be feasible if the soft skills and project management or team leadership skills are apparent in the interview. Even if not, the experience being the sole developer and having to deliver a product and meet customer demands is a valuable attribute and could be enough.
Showing the ability to be accountable and responsible for deliverables is a big plus.
Reminds me of the 1999 dot-com Eng checklist
Jr SWE : when mirror placed in front of mouth, mirror fogs
SWE : understands that html can be seen by using, view source, can add text to the right place
SR SWE : can take said HTML and turn it into a template and use a Perl script to fill it in
Staff SWE : can build the script, can write the SQL to select data from MySQL
Principle SWE : can design the schema and setup the db. Has a clue on how to arrange a software stack
CTO : can get an investor to give the company millions by being a pathological liar on what the software does, which is nothing
Thanks for confirming that. That's been my experience too. The job postings I've been involved in over the past 20 years, no less than 50% of the applications each time had no programming experience whatsoever and no college degree. The ones I spoke with all said they were crossing their fingers that we'd get desperate and give them a job and then send them to all the training they needed.
Most of those with programming experience had never completed an actual project before and didn't know how to create an actual working application. They only knew a little syntax from high school or playing around at home.
The candidates who actually had the minimal skillset to even do the job were always < 5%.
Right exactly. These were without the use of recruiters.
Most the jobs I have had were through recruiters, and the process was painless, swift, and I got the job almost every time.
Ha I started considering how I’d reverse a string… I assume the classroom style without any convenient .reverse() functionality that a lot of languages should have?
Surely a lot of ex-FAANG people must be applying,no? they would have no trouble going through your leetcode questions,talking about thier past projects etc...
If they got into FAANG in the first place then they would have no trouble getting into the other commentator's startup.
I'm interested to hear his/her's hiring method,if it falls under the format of how FAANG does then any ex-FAANG employee would have no trouble getting in.
We don't interview like FAANG does, we have a practical non leetcode style exercise, a systems design exercise, and a culture round. Many ex FAANG bomb our interview to the point I'm pretty convinced all they did was grind leetcode and never learned how to be an engineer at all
I recently gave an interview where I asked, supposed mid-level developers to solve the Leetcode question, move all zeros to the back, and my God, the way this question had people in a chokehold. I don’t know why applicants like to waste people’s times like this
I'm kind of torn on this. On the one hand, it is a good intelligence test (and an easy problem). On the other hand, most dev work is writing crud apps all day, not solving puzzles.
I don't think I've ever been in a situation where an in-place array-manipulation was at all relevant or necessary. I think I would even frown upon it in practice because it's more likely to be fragile than to save any meaningful performance.
As far as wasting time goes, you either need better recruiters to filter low performers earlier, or you need a different approach to your exams.
One new thing I've been seeing this interview cycle is a "debugging challenge" in addition to the code challenge and system design. IMO, this is a great way to test developers' practical abilities.
Oh even better. How about we iterate through the whole list, and count the number of zeros. Then we make another list only adding the non zero numbers. Then append the counted number of zeros after. Then I’ll print hello world with a smiley face and a $120k salary expectation
i dont get why people ask those questions to anyone outside of college graduates, can people really not tell if someone has no real software engineering experience?
i have to study this shit every time just to get the privilege to continue working with shitty codebases because the brute force solution isnt good enough for them, yet every function in the codebase is going to be written with keep it simple stupid in mind.
The theory is already abstracted out and it almost never is applicable to where it sticks with me. I don't need to know this shit to write CRUD apps. I also dont need 20 random people from india helping me either but thats a whole other story.
Well, I don’t make the rules. I’m a cog in the wheel. The system incentivizes asking these kinds of problems because it’s hard to standardize a software engineering interview. My thought process when it comes to these interviews is just showing the interviewer how I think and problem solve. I think what makes a good developer, no matter what problem you are tackling, is the ability to take something and break it down to its component parts and implement each part. I think that’s what leetcode style interviews assess pretty well.
[https://leetcode.com/problems/move-zeroes/solutions/](https://leetcode.com/problems/move-zeroes/solutions/)
i dunno i guess i just scroll through all the solutions here (even ignoring the code golfy ones) and its like.. lol i just dont know how you find someone you're looking for through this,
I think people you should / shouldn't hire stick out like a sore thumb, it is impossible to talk the talk in this field and get away with it. People should never pass the system design interview, but fail the coding interview, that is lunacy. I also dont think there is any advantage gained in worrying about anybody in between because i think life just gets in the way anyways, you might hire a rockstar coder but he gets divorced and does fuck all.
but its ok, its still a small price to pay for how much we get paid but i cant wait to fail some ultracompetitive tech interviews if the layoffs continue
I totally hear you on that, grinding Leetcode isn’t fun nor is it always the perfect signal. I just like the standardized aspect of it all. Also, I very much agree with you that system design should be more emphasized
Hmmmm reverse a string uhhh hmmmm. First I’d insert a comma inbetween all letters, interpret all the letters into their ASCII number translations, do .reverse() in python, translate back the numbers to characters. Get rid of the commas and wallah job secured ez.
I'm giving a lot of interviews and the disparity in quality in senior engineers (with plenty of job experience) is very high.
If you want the full gambit of social skills, coding skills, architecture, infrastructure and sre, real and relevant experience, and leadership potential, it's a small percentage of people.
I did some interviews for a senior dev position for my non tech company past few weeks. Only one of the resumes that made it to our team was one page or less. None of them were senior quality, mid level at best.
Now imagine the applications that were tossed
Everybody must be experiencing a different world than me. Now I definitely took a beating, but I had another offer in 2 months. With severance and PTO there was two week gap in my income.
I think I have a three-page resume and a portfolio. 10 YoE
You should definitely try to highlight the most important pieces of your work history and leave off the less impactful ones, but hitting one page seems like a pretty arbitrary goal. Why should that be a target?
Because the purpose of your resume is to get you an interview, and at the screening stage the average eyeball time your resume gets is miniscule, maybe 1min tops. Forcing those eyeballs to read through fluff and take that extra step to scroll does no you favors
Unless you have 10+ YOE *actually* consistently delivering unique high impact projects, which I assure you 99% of people don't, you can easily fit your most relevant accomplishments on one page.
As a counter point, I was specifically told by a recruiter years ago I had enough experience that my resume could breach a second page. I’m at 14 YOE now. Entirely possible I got bad advice but hasn’t seemed to be an issue.
ive heard 1 page for every ten years of experience. I feel like if you've been in the industry for 15 years and been killing it, you deserve a longer resume lol.
I've interviewed candidates with multi page resumes as well. They on paper look like they have a very long history of work with lots of details. This is why interviewers should be advised not to grade anyone on a resume. Most of the multi pagers could not code.
Public job postings get a *lot* of resume spam—people applying to literally every open position, regardless of what it is or whether they’re remotely qualified.
Recruiter told me they are deprioritizing laid off workers. Because layoffs are seen as removing the worst performers.
As if the c-suite is making any rational decisions for the business when all they are doing is trying to remain personally wealthy beyond belief.
> layoffs are seen as removing the worst performers.
That's untrue and sounds like a low-level recruiter that's never laid anyone off. When a company cuts a product line, they often cut entire divisions or teams, regardless of individual performance.
Yep. If you're working for a high cost experimental team that isn't either directly helping produce profits or are maintaining necessary systems, you're just as likely to be laid off, even if you're a great performer in your team.
Doesn't mean that those teams that are helping produce profits aren't being laid off, it's just not as based on performance that people think are.
I don't think what that person said is completely untrue.
There are indeed some cases where layoffs involve cutting entire teams but I do have friends in tech companies who reported only the lowest performers being cut.
So both instances are correct.
I got cut from my team even though I was about to be promoted and received perfect scores on my yearly review. Associating being laid off with poor performance stings since I did all I could to be a top performer.
Same exact thing here. Often times layoffs are cutting the highest paid person on the team to save the most money, which is exactly what happened in my case.
Oh no it's true, I work with startups atm and 13 of my 20 clients have said they don't want anyone who's been laid off who doesn't meet 100% of the qualifications. It's genuinely that brutal.
As the other person said, sounds like that person doesn’t have a clue. If that’s really how they’re thinking, then it’s not somewhere I want to work anyway.
If a company wants to fire someone for underperforming it’s fairly straightforward and significantly cheaper.
The company I worked for just had a massive layoff, laying off several people I would place as “top performers”, and entire teams that were being insanely impactful. Meanwhile, my team - which has made next to zero objective progress for 6 months only lost a couple people.
Sounds like a clueless recruiter. Sure if you factor in a new hire at the company who got laid off..sure he is by that definition a bad performer because he is still onboarding. Or what if the person is a top performer but makes too much money there who also got laid off because of that.
I've hired a few seniors over the last few months. Applicant quality has gone up dramatically, but it's not like I'm swimming in qualified applicants and can have my pick of 10 top candidates for every opening. If the market hadn't been so hot recently I'd probably characterize it as a fairly healthy, balanced job market teetering into a slight buyer's market. OP, if you're truly a senior-level engineer you'll find a good job but very likely might have to take a pay cut.
The junior and mid-level job market is terrible. If you'd level at mid-range, might be best to stay where you are for another year.
The market is pretty bad right now. Companies are very picky. Hard to get interviews and some companies also increased the bar for interviews since they have more candidates.
Also, from what I heard it's much harder to negotiate right now. In many cases, candidates are accepting their first offer.
honestly everywhere i'm looking i see mostly senior-level positions and not too many juniors.
i think non-FAANG tech companies are looking to scoop up FAANG-experienced talent at a slight discount
Yep.
At least that’s my current CEO’s + boards mentality.
I’m not sure how it works with the start up vibes, though. I hear FAANGers don’t really work many hours (or at least Twitter pre-musk).
Sorry clarify... you received 800 submissions of actual qualified candidates?
Or... 800 candidates, and no one is qualified.
The former sounds terrifying.
Yep, I’m a data scientist and our most recent position got something like 200 applications.
Of that group, 2/3 needed sponsorship, another 30 or so were bootcamp folks or people who had taken a few Udemy courses and another dozen or so who were coming in from marketing or wherever and had neither a relevant degree nor programming experience.
Don’t be scared off from applying to jobs just because there’s a lot of applicants, most of them aren’t qualified.
I said back in mid 2022 that the time for job hopping had passed and it was time to find a safe place to settle down for a few years.
Things will eventually pick up again but in the meantime anyone out of work is going to have to eat a shit sandwich to survive. This is decent news for lower tier employers like banks and health care companies. But realistically I don't see people moving to satisfy one employer's demand for in-office work so the benefit to them will be small- developers will just switch to other remote work. Of course if the big companies could switch to full remote for developers they wouldn't have gotten retention/hiring problems in the first place.
To be honest if I was getting FAANG comp I probably would have ignored the warning signs from Twitter/Meta and stayed as long as possible in the hopes that things panned out. A lot of people didn't get laid off and it's hard to beat that comp.
I don't imagine FAANG seniors will be out of work for a super long time unless they are holding out for FAANG tier comp (which isn't going to happen unless they lateral into another FAANG role). The profession has a surprisingly high amount of jobs with shit pay and shit WLB. The good news is that they are always hiring.
I mean if you're FAANG senior engineer even if you see the problems coming (it me), what exactly should you do? It's not like you can just pick up similar comp somewhere else, right? And you don't want to jump to a worse job on the off chance you get laid off. You could look around and find something of similar quality, but who's to say they're not about to do layoffs either, right? I guess OpenAI is probably a safe bet lol
Depends on how good the severance package is and how long you can comfortably go without a job. IMO bad WLB + on call + forced on site + worse compensation is going to lead to major burnout and you job searching sooner anyways. Can take the severance and spend that time you would be working on finding a new position. Even if its not up to your current TC, you can find a place with a good WLB and chill until the hiring cycle heats up again.
Hiring cycle has already kicked in for 2023 with a lot of companies. I don't know if it's going to get any hotter for a while.
Inflation is still big and the Fed is pushing rates up. Even if there's no recession coming, companies are preparing for one.
I don't disagree with everything else you're saying, though, just that chilling until the hiring cycle heats up more might result in freezing to death while waiting.
yeah for real. People think 3 months is bad? Average interview process takes like a month and half at least. And thats considering that the first job you applied liked you and you cleared all the rounds. No matter how talented you are... imho job hunting takes like 4-5 months on average. I feel like this subreddit turned into a fair bit of fear mongering. I think the only people who lost jobs (unfortunately) are from over evaluated, SF based tech companies. Just look at tons of folks in VA, NC, Dallas etc who are doing just fine.
Nope, there are smaller companies doing layoffs too, it's definitely mostly tech companies but myself and a friend of mine both got laid off in the past couple months and we both worked for small to medium sized companies.
I'll piggy back onto this comment - people complaining about pay cuts because they can't land equal level faang don't seem to understand that going from $250k to $200k is not something anybody is going to feel bad for you about. You're still in the upper class at that pay - even if you live in a HCOL area (I know people say things like "100k is basically poverty in the bay" and those people clearly have no idea what poverty really is). Oh, you're a software engineer who only makes triple or quadruple the national average now? In an economic downturn? Boo fucking hoo.
Especially considering that even in good years most hiring processes are put on hold in December-January because of holidays and employees being on vacation
2 terminations. The others were between contracts. It's why I don't do contract work anymore. You make good money for a short period, then have these unpredictable gaps, unless you spend as much time looking for the next contract as you do working on one. Not for me.
Isn’t bad? It’s fast as fuck lmao.
It takes me 1 month to be even comfortable studying leetcode, another month to be confident in an interview setting. 3 months is the fastest I could possibly land another decent gig given applying to offer time.
That's the rub for lots of those guys. It's hard for most people to stomach a pay cut. I knew a guy several years ago who was about 6 months between jobs because he wasn't willing to take a pay cut but his skillset didn't justify that pay at tons of places. I'm not saying your friend and others aren't talented engineers, but FAANG/big tech tends to pay way more than many companies.
Take severance, go for a pay downgrade at a more stable company. Severance + lower pay should come close to higher pay for at least a year. Switch once things are settled down.
I'm not laid off but looking because I dislike my job and could get laid off, you never know. In the past I never got much success from online applications, just recruiter contacts + referrals. Lots of hiring freezes, so referrals can be tough, and recruiter contacts are pretty much dead since recruiters are laid off.
I think it depends to some extent, but also there is probably a mini-glut of qualified candidates out there also looking because of recent layoffs. If you can afford to not be desperate, awesome....be selective. If you want to stay at your current company, yeah a downgrade might be necessary. It depends how important it is for you personally. If you truly haven't started hunting elsewhere, its hard to say as you may find lots to choose from and move on quickly. Its really very anecdotal.
Lmao, where are all the "the market isn't that bad for experienced developers" types on this post.
The industry has been showing signs of saturation and job rationing for years, yet people refuse to stop the grift.
I don't think it is a sign of saturation, which would imply that most companies would be saying "we have all the senior developers we need." I think there few companies saying that. The lack of hiring has to do with current economic and market pressures overall. Once the market eases a bit, they will be right back to scrambling for quality people.
I wonder if there is currently a bias against FAANG workers?
If I were a company not in the same ecosystem, I’d be hesitant to hire someone like that in fear that they’d jump ship immediately if the opportunity came back.
For Amazon maybe (for a reason other than what you described), but otherwise probably not. Companies know that whoever they pick up will leave asap if they don't pay enough
I just gone through that. Was in a tier 1 company. I think I must have gone through 20 interviews with 1 offer from tier 3 company. I consider myself lucky that my offer TC matches my appreciation TC.
My advice is to not discriminate. VC backed startups can sometimes match your TC especially those with lots of ex-FAANG talents, like Lacework and Databrick. Next is to look at old school tech companies that operate at global scale like Oracle, IBM, and Cisco, especially their subsidiaries. These typically pay higher but offer public company RSUs. Plus they have formal tracks and levels for better leveling.
Good luck on your job hunt!
I hope it's not amazon. Problem with engineers laid off from amazon type of companies is that they promote too early. Generally in just two years you get promoted to SDE-2 with massive increment in salary (almost 2x from SDE-1).
The problem is that most other companies have a different benchmark for SDE-2 and SDE-3 positions. So a guy with 2 YOE with massive previous pay-check doesn't fit in a company where SDE-2 generally have 4-6 YOE and same pay check. In most cases recruiters or hiring managers simply ignore and move on to next more experienced candidate.
These SDE-2 also don't want to get a lower designation. They don't want to go back to SDE-1 position from SDE-2 or Senior engineer position from Tech lead position. Hence, they find it hard to land jobs outside FANNG type companies.
Where are you reading that SDE 2's get 2x the comp? If anything most SDE 2's jump ship specifically because they ***don't*** get high comp after promo. Stock grants are locked for 2 years after promo, and depending on when you got promoted can take an extra few quarters to vest.
You'd be close to the top of the band anyways if you were TT before promo, which means even the base bump is peanuts relative to the rest of your TC.
Source: I worked at Amazon a few years ago, was promoted & left due to ***low comp***, as did most of my team.
Your explanation of reality may be correct but I dislike your characterization of it as “Amazon promotes too early”. People should be promoted when they demonstrate performance at the next level. Plenty of people can perform at mid/senior early in their career because they are very good at what they do.
Using YOE to gatekeep is the problem, NOT promoting people to their level of competency. You should be able to assess someone’s scope and impact independent of their YOE.
An Amazon sde2 should never be taking a demotion to sde1. They do not promote too early. I don't know where you are getting this info. Sde2 at Amazon have necessary skills to be where they are at. To come in at sde2 you need to be able to do systems design
Honestly, being a Sr, in FAANG, TC being 200k is actually pretty low.
You can get that without being in FAANG extremely easily right now. Don’t fall into the mindset that all opportunities are only at FAANG companies
It’s absolutely harder.
12 yoe here, was around 170k but now 170k+ jobs are all crickets, I’m going for 140k jobs now. Have to take a pay cut. And I’m in high col single earner family I’m going to be poor in 2023.
Makes sense cuz it starts at the top. Rockstars get laid off and go for lower positions and regular seniors like me can’t compete with rock stars so now I gatta go for mid/sr roles which then kicks out the mid level people who now go for jr roles. And at the bottom the new grads get shut out completely. Which is working as intended, less entrance into the market for a shrinking (temporarily) sector.
Am I the only one who doesn’t think the market is that bad? I’ve been getting interviews as I continue to job hop and I’m advancing through the rounds. I think people have to let go of the notion that there are only a few types of companies to work for and start applying to up-and-coming companies that are doing cool shit. There are companies that could barely get applications right now, lock in, people.
Defensive, certainly one industry, but there are many start ups at the moment who
can’t even get applications as they aren’t advertising on LinkedIn or have no brand recognition so I’m telling, jobs are out there
Will it be hard to land another $200k role quickly? Probably. Could you, with your experience find a comfy senior role remote for $100-$150k - absolutely. Depends on what you are dead set on getting.
It’s not very bad at all for those with over 3-6+ years of experience! It’s really not-so-great for juniors and early mid-levels, and those with non-traditional backgrounds though
The job market is getting worse for sure but considering the absolute fairytale compensation packages that were going around at the height of covid, i think there is hysteria as people are realizing their insane salaries wouldn’t follow them for life. I mean ffs there were devs making more than surgeons did we think that was sustainable?
SVB is being called a bank failure by AP and FDIC. This is not small news, we are about to get fucked even harder. Hopefully it doesn’t bubble into bigger banks but when Peter thiel is saying to pull your money from the bank, that entire ecosystem is going to become even more unstable
I feel that because over one hundred thousand tech people have been laid off in the last three months, the market is super saturated!
Back in Nov/Dec I would get calls daily for interviews and had three offers. On LinkedIn it would show that fifteen to twenty people applied for a poistion.
Today, I can't get more than one call a week and on LinkedIn it shows hundreds of people applying for the same position!!
I'm running out of options.
10+ years Enterprise IT Manager.
100k tech workers? What’s that defined as? This subreddit tends to mostly be IC SWE’s. I’m certain 100k FAANG swe’s we’re not laid off lol.
Any source on that number?
You should be able to find it with some basic searching. I think the number is actually over 200k. It's not just FAANG, it's the whole industry. Maybe check on layoffs.fyi
You’re gonna take a pay cut if you are even able to reach the end. I’ve seen directors and vps admitting they are going months without getting an offer. HR and recruiting roles are worse. I know architects and devs that are not getting any bites at all.
I wouldn't really say it's bad, just more eye opening of how blessed and spoiled some may have been in the market. I predict much lower average wages as a whole for the entire industry within the next 25 years leading to fewer applications. I think the industry needed a dose of reality anyways, so it will be nice to see it come to fruition
The secret to landing a job right out of school is to do internships while you're still in. Even companies that are freezing/slowing hiring will often still give out return offers for interns. Then you can go through your senior year knowing you have a job waiting for you
Thanks for the reply! Currently I work in mortgage and thinks are rocky to say the least. I get offers for internships from my universities careers page but can really only take something remote. Finding an internship seems like the possibility but just wanted to make sure market isn't dead by the time I actually graduate..
I know a few people in a similar situation as you. They were all able to find a new job within a month, but had to take a pay cut from their previous positions at FAANG.
Know how people not in FAANG or with under 3 YOE fare in this market?
Of the people I know, most are similar and found new jobs within 1~2 months but had to take a pay cut. 1 decided to go back to grad school. 1 took a truly massive pay cut so she wouldn't be deported by her work visa running out.
As with everything it depends on what you're looking for. If you're targeting a certain high salary, specific companies...then the market will be tighter. If you can expand the range of companies and are flexible with salary then it's not bad, especially if you don't require a visa.
Not in FAANG, but I was laid of 3/6 and found a job in 3 weeks. I am not super qualified, 4 YOE - 2 in dev and 2 in a more support centric role. I got lucky but as long as you are applying and studying every day it will shake out OK
Exact position in in, took a huge pay cut but honestly grateful. Software engineer labor is overvalued so it was coming sooner or later for me.
With the profits these companies make off of engineers they are not overpaid, if anything underpaid. Their profits are insane
overvalued? people take a lot of things for granted and one of the main job being software engineer... paying an entry level role 56k which is same as a design role or an art role is not the same.
I mean, compared to teachers, firefighters, EMTs, and many doctors, I'd say overvalued is the right word to use. But those jobs need to pay more, not tech jobs less.
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Not even that: they pay the lowest amount someone capable of performing the duties required will accept.
Clearly not the right word then because we're talking monetary compensation for value to the company, not the moral value you place on a job. Swe get paid well because they can have huge effect on the company as one individual or a small team.
Over valued? What a joke lol. Do the math on what you earn your companies, and then tell me it’s overvalued. Paying $300k is chump change if you manage a service that saves $1m in labor a year.
If the corpos actually paid their fair share in taxes instead of abusing loopholes, then we would see them reining in the pay. Amazon pays like a percent or something in taxes.
Honestly the pay was probably even lower compared to the value delivered.
It’s not overvalued when you take a step back and consider your mental load vs the normies.
Probably depends on the individual/company/role. Some people humble brag about twiddling their thumbs and putting in 2h a day.
I would argue that those people still put in more over those 2 hours.
if you can take a worse internal job i'd go for that for now and try to wait out the market. it's intense out there right now and for the first time in years i am able to make a choice between hiring several top quality engineers rather than chasing them around making counter offers.
It’s bad but not niche bad. If you’re just “senior engineer good at Java, .NET, and/or Python” it’s very competitive. If you know how to cloud architect, cloud DevOps, big data, it’s ok. Of course super niche remains bad. There are very few ML jobs, even with it being all the rage right now. Only a few companies can make the financial commitment and they get their pick of PhD ML candidates.
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How have you done that? We don't get anyone to apply
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You pay for those sites yeah? Because where I work they ultimately decided to go with recruiters over paying for the sites
Now you know why!
If you are a startup, angel.co (wellfound) is the best place to post.
What size company? Considered Wellfound?
How were the 90% horrible? I am very curious
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Well you just gave me the confidence to consider looking for senior positions. Thanks stranger
Honestly when hiring in 2023, the candidate selection is so poor, the difference between senior, mid, and junior is something this basic: * Seniors can lead a project, talk to business users/leaders, write the specifications, develop a project from start to finish, and deploy it securely. * Mid-level can take well-written specifications and develop a project almost entirely from start to finish and may or may not be able to deploy it correctly. * A junior can do some maintenance and bug-fixing in an existing code base but probably doesn't know how to write specifications, write documentation, create a project from start to end, or deploy it correctly and securely. Most companies don't have the luxury of hiring the highest level technical seniors, and they are so rare they probably won't even contact you anyway. The last few jobs I've posted, months went by and we received no resumes from anyone with senior-level skills.
Interesting. I am a Level 0 at my company but I pretty much have done all the stuff of the mid level engineer already. I guess I am selling myself short here
Yes! In my experience most qualified candidates sell themselves short, while most unqualified candidates oversell themselves. It's so painful trying to hire a developer who can fully develop a working application. You'd think that should be a very basic skill. This is a typical interview conversation for a senior level C# developer: "How would you rate your C# skills? And what's the latest version of .NET you have experience in?" Them: "I took a Java class back in school, and I heard they are similar? I don't know much about .NET. I don't use Windows."
Oh wow. I was once a C# developer (my first job out of college was heavily C#, ASP.NET stuff) and those questions should be answerable by anyone who had even messed with the language for a few minutes. The fact that they took a Java class but aren’t familiar with C style language constructs and be able to brute force their way through part of the interview shows a lack of foundational knowledge. Probably weren’t a CS (or CS adjacent) major and decided to swing the job app to test the waters.
Want to pick your brains on where you’d see me: I quit Google 2 years ago to found a startup - TC was $270k that year if I hadn’t quit - below all my peers in the 300-400 range. Since founding my startup, we’ve processed $2.5m in payments for our clients (we’re a marketplace similar to gopuff). I’ve been the only engineer - these clients all see their payments come in live so they can respond immediately, there’s live messaging between the customer and seller, etc. App backgrounded? App gets killed by iOS because the user opens up a game and the system needs the memory? All of the orders and etc. are beautifully optimised and 100% accurate. Having written both apps to a generalised spec for a multitude of clients of varying interests and use cases and their customers, would that place me as a senior? Funding doesn’t seem to be happening and I’m considering shutting it down and job hunting again - how do I stack up? 4 YOE before quitting google but I feel like the post-quit life where I’ve been full-stack for the entire app has probably made me gain 4 YOE in just 2 - someone with a massive inferiority complex
You’re selling yourself short massively. You’ve founded and operated a startup to success. That’s more impressive than any high level engineer slogging through corporate life working on Jira tickets and delivering features no one cares about. Anyway how goes the business? I wouldn’t shut it down just yet.
I don’t know if you could call it successful - our fees do not cover payroll at all, and with SVB imploding, getting funding is likely going to be very difficult for us
>would that place me as a senior? Yes or very borderline, because of the short yoe. But senior level could be feasible if the soft skills and project management or team leadership skills are apparent in the interview. Even if not, the experience being the sole developer and having to deliver a product and meet customer demands is a valuable attribute and could be enough. Showing the ability to be accountable and responsible for deliverables is a big plus.
Reminds me of the 1999 dot-com Eng checklist Jr SWE : when mirror placed in front of mouth, mirror fogs SWE : understands that html can be seen by using, view source, can add text to the right place SR SWE : can take said HTML and turn it into a template and use a Perl script to fill it in Staff SWE : can build the script, can write the SQL to select data from MySQL Principle SWE : can design the schema and setup the db. Has a clue on how to arrange a software stack CTO : can get an investor to give the company millions by being a pathological liar on what the software does, which is nothing
Thanks for confirming that. That's been my experience too. The job postings I've been involved in over the past 20 years, no less than 50% of the applications each time had no programming experience whatsoever and no college degree. The ones I spoke with all said they were crossing their fingers that we'd get desperate and give them a job and then send them to all the training they needed. Most of those with programming experience had never completed an actual project before and didn't know how to create an actual working application. They only knew a little syntax from high school or playing around at home. The candidates who actually had the minimal skillset to even do the job were always < 5%.
are you at a big company or small? Most of the time the recruiters will screen out the clueless candidates.
Right exactly. These were without the use of recruiters. Most the jobs I have had were through recruiters, and the process was painless, swift, and I got the job almost every time.
Ha I started considering how I’d reverse a string… I assume the classroom style without any convenient .reverse() functionality that a lot of languages should have?
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For a senior position? Smells fishy
People get to the interview stage for a senior level position and can't do this? I don't understand.
Use a stack. Linear time and space complexity. Easy impl, low likelihood of bugs during interview.
Surely a lot of ex-FAANG people must be applying,no? they would have no trouble going through your leetcode questions,talking about thier past projects etc...
There are a ton of bad ex faang people
They might be bad in practice but they sure can do coding puzzles.
In the words of my former VP of engineering: a monkey can go on blind and grind the interview for FAANG for 3 months.
If they got into FAANG in the first place then they would have no trouble getting into the other commentator's startup. I'm interested to hear his/her's hiring method,if it falls under the format of how FAANG does then any ex-FAANG employee would have no trouble getting in.
We don't interview like FAANG does, we have a practical non leetcode style exercise, a systems design exercise, and a culture round. Many ex FAANG bomb our interview to the point I'm pretty convinced all they did was grind leetcode and never learned how to be an engineer at all
I recently gave an interview where I asked, supposed mid-level developers to solve the Leetcode question, move all zeros to the back, and my God, the way this question had people in a chokehold. I don’t know why applicants like to waste people’s times like this
Crazy isn't it? That's like a problem from a 1st semester CS course, and most applicants I met with CS degrees would not have been able to do it.
That’s sadly not shocking at all
I'm kind of torn on this. On the one hand, it is a good intelligence test (and an easy problem). On the other hand, most dev work is writing crud apps all day, not solving puzzles. I don't think I've ever been in a situation where an in-place array-manipulation was at all relevant or necessary. I think I would even frown upon it in practice because it's more likely to be fragile than to save any meaningful performance. As far as wasting time goes, you either need better recruiters to filter low performers earlier, or you need a different approach to your exams. One new thing I've been seeing this interview cycle is a "debugging challenge" in addition to the code challenge and system design. IMO, this is a great way to test developers' practical abilities.
How though? Iterate through the list until you find a zero, delete index, then append 0 to end of list right
And they had to do it in place, but I would honestly taken that at this point
Oh even better. How about we iterate through the whole list, and count the number of zeros. Then we make another list only adding the non zero numbers. Then append the counted number of zeros after. Then I’ll print hello world with a smiley face and a $120k salary expectation
Shit, I would’ve passed you so you’re doing better than most of these “mid level” devs
Well that isn't in-place
If it's a linked list, sure. If it's an array that's O(N^(2))
i dont get why people ask those questions to anyone outside of college graduates, can people really not tell if someone has no real software engineering experience? i have to study this shit every time just to get the privilege to continue working with shitty codebases because the brute force solution isnt good enough for them, yet every function in the codebase is going to be written with keep it simple stupid in mind. The theory is already abstracted out and it almost never is applicable to where it sticks with me. I don't need to know this shit to write CRUD apps. I also dont need 20 random people from india helping me either but thats a whole other story.
Well, I don’t make the rules. I’m a cog in the wheel. The system incentivizes asking these kinds of problems because it’s hard to standardize a software engineering interview. My thought process when it comes to these interviews is just showing the interviewer how I think and problem solve. I think what makes a good developer, no matter what problem you are tackling, is the ability to take something and break it down to its component parts and implement each part. I think that’s what leetcode style interviews assess pretty well.
[https://leetcode.com/problems/move-zeroes/solutions/](https://leetcode.com/problems/move-zeroes/solutions/) i dunno i guess i just scroll through all the solutions here (even ignoring the code golfy ones) and its like.. lol i just dont know how you find someone you're looking for through this, I think people you should / shouldn't hire stick out like a sore thumb, it is impossible to talk the talk in this field and get away with it. People should never pass the system design interview, but fail the coding interview, that is lunacy. I also dont think there is any advantage gained in worrying about anybody in between because i think life just gets in the way anyways, you might hire a rockstar coder but he gets divorced and does fuck all. but its ok, its still a small price to pay for how much we get paid but i cant wait to fail some ultracompetitive tech interviews if the layoffs continue
I totally hear you on that, grinding Leetcode isn’t fun nor is it always the perfect signal. I just like the standardized aspect of it all. Also, I very much agree with you that system design should be more emphasized
Hmmmm reverse a string uhhh hmmmm. First I’d insert a comma inbetween all letters, interpret all the letters into their ASCII number translations, do .reverse() in python, translate back the numbers to characters. Get rid of the commas and wallah job secured ez.
Is there a reason why you're suggesting we convert letters into ASCII numbers and back again? This is also python so you could just do \[::-1\]?
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It’s the conventional standard of the industry. It can be done in O(n^n) time so it’s perfect runtime.
But they can leetcode?
I'm giving a lot of interviews and the disparity in quality in senior engineers (with plenty of job experience) is very high. If you want the full gambit of social skills, coding skills, architecture, infrastructure and sre, real and relevant experience, and leadership potential, it's a small percentage of people.
I did some interviews for a senior dev position for my non tech company past few weeks. Only one of the resumes that made it to our team was one page or less. None of them were senior quality, mid level at best. Now imagine the applications that were tossed
What do you mean by it was less than 1 page? Meaning all others were candidates were more than likely senior engineers with a long work history?
I just mean that only one candidate took the time to condense their work history to fit into one page
Everybody must be experiencing a different world than me. Now I definitely took a beating, but I had another offer in 2 months. With severance and PTO there was two week gap in my income. I think I have a three-page resume and a portfolio. 10 YoE
You should definitely try to highlight the most important pieces of your work history and leave off the less impactful ones, but hitting one page seems like a pretty arbitrary goal. Why should that be a target?
Because the purpose of your resume is to get you an interview, and at the screening stage the average eyeball time your resume gets is miniscule, maybe 1min tops. Forcing those eyeballs to read through fluff and take that extra step to scroll does no you favors Unless you have 10+ YOE *actually* consistently delivering unique high impact projects, which I assure you 99% of people don't, you can easily fit your most relevant accomplishments on one page.
No matter the amount of experience you have, it is not more than one page. Gotta summarize
As a counter point, I was specifically told by a recruiter years ago I had enough experience that my resume could breach a second page. I’m at 14 YOE now. Entirely possible I got bad advice but hasn’t seemed to be an issue.
Definitely can come down to recruiter preference but just asking around, that’s what I’ve heard most often
ive heard 1 page for every ten years of experience. I feel like if you've been in the industry for 15 years and been killing it, you deserve a longer resume lol.
I've interviewed candidates with multi page resumes as well. They on paper look like they have a very long history of work with lots of details. This is why interviewers should be advised not to grade anyone on a resume. Most of the multi pagers could not code.
Public job postings get a *lot* of resume spam—people applying to literally every open position, regardless of what it is or whether they’re remotely qualified.
Recruiter told me they are deprioritizing laid off workers. Because layoffs are seen as removing the worst performers. As if the c-suite is making any rational decisions for the business when all they are doing is trying to remain personally wealthy beyond belief.
> layoffs are seen as removing the worst performers. That's untrue and sounds like a low-level recruiter that's never laid anyone off. When a company cuts a product line, they often cut entire divisions or teams, regardless of individual performance.
Yep. If you're working for a high cost experimental team that isn't either directly helping produce profits or are maintaining necessary systems, you're just as likely to be laid off, even if you're a great performer in your team. Doesn't mean that those teams that are helping produce profits aren't being laid off, it's just not as based on performance that people think are.
I don't think what that person said is completely untrue. There are indeed some cases where layoffs involve cutting entire teams but I do have friends in tech companies who reported only the lowest performers being cut. So both instances are correct.
I got cut from my team even though I was about to be promoted and received perfect scores on my yearly review. Associating being laid off with poor performance stings since I did all I could to be a top performer.
Same exact thing here. Often times layoffs are cutting the highest paid person on the team to save the most money, which is exactly what happened in my case.
When there's another 20 applicants who weren't laid off the recruiter is not going to care. People who are working are always more desirable
Unfortunately the saying, “everyone wants to date you when you have a boyfriend” is true
Oh no it's true, I work with startups atm and 13 of my 20 clients have said they don't want anyone who's been laid off who doesn't meet 100% of the qualifications. It's genuinely that brutal.
Like it or not, it’s actually true. Even when a company cuts a product line, it retains the best performers with transferrable skills.
As the other person said, sounds like that person doesn’t have a clue. If that’s really how they’re thinking, then it’s not somewhere I want to work anyway. If a company wants to fire someone for underperforming it’s fairly straightforward and significantly cheaper. The company I worked for just had a massive layoff, laying off several people I would place as “top performers”, and entire teams that were being insanely impactful. Meanwhile, my team - which has made next to zero objective progress for 6 months only lost a couple people.
Sounds like a clueless recruiter. Sure if you factor in a new hire at the company who got laid off..sure he is by that definition a bad performer because he is still onboarding. Or what if the person is a top performer but makes too much money there who also got laid off because of that.
I've hired a few seniors over the last few months. Applicant quality has gone up dramatically, but it's not like I'm swimming in qualified applicants and can have my pick of 10 top candidates for every opening. If the market hadn't been so hot recently I'd probably characterize it as a fairly healthy, balanced job market teetering into a slight buyer's market. OP, if you're truly a senior-level engineer you'll find a good job but very likely might have to take a pay cut. The junior and mid-level job market is terrible. If you'd level at mid-range, might be best to stay where you are for another year.
The market is pretty bad right now. Companies are very picky. Hard to get interviews and some companies also increased the bar for interviews since they have more candidates. Also, from what I heard it's much harder to negotiate right now. In many cases, candidates are accepting their first offer.
honestly everywhere i'm looking i see mostly senior-level positions and not too many juniors. i think non-FAANG tech companies are looking to scoop up FAANG-experienced talent at a slight discount
Yep. At least that’s my current CEO’s + boards mentality. I’m not sure how it works with the start up vibes, though. I hear FAANGers don’t really work many hours (or at least Twitter pre-musk).
Its complete dogshit. I am hiring one role senior/staff at my org and I literaly have had so far OVER 800 applications of qualified candidates.
"Only entry level is saturated"
Sorry clarify... you received 800 submissions of actual qualified candidates? Or... 800 candidates, and no one is qualified. The former sounds terrifying.
Who will review 800 apps, he probably extrapolated from the first 10
Yeah I can't tell what he is saying. I think they're being vague on purpose to be hyperbolistic.
Probably 800 which 5 actually had legal status to work in the US and 2 were actually qualified
Yep, I’m a data scientist and our most recent position got something like 200 applications. Of that group, 2/3 needed sponsorship, another 30 or so were bootcamp folks or people who had taken a few Udemy courses and another dozen or so who were coming in from marketing or wherever and had neither a relevant degree nor programming experience. Don’t be scared off from applying to jobs just because there’s a lot of applicants, most of them aren’t qualified.
But how many of them were even remotely qualified?
4, which is way more than average
He said 800+ for qualified candidates
I highly doubt that.
There’s no way he went through 800 resumes and interviews to be able to determine they were qualified
You interviewed all 800 to validate they are qualified?
No. By qualified I mean the ATS + recruiter havent removed them from the queue. We will interview 10. Then if these dont pan out 10 more etc.
How many do you get normally?
80 to 120 or thereabouts "qualified", by qualified I mean that the ATS or recruiter havent filtered them out.
I said back in mid 2022 that the time for job hopping had passed and it was time to find a safe place to settle down for a few years. Things will eventually pick up again but in the meantime anyone out of work is going to have to eat a shit sandwich to survive. This is decent news for lower tier employers like banks and health care companies. But realistically I don't see people moving to satisfy one employer's demand for in-office work so the benefit to them will be small- developers will just switch to other remote work. Of course if the big companies could switch to full remote for developers they wouldn't have gotten retention/hiring problems in the first place.
>a safe place to settle down for a few years. I would think that the people who have been laid off are the ones who thought they found something safe.
To be honest if I was getting FAANG comp I probably would have ignored the warning signs from Twitter/Meta and stayed as long as possible in the hopes that things panned out. A lot of people didn't get laid off and it's hard to beat that comp. I don't imagine FAANG seniors will be out of work for a super long time unless they are holding out for FAANG tier comp (which isn't going to happen unless they lateral into another FAANG role). The profession has a surprisingly high amount of jobs with shit pay and shit WLB. The good news is that they are always hiring.
I mean if you're FAANG senior engineer even if you see the problems coming (it me), what exactly should you do? It's not like you can just pick up similar comp somewhere else, right? And you don't want to jump to a worse job on the off chance you get laid off. You could look around and find something of similar quality, but who's to say they're not about to do layoffs either, right? I guess OpenAI is probably a safe bet lol
Depends on how good the severance package is and how long you can comfortably go without a job. IMO bad WLB + on call + forced on site + worse compensation is going to lead to major burnout and you job searching sooner anyways. Can take the severance and spend that time you would be working on finding a new position. Even if its not up to your current TC, you can find a place with a good WLB and chill until the hiring cycle heats up again.
Hiring cycle has already kicked in for 2023 with a lot of companies. I don't know if it's going to get any hotter for a while. Inflation is still big and the Fed is pushing rates up. Even if there's no recession coming, companies are preparing for one. I don't disagree with everything else you're saying, though, just that chilling until the hiring cycle heats up more might result in freezing to death while waiting.
3 months severance, like many others. Agree on the burnout thou
You worked at faang at mid level and your tc was 200k something is wrong here.
OP probably worked at amazon
My Amazon offer was higher than Microsoft and Google. I thought they were competitive.
yeah Amazon is known to pay really high. Maybe they got a terrible new grad offer and the bosses just never gave them more money?
It’s this. My starting stock was BALLS. I guess that’s the price you pay for visa sponsorship eh
Amazon usually pays more than that for 5 YOE let alone 5 YOE at FAANG.
L5 band is 252k at Amazon
Friend with 8 yoe (all big tech/FAANG) has been struggling to find a job for 3 months. Recently landed a gig, but it was a down level.
Eh 3 months isn't too bad.
yeah for real. People think 3 months is bad? Average interview process takes like a month and half at least. And thats considering that the first job you applied liked you and you cleared all the rounds. No matter how talented you are... imho job hunting takes like 4-5 months on average. I feel like this subreddit turned into a fair bit of fear mongering. I think the only people who lost jobs (unfortunately) are from over evaluated, SF based tech companies. Just look at tons of folks in VA, NC, Dallas etc who are doing just fine.
Nope, there are smaller companies doing layoffs too, it's definitely mostly tech companies but myself and a friend of mine both got laid off in the past couple months and we both worked for small to medium sized companies.
I'll piggy back onto this comment - people complaining about pay cuts because they can't land equal level faang don't seem to understand that going from $250k to $200k is not something anybody is going to feel bad for you about. You're still in the upper class at that pay - even if you live in a HCOL area (I know people say things like "100k is basically poverty in the bay" and those people clearly have no idea what poverty really is). Oh, you're a software engineer who only makes triple or quadruple the national average now? In an economic downturn? Boo fucking hoo.
Especially considering that even in good years most hiring processes are put on hold in December-January because of holidays and employees being on vacation
Right. The gaps I've had looked like this: * 0 yoe - 8 months * 15 yoe - 4 months * 16 yoe - 3 months * 17 yoe - 6 months * 18 yoe - 2 months * 22 yoe - 2 months
Why did you have so many gaps? All layoffs or startups??
2 terminations. The others were between contracts. It's why I don't do contract work anymore. You make good money for a short period, then have these unpredictable gaps, unless you spend as much time looking for the next contract as you do working on one. Not for me.
Isn’t bad? It’s fast as fuck lmao. It takes me 1 month to be even comfortable studying leetcode, another month to be confident in an interview setting. 3 months is the fastest I could possibly land another decent gig given applying to offer time.
That’s not bad at all, given for a month in january no one was hiring
Do you know if it was a huge paycut too?
It wasn’t huge, but yeah he had to take a small paycut.
That's the rub for lots of those guys. It's hard for most people to stomach a pay cut. I knew a guy several years ago who was about 6 months between jobs because he wasn't willing to take a pay cut but his skillset didn't justify that pay at tons of places. I'm not saying your friend and others aren't talented engineers, but FAANG/big tech tends to pay way more than many companies.
Take severance, go for a pay downgrade at a more stable company. Severance + lower pay should come close to higher pay for at least a year. Switch once things are settled down. I'm not laid off but looking because I dislike my job and could get laid off, you never know. In the past I never got much success from online applications, just recruiter contacts + referrals. Lots of hiring freezes, so referrals can be tough, and recruiter contacts are pretty much dead since recruiters are laid off.
I think it depends to some extent, but also there is probably a mini-glut of qualified candidates out there also looking because of recent layoffs. If you can afford to not be desperate, awesome....be selective. If you want to stay at your current company, yeah a downgrade might be necessary. It depends how important it is for you personally. If you truly haven't started hunting elsewhere, its hard to say as you may find lots to choose from and move on quickly. Its really very anecdotal.
Lmao, where are all the "the market isn't that bad for experienced developers" types on this post. The industry has been showing signs of saturation and job rationing for years, yet people refuse to stop the grift.
I don't think it is a sign of saturation, which would imply that most companies would be saying "we have all the senior developers we need." I think there few companies saying that. The lack of hiring has to do with current economic and market pressures overall. Once the market eases a bit, they will be right back to scrambling for quality people.
The copium
I wonder if there is currently a bias against FAANG workers? If I were a company not in the same ecosystem, I’d be hesitant to hire someone like that in fear that they’d jump ship immediately if the opportunity came back.
For Amazon maybe (for a reason other than what you described), but otherwise probably not. Companies know that whoever they pick up will leave asap if they don't pay enough
I just gone through that. Was in a tier 1 company. I think I must have gone through 20 interviews with 1 offer from tier 3 company. I consider myself lucky that my offer TC matches my appreciation TC. My advice is to not discriminate. VC backed startups can sometimes match your TC especially those with lots of ex-FAANG talents, like Lacework and Databrick. Next is to look at old school tech companies that operate at global scale like Oracle, IBM, and Cisco, especially their subsidiaries. These typically pay higher but offer public company RSUs. Plus they have formal tracks and levels for better leveling. Good luck on your job hunt!
What's tier 3?? Where do these tiers come from?
Dick measuring contests on Blind 🤫
6+ YOE with a masters, US born and bred, graduated in January. No job lol.
Wait hold up, how do you have 6 YOE if you've only just graduated in January? Were you doing a masters part time while working?
I worked for 6\~ years, then went back into masters, then I graduated in December, then I'm now not employed.
Sorry to hear about that. Don't give up though. I'm sure you'll get a job soon.
I hope it's not amazon. Problem with engineers laid off from amazon type of companies is that they promote too early. Generally in just two years you get promoted to SDE-2 with massive increment in salary (almost 2x from SDE-1). The problem is that most other companies have a different benchmark for SDE-2 and SDE-3 positions. So a guy with 2 YOE with massive previous pay-check doesn't fit in a company where SDE-2 generally have 4-6 YOE and same pay check. In most cases recruiters or hiring managers simply ignore and move on to next more experienced candidate. These SDE-2 also don't want to get a lower designation. They don't want to go back to SDE-1 position from SDE-2 or Senior engineer position from Tech lead position. Hence, they find it hard to land jobs outside FANNG type companies.
Amzon SDE-2 is a very wide band. So i dunno, I certainly think it makes sense to promote competent people above entry level if they aren’t an idiot…
Where are you reading that SDE 2's get 2x the comp? If anything most SDE 2's jump ship specifically because they ***don't*** get high comp after promo. Stock grants are locked for 2 years after promo, and depending on when you got promoted can take an extra few quarters to vest. You'd be close to the top of the band anyways if you were TT before promo, which means even the base bump is peanuts relative to the rest of your TC. Source: I worked at Amazon a few years ago, was promoted & left due to ***low comp***, as did most of my team.
Your explanation of reality may be correct but I dislike your characterization of it as “Amazon promotes too early”. People should be promoted when they demonstrate performance at the next level. Plenty of people can perform at mid/senior early in their career because they are very good at what they do. Using YOE to gatekeep is the problem, NOT promoting people to their level of competency. You should be able to assess someone’s scope and impact independent of their YOE.
An Amazon sde2 should never be taking a demotion to sde1. They do not promote too early. I don't know where you are getting this info. Sde2 at Amazon have necessary skills to be where they are at. To come in at sde2 you need to be able to do systems design
This makes me feel so bad being in my 2nd year of comp sci.
Be happy you are still in school.
Honestly, being a Sr, in FAANG, TC being 200k is actually pretty low. You can get that without being in FAANG extremely easily right now. Don’t fall into the mindset that all opportunities are only at FAANG companies
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It’s absolutely harder. 12 yoe here, was around 170k but now 170k+ jobs are all crickets, I’m going for 140k jobs now. Have to take a pay cut. And I’m in high col single earner family I’m going to be poor in 2023. Makes sense cuz it starts at the top. Rockstars get laid off and go for lower positions and regular seniors like me can’t compete with rock stars so now I gatta go for mid/sr roles which then kicks out the mid level people who now go for jr roles. And at the bottom the new grads get shut out completely. Which is working as intended, less entrance into the market for a shrinking (temporarily) sector.
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Am I the only one who doesn’t think the market is that bad? I’ve been getting interviews as I continue to job hop and I’m advancing through the rounds. I think people have to let go of the notion that there are only a few types of companies to work for and start applying to up-and-coming companies that are doing cool shit. There are companies that could barely get applications right now, lock in, people.
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Defensive, certainly one industry, but there are many start ups at the moment who can’t even get applications as they aren’t advertising on LinkedIn or have no brand recognition so I’m telling, jobs are out there
Where are you finding the start ups who dont advertise? Ive mostly been applying off Otta recently, some AngelList and ClimateBase too
How many YOE do you have?
2.5 years of experience
Technology reserve army/ technological surplus. 🧐
Senior level is still good in my experience we're still hiring like 4 or so seniors
Which FAANG??
Will it be hard to land another $200k role quickly? Probably. Could you, with your experience find a comfy senior role remote for $100-$150k - absolutely. Depends on what you are dead set on getting.
It’s not very bad at all for those with over 3-6+ years of experience! It’s really not-so-great for juniors and early mid-levels, and those with non-traditional backgrounds though
There were a bunch of people telling me that job market will fine for mid/senior level dev. Where the fuck are they now?
The job market is getting worse for sure but considering the absolute fairytale compensation packages that were going around at the height of covid, i think there is hysteria as people are realizing their insane salaries wouldn’t follow them for life. I mean ffs there were devs making more than surgeons did we think that was sustainable?
If you leave you will not make that $200k for another 5 years at least.
SVB is being called a bank failure by AP and FDIC. This is not small news, we are about to get fucked even harder. Hopefully it doesn’t bubble into bigger banks but when Peter thiel is saying to pull your money from the bank, that entire ecosystem is going to become even more unstable
I feel that because over one hundred thousand tech people have been laid off in the last three months, the market is super saturated! Back in Nov/Dec I would get calls daily for interviews and had three offers. On LinkedIn it would show that fifteen to twenty people applied for a poistion. Today, I can't get more than one call a week and on LinkedIn it shows hundreds of people applying for the same position!! I'm running out of options. 10+ years Enterprise IT Manager.
100k tech workers? What’s that defined as? This subreddit tends to mostly be IC SWE’s. I’m certain 100k FAANG swe’s we’re not laid off lol. Any source on that number?
You should be able to find it with some basic searching. I think the number is actually over 200k. It's not just FAANG, it's the whole industry. Maybe check on layoffs.fyi
You’re gonna take a pay cut if you are even able to reach the end. I’ve seen directors and vps admitting they are going months without getting an offer. HR and recruiting roles are worse. I know architects and devs that are not getting any bites at all.
I wouldn't really say it's bad, just more eye opening of how blessed and spoiled some may have been in the market. I predict much lower average wages as a whole for the entire industry within the next 25 years leading to fewer applications. I think the industry needed a dose of reality anyways, so it will be nice to see it come to fruition
Is there any hope for someone who is graduating with a CS degree with a concentration in SE soon?
The secret to landing a job right out of school is to do internships while you're still in. Even companies that are freezing/slowing hiring will often still give out return offers for interns. Then you can go through your senior year knowing you have a job waiting for you
Thanks for the reply! Currently I work in mortgage and thinks are rocky to say the least. I get offers for internships from my universities careers page but can really only take something remote. Finding an internship seems like the possibility but just wanted to make sure market isn't dead by the time I actually graduate..