Yeah, the market is not completely dead, I can believe that, it just seems extremely competitive for the few positions available, and interviewing is very Leetcode-heavy in the US (the UK much less so, or easier).
I'm thinking that being physically present will clear things up about the state of the market and the level of competition, and perhaps expose me to more opportunities that online/remote applicants don't have. Maybe that's wishful thinking.
On the other hand, a full year is a significant amount of time to invest in searching for a job, and I am willing to compromise on compensation somewhat. How likely is it that I fail to secure even a single offer in that time I'm thinking? I want to say low but then again I see a lot of quality US candidates struggle for months on end.
The market is pretty horrible right now, in my experience. Speak to a recruiter and it should be a little easier to find something. I used to have roughly 1/2 of applications leading to interviews and around 3/4 of those leading to offers but this year had a 20 application dry streak. I think the market is pretty flooded with good talent from the large tech companies layoffs and the number of people going through bootcamps for junior positions too.
Hoping to get an offer in my final interview for a role in 10 minutes!
Personally, it feels harder this time, and most of the recruiters I talk to say the market is weak right now. But I’ve been seriously looking for less than a month, so it’s normal for me to not have found anything yet. I just tell myself that I’ve got through this before.
I can relate to #2 the most. My job search was 11 months, and this was in 2021 during the supposedly ridiculously good market. I think I had 50 applications and 7 on-sites before getting an offer
It's tough market. Take a step back.. take tomorrow off. Get your resume ready on the weekend and start applying. Give yourself a few days to understand the response level from applying and make a decision.
Don't give a month.. give two weeks when you need it (after the offer)
Like others said, the market is really, really tough right now. Like, REALLY tough. You and I are roughly the same age, and we've never faced this kind of market before. It has always been relatively easy to land a job. That's not the case right now.
I don't know your whole story, but based on what you wrote here, I think you _are_ on the right track. You're just in a shitty situation because of the market.
I feel you. I've been there a couple of months ago. Luckily it turned around and I got two offers in one week after months of nothing. I have 10 years of fullstack experience and some tech lead experience. The job market feels hard now. Few years ago it took me a few weeks to fill my calendar with interviews...
Is your local job market that bad? I basically took a 1 year and a half break and I got a job within 3 months, after interviewing with 6 (I think?) companies.
And this is in a small (albeit rich) European city of about 400k people.
Every market is a good one for some job seekers and a terrible one for others.
It's very hard to have a good sense of it unless you're really close to the industry cycles(financing, hiring, etc.) - anecdotes always have an aspect of normalizing your own situation, because that's just what humans do.
Yeah I think it’s important to remember that we aren’t terrible failures, but the market has shifted completely. I’m entering my second month of looking really hard (30+ applications a month) and have only had a few interviews so far.
For my last job I sent out a few lazy applications in early Jan 2021 and was debating which of 3 offers I wanted to take a few weeks later.
I’m a better engineer than I have ever been, it’s just a rough market. Hopefully everyone has the savings and emotional fortitude for a long job search.
The last time I job searched in 2020, it took 7 months. For me, it was the adoption of the leetcode interview process, even at startups. I'm not especially good at leetcoding, and at some companies you need to solve 4-8 problems. So it's just a strange stochastic process where eventually you pass them all, but it takes many tries.
It isn't you. I have a solid resume (I know because I've interviewed hundreds of people in my career), but the market is just much slower. In 2020-2022 I was getting 5-10 recruiters reaching out every week. If I thought something was interesting, I'd respond saying that I'm not really looking for anything new, but I'm open to a conversation. People would still be thrilled to speak to me, even though I was upfront that I'd only leave for something perfect.
Lately, I get maybe one person reaching out every month. I responded to one last week, even though I'm not looking, just to see what the job market is like. I was ghosted.
I think we're just not in a hiring frenzy right now. People don't want to leave their jobs and risk it on something new. Some companies are laying off. For the companies that are hiring, they are probably seeing many more applicants and a higher conversion rate.
I definitely regret not interviewing for jobs right away when I graduated a few months ago. At the moment I was thinking that in a few months the job market would still be hot.
A few months ago, recruiters were reaching out to me. I started applying last week and a single job posting would have more than 1k applicants which was not the case months ago.
On top of that, as a new grad, finding early career positions is difficult. Most of the opening are SR level.
It's a tough market now. Rejections are the default, and everyone hiring will be looking for a discount deal.
As compared to last year, I felt like a champion trying to find jobs; nearly every major company in the country would approach me.
So it could just be bad timing. I saw some stats that people who graduate right after the 2008 recession never catch up to the career growth of their peers.
I was on the market five months ago. It took me three weeks of selectively applying directly to companies I wanted to work for (maybe 8 hours of actual work, then 10 hours of interviews, and lots of waiting) to net two solid offers. I didn't have to negotiate the offer I accepted because they didn't ask my baseline and capped out the offer for the job description. I negotiated with the other company to see if they would match, they would not. That's on par with every job hunt I've been on. The difference this time was avoiding job listing sites, which I've had very bad results with.
Every other year is probably more accurate these days. But is what it is.
Last search I had something like 6 in hand offers (a few more that would’ve transpired but they realized they were out of their depth). It takes quite a bit of time. You have to schedule significant time off or sick days to do it. It’s not something that happens in a couple weeks.
For me, I spent about a year studying(leetcode and system design), mock interviewing (30+), and interviewing. Spent about 3 months without an actual job and interviewing+studying. (Something like 25 interviews in a week at times - 3-4 onsites per week when not doing tech screens)
Got the offer I wanted in the end - isn’t exceptional offer but I don’t have exceptional names on my resume either. Make $400k/yr. It was either that or another high growth startup and I wasn’t finding any that were that appealing on comp+culture after interviewing.
Maybe not as easy as at the peak, but still not that bad. However, you can definitely have just a run of bad luck, no matter what the job market is like. Maybe try companies in a different industry than the ones you've been interviewing for so far?
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