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Comment by throwawaysleep | Hacker News Reader

Also, how many of the unemployed are any good? I know people who are unemployed. I don't know any I would want on my team.

And while on paper a few are theoretically great (20+ years experience as a software engineer), they don't want to learn React or newer versions of Java.

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these type of comments are common until it happens to you

> Also, how many of the unemployed are any good?

Do you understand what a layoff is? The market is flooded with great developers who got let go by CEO's and managers who are either incompetent or negligent.

The market is flooded with Product Managers and other tech-adjacent people who were the primary focus of the layoffs.

I'm looking right now with 20+ years of experience and recent with .Net/C# through v6 and React v16.

That said I'm trying to stay less than a 15% pay cut. There are jobs... And I'm about to go ahead and take the 25% pay cut a lot of the jobs are at.

But it still sucks. I'm applying and seeing literally over a hundred others have applied to most things.

I'm also so sick of boilerplate rejection emails. If I haven't spoken to a human, I'd rather not get any email at this point.

It's probably easier to lay off people (and hire cheaper replacements if needed) than to cut their pay. The tech industry seems to have decided to do this.

10 YOE with C# and React being the bulk of it. My company canned most of the IT department/engineers in August after getting hacked a bunch the last couple of years. I haven’t seriously started looking until January, but wow.

I posted on that “who’s looking?” thread here on HN I’d say a month or so ago, had one guy reach out for a job working with WPF. I’m guessing if that weren’t enough to turn me off, the pay would’ve been.

I will say the best-paying SWE jobs are never going to be with C#.

I pulled out with one company before getting a final offer, but they said it’d be around $130-140k and it’s mundane C#/React/MSSQL which I’m actually trying to get away from. I don’t know if it’s still the case today, but 2 years ago there were many companies who’d hire you despite having 0 experience with their language (usually something newer like Go).

I’ll just keep on with house projects and reading and relaxing for a while longer. It’s been 5 months and I still don’t need the money. Still, I wouldn’t be surprised if I end up taking a pay cut.

I'd like to take more time, but medical bills, home and car repairs are into things a lot. Think I may have found a job today, starting in a few weeks though. It's been a rough 5 weeks though.

Many people I know, despite commanding six-figure salaries, are not able to really take a hiatus from work. Imagine if you had kids. If we were in just about any other first-world country, there would be a safety net for the unemployed. The system we have now is not a safety net- it's designed to be as difficult to apply for as possible, and in states like Florida, unemployment is $275/week, capped at around $3k. $275/week doesn't even pay my mortgage.

Fair enough on that... My youngest is 21 now. I tend to go on full burn a lot of the time. I've only hit a burn out twice in 28 years though, so not too bad.

The last time,.I started taking regular vacations. The COVID period limited that a lot. I like road trips, but given I was advised by my doctor and medical issues to not vaccinate at that matter it pretty difficult.

Total BS!

People are willing to learn anything and everything to land and keep a job. The problem is the HR/Recruiting process using buzzwords/jargons/fads to screen applicants in a all or nothing manner.

This... Especially recruits who don't understand what they're looking for... You have to sell through the recruiter, then the amount manager before anyone with a clue sees your resume.

And those first two states you pretty much need to be as arrogant as possible... If you're honest and say you're a 7 at something, they drop you for not being a 9... May as well lie.

And by 7 vs 9, to me a 9 or 10 is someone who literally someone who works on the language or platform... I've used JS since 1996 and know it far better than most, I still don't feel comfortable calling myself a 10 with it...

I've had similar experiences. One recruiter within the company said they had an offer ready for me and then asked about my React experience at the last second. I was completely honest that I was still getting up to speed on React but had used similar frameworks and done front-end since the late 90s. I got ghosted.

I condone cheating on interviews. Don’t lie on your resume, but check GlassDoor for interview reviews- more often than not you see exactly what they’re going to ask you about. One interview I saw they ask candidates about SOLID principles and the three dependency injection lifetimes in C#. I made sure I had those on lockdown (and by lockdown I mean up on my computer screen during the phone call).

It’s absurd that you’re expected to know things like SOLID like we say a pledge of allegiance every morning about it… I, like most, follow SOLID (more or less) without realizing it.

Solid as a religion bugs me... Not as much as "Clean Code" patterns in the .Net space. You usually don't need half the level of separation in practice especially for micro services. Write similar code. Have classes that represent the concern from a feature perspective instead of a technology perspective. Etc.

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