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Comment by grepfru_it | Hacker News Reader

Hey this is very similar to my story 2 years ago! (different company) It's only going to get worse, but protip: if you don't want to deal with the interview circuit like I did, set your salary expectations hilariously low and at least you will still collect income.

Good luck to everyone in our shoes!

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When hiring, I'm suspicious of qualified people with low income expectations, I don't think this is a winning strategy personally and I'd take this advice with a grain of salt.

Suspicious of what, exactly? If someone needs work and aren’t landing the jobs, is there another approach they should be taking?

Suspicious that the highly qualified person isn't going to take the crap that the employer is hoping to give out at that lower pay level.

That they won't stick around long enough

In my case, every time I ask for high pay, they expect me to give them the world in an interview or to be some manager or principal / staff engineer, I just want to write code, I don't want to be stuck in meetings all day, I've been there, it's not me.

Look, if you pay me enough I'll meet your standards for your company, I think a more productive interview is a culture fit interview that covers at a high level the things you care about with your team, grilling people with verifiable years of experience is an insult. Most developers learn on the job. Every job is a new learning experience. Chances are high if you don't have onboarding documentation, I'm your guy writing it because its absurd to me that any project lacks such documentation.

This is what I did when I entered the workforce in the fallout of the dotcom crash. I worked as an independent contractor for $35/hr ($58/hr in today's money).

Easier to pull off when you have zero salary expectation, no lifestyle to maintain or family to feed and just want to build experience.

I mean, I've been severely underpaid for a while, so my salary ask is never that high, but cost of living keeps going up on me, and I've not caught up. I'm having to deal with the interview circus (not a typo) currently and it is tiresome, if its not questions that I know don't matter in order to create a CRUD application, it's a confused HR person that passes on me for some magical reasons. It would be nice if I could get actual feedback from prospective employers, I gave you time and energy, got myself hyped for your company, only to receive no such feedback. This is the longest I've been without a job my whole life, so its quite an experience. The last time I was jobless, I had a job within a week.

I don't know, I think everyone's experience is different, and some of us are better fit for specific teams, if someone can figure out how to pair people based on how well they would fit with specific teams as opposed to what technology they all use, they would make a fortune, I can learn any obscure language in a short span of time, heck I was building a MonkeyC app for Garmin Watches within a week of being asked to work on one, a simple proof of concept in a language I had never heard of, because I liked the people I worked with, mind you I was the only one touching that language.

Are you in sales?

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