▲ 12 points

Ask HN: Recurring developers and companies in the "Who is hiring/hired" threads

by marko-djuric·2y ago·16 comments·view on hn ↗

If you compare threads within a year you can notice lot of developers re-posting their offers from month to month, some of them have pretty strong profiles and still it happens. I don't believe that all of them are that much picky, and especially incapable for work or to pass a reasonable interview.

Similar for companies, some of them have pretty small teams and very common tech stack but still can't fill position for months or even a year, makes me want to ask myself "How is their project even progressing in meantime... do they even have a real project and urge for developer or its completely optional".

I know it's market crisis atm but still it doesn't explain it completely, do you have a proper explanation?

16 comments

I posted my info in the last one of those threads and exactly one person reached out, for a role that did not sound appealing me that I wasn’t a great fit for. I have an active StackOverflow (top 18% this year), active Github, several tech articles on Medium (~50 followers), I’ve read many books on SWE (like beautiful teams and mythical man month), TripleByte certified (apparently less than 2% of SWEs pass that) of course TripleByte is dead now… but yeah, I’ve never worked at FAANG but I’m no slouch.

I've never contributed to Stack Overflow, don't have an active Github, never read any SWE books and I am not TripleByte certified.

But I've gotten several offers from top companies at top percentile pay.

I wonder if you're optimizing for the wrong thing here.

I think you're making my point- the industry is biased towards candidates who (and I'm not saying this is you) can solve leetcode mediums/hards in O(log(N)) or better time, and people like me who spend so much time outside of our day jobs immersing ourselves in this stuff- because we genuinely like it more than anything on this Earth- aren't doing our careers any favors.

It's possible I'm an asshole in interviews. I don't think so, but it could be, or something else. I will say though, it seems nobody even LOOKS at that stuff. Nobody asks me about books I've read. Nobody asks me about my Medium articles or code on my GitHub profile... so I have to assume people don't bother and just stick to what they can see on my resume- perhaps to their own detriment.

I'll offer a counterpoint. I've interviewed a number of people recently and the things that I was looking for were not leetcode related or any of that nonsense. I would've been thrilled to discuss code you've written, projects you're interested in or approaches that did not work. I'd go as far as saying that resumes have become close to useless these days.

Unfortunately, I've seen people take it too far in both directions. Ones that could probably ace leetcode problems but did not have a good understanding of how software works and ones that were deep into marketing and branding but can barely write functioning code.

You'll have to look for what works for you. I am saying this both as someone who has to hire and someone who was looking for work at one point.

You're the minority, from what I've read from others and experienced firsthand.

Typically the technical interviews at companies (in the US at least) consist of HackerRank (either something generic a la leetcode or something made in-house at the company) followed by a live coding test and trivia (SOLID principles, Gang of Four design patterns, OOP fundamentals, sometimes things specific to the languages the company is using). This is for senior level positions. I find most companies put all SWE candidates through the same interview process, same coding challenges/leetcode, regardless of experience level.

You may have missed their point - if I'm hiring, I don't care what books you have read, how many internet points you have, or what online tests you have done well on. Those simply are not relevant to the actual question at hand which is: What can you accomplish if I bring you in to work with me?

So my worry would be that someone who comes in telling me about books and stack overflow street cred, even if that speak well to their tech knowledge, is not skilled enough to understand what is relevant.

How do you aim to answer the question at hand?

These things are on my resume, but I'm not "telling" interviewers about it. I go through their interview process same as everyone else.

Honestly, I'd take them off your resume. The github link is fine, but I don't call people back if they list details that don't impact the job. Again, nothing wrong with the details but this isn't the place for them, and your resume needs to reflect that you understand where your value comes from.

Your resume serves two purposes - don't give them a reason to throw it out. And do give them a reason to call you. Every piece of information will do one of those things, so think carefully and put as little info in a resume as possible while still making someone know you can contribute. This is not a job application, it is a teaser - make them want to call you and ask questions.

To that end, you do what everyone says - fill it with descriptions of your accomplishments supported by what measurable impact they had on the business. Sprinkle tech details in only as needed to explain what skills were used to make those impacts, and to keep your resume in the mix when people are searching for keywords.

If you are earlier in your career, those impacts may be less impressive, but the resume will still be stronger if you say something measurable. As a made-up example: "Fixed 87 bugs in our React front-end" vs. "Maintained the web app." Ideally, that same bug-fixing work could be described more like: "Improved customer CSAT scores from 67 to 83 due to improved quality achieved via a bug-fixing effort that resolved 87 customer concerns."

Once you get to the interview, continue to focus the discussion on how you help the business. Using that same bug-fixing example, if they ask you about it, don't dive deep into the hardest bug to fix or how you troubleshoot - talk about the customer problems that drove you to the decision to spend time on bugs in the first place, what you hoped to accomplish, a brief overview of the types of bugs you worked on, the results, and practices you put in place to prevent falling back into a buggy customer experience.

Because as you said - you go through their interview process the same as everyone else. I'd tell you to stop doing that. Because many of my jobs have come when the conversation took the interview process in new directions... I've had multiple interviews (and offers from them) where the interviewer tells me that we derailed their own process, had different discussions, and they really could tell we could work together well. That is the impression you want to leave people with - "This person is really someone I want to work with."

Thank you for the detailed response. I think there are lots of good tips in there. I don't know that I "list details that don't impact the job"- could you elaborate or give an example?

One thing I certainly struggle with in 2024 that I have not struggled with in previous job hunts is that nowadays I rarely hear back from a company after applying. Sometimes I get the automated rejection email weeks later. It is rare that I talk to a human. I try to combat this by optimizing my resume's ATS score to the job postings, but what I often find is that my ATS score is less than 80-100 because it is missing keywords like "OOP" and "debugging" which are keywords that obviously should not need specifying on a SWE's resume. Is the issue that the job poster made a lousy job description? And is the solution to "play the game" and throw dumb keywords on my resume like "OOP"?

I do not know if what has changed is that my resume isn't making it past automated screening, and for all I know companies are using LLMs to screen resumes rather than ATS, which may be better, but could be worse for all we know...

So, what do you optimize for?

We’ll never know

Do you have an email address or a contact method?

I have been using Hacker News for almost 15 years and saw the evolution of both threads over this period.

Who is hiring? thread used to be about personal recruiting and opportunities posted by individuals who were also engaged here. For example, I met a founder who previously went through YC batch and also a VC who was recruiting for one of his portfolio company, through this thread.

Now, the "Who is hiring?" thread has degraded into just another "impersonal" source of potential candidates, like LinkedIn, Indeed and other job boards, and/or being used for market exposure to target audience. Postings from personal and/or engaged accounts have dwindled to almost none.

IMO, you are likely to have better experience if you ignore postings that redirect you to career page to apply and postings from new accounts and/or accounts that do not actively engage in the community.

Who wants to be hired? thread seems to have had several incarnations, over the years, for people looking for job and or project. I regularly post to this thread and routinely get contacted, mostly by wannabe entrepreneurs who want people to work for free/equity only or recruiters. But I am not a traditional job searcher.

I received two paid engagements through this thread, primarily through direct contact by founders. First one was a pre-seed incubator startup that engaged me for a pilot with a potential customer. We parted ways after successful engagement in few months as I didn't want to move back to US and for long-term effectiveness with targeted vertical, a US based person would have been better fit. Actually, later I also participated in their seed round and with excellent outcome till now. The second one (latest) was a seed funded startup that engaged me for a PoC with a large Japanese company, which turned out be a very bad fit with poor culture and poor communications. They still haven't paid me for the time I worked with them.

I have also made good connections with a few fellow posters on this thread. I generally reach out to posters on this thread whose profile I find interesting.

IMO, if you focus on contacts by people who are engaged in community, you will have better experience. Now, I generally ask for HN username as a first step. Also, don't work for free, timely exchange of any money is a good indicator of character.

I assume a lot of these are evergreen postings - companies trying to get people to apply so they can select the top people if one applies, or employees looking for a better job. Basically, most people/companies should always be looking, even if they aren't desperate to jump on the first thing.

I actually love the responses and people I meet from the who is looking for work threads. I feel like I might still be fishing out there if it didn't offend the people I work with.

It could be similar to Tinder addiction. Looking for a date but not to marry. Some of it might just be measuring if they're still marketable.

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.