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Comment by dsmithatx | Hacker News Reader

One very important thing strikes me about this. Getting 38 job interviews is very much a sign of the times. In 2002 I was a highly skilled senior linux/aix/hp-ux/Solaris admin and PHP programmer and I got laid off. I submitted my resume more than 1000+ times in the first year and ZERO interviews.

I hate to sound alarmist but, I fear many younger tech people may not realize how lucky they are currently. If the economy turns south you are not going to get 38 job interviews unless you seriously have some needed skills.

Don't be like this guy and accept you are bad at interviews thinking there is plenty of opportunity. Don't blame the white board if every job in your field expects you to be able to white board. If you plan to survive during the next downturn or bubble burst you better be someone companies really want to hire. You may be lucky to land one job interview and it will be hard to stay motivated as months start to go by.

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>Getting 38 job interviews is very much a sign of the times.

I've noticed that many employers have copied google and have stated to interview with as many people as possible. Lots of them take pride in their acceptance ratio, some even advertising that on their careers page. Def a sign of times but might not in a way that you are suggesting.

Getting an interview is not all that hard these days, you can get an interview with google/facebook ect pretty easily.

For my current job I interviewed with no less than 12 people, some of them twice. This was face-to-face interviews over two visits, and does not include the initial phone screen by the recruiter or the company itself. It's awful, and as far as I know I'm the only one who went through that.

Many companies are swimming in cash and can afford to have 5 high paid Engineers sitting in interviews for hours each week. When stock prices go down that luxury fades. We saw this in the late 90s.

Yep getting an interview isn't hard at all these days. The economy is great and jobs are dime a dozen. My point exactly, it's 1997-1998 all over again. I've practically stopped using my phone and had to get a new email address. The recruiters have literally been driving me insane.

> and can afford to have 5 high paid Engineers sitting in interviews for hours each week

Plus, companies expect you to work more hours if interviews have delayed a must have feature.

> Getting an interview is not all that hard these days, you can get an interview with google/facebook ect pretty easily.

Maybe... I got contacted by 2 google recruiters in 2 separate instances. I replied to them, but I never heard back.

I would've probably failed at the whiteboard, but I never even got a chance to attempt the interview.

Yeah, that just happened to me this week. I'm sitting here wondering what I said wrong in my reply email.

Was I not enthusiastic enough? What was it?

You should get a reply; it is possible the recruiter is no longer working there, or something else. Or maybe they're just being slow.

Some more info: https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Google-recruiting-take-as-lon...

Also down with kt, long live cj. :(

lol despite my username, I'm more of an MVP fan. <3 Taeja, HerO, Life!

the trend i've seen lately is that internal recruiters are now as flaky as the typical 3rd-party recruiter. everyone is just spraying and praying. (though, personally, my experience with google recruiters has always been amazingly positive.)

Google -scheduled an interview -forgot it -scheduled another -forgot that one, too -after a few annoyed emails, they scheduled another. -they remembered the next one, but the guy seemed stupidly disinterested. -never heard back.

What the fuck.

While there will definitely be downturns and upswings in the future I doubt we see the kind of tech wasteland that we saw from 2002-2004. Software/the internet/computers are just too involved in today's society and we can't even keep up with the demand right now.

The only way I see software engineering (or at least quality SE) not being a scarce resource in the near future is if we dramatically rehaul our education system within the next 10 years, dramatically increase programmer efficiency, and potentially invent an AI to do basic CRUD style work. Even then though, we're going to need legions of programmers to maintain the crap we're building today, and most of that will require highly specialized and rare knowledge (I, for one, can't wait until node.js programmers are the new FORTRAN maintainers).

Honestly, in the future the only true full time job might be being a programmer. This is probably not a good thing for people like us, as everyone else will be free to pursue their interests while we still bang our heads at syntax errors.

Eh, I can't pay for interviews right now. Maybe I'm just applying to the wrong jobs, but I feel like you have to be a part-time marketer in this industry right now to get interviews for jobs wherein you do not match the company's laundry list.

I am in Brazil.

I graduated in 2009, never had a legal job (according to Brazillian laws).

Also I too sent thousands of resumes since then, and since 2009 I got like 6 or 7 interviews in total (some that landed me a contract instead of a job...)

And, it's not like the job market is that rosy now either. Sure, every tech company on earth is interviewing, but few of them are actually hiring. Getting 38 job interviews these days with companies that are not serious about hiring is fairly easy, but pointless. Companies have a lot of cash and it's fairly cheap to interview people, so they all seem to be kind of playing the market and fishing for the bargains.

Depends on the company, I guess. I interviewed with Fidelity Investments Dublin in June 2015 for a .NET programmer contract (they are mostly Java but also have some VB.NET code). They told me that the Dublin office had 300 programmers at that time but they were looking to reach 1000 by the end of the year.

The job market in Ireland is nuts :)

Did you send it out 1000+ times without making any changes?

I didn't really make any changes and I'm still using the same resume 14 years later. At the time it had 10 years of job history. Obviously now it has 24 years but, my experience level is the same and I'm still basically working with the same technologies.

I haven't looked for a job in one year and my resume/profile is posted no where online. I get about 30-40 emails per week and 5-10 phone calls because I put out the resume last March when I was looking. This was the same result with the same resume in 1997-1998. Post 2002 I never got a call and rarely an email back acknowledging someone received it. Also recruiters found me jobs in 4-5 days in 1998. Zero jobs from 2002-2004 (2008 was also pretty miserable). Again today recruiters can find me a job in under a week.

This is highly location-dependent. I get a fraction of your volume even when posting mine on careers sites and constantly tweaking my LinkedIn profile. Of course, I'm in Dallas and wee seem to be invisible to most of the tech world.

Just wanted to say - cool handle! World War 1 history fan?

Wrong von Moltke. General military history fan, mostly 19th and 20th centuries.

Ah the Franco-Prussian war then. Nice

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