Item — HN Reader

> Instead of finding an offer after 500 interviews, now you may have to do 400.

Holy cow, is that really how many interviews it takes to get hired these days?

It’s been about 10 years since I changed jobs, and then it took less than maybe 10 interviews.

> For me, getting a master's degree was more useful than getting a bachelor's.

I’m not sure this is the norm. I know very few people that I’ve worked with or have interviewed that have masters degrees. I’ve worked with + interviewed maybe close to 300 SWEs, and probably fewer than 5%, if that, have/had masters degrees.

2 comments

> Holy cow, is that really how many interviews it takes to get hired these days?

I’m 50 and have been working as a software developer or closely adjacent for almost 30 years. I’ve never seen a job market like this.

Even back in 2000-2001 as a regular old enterprise dev with 3 years of experience, jobs were plentiful in Atlanta doing corporate dev. I got my third job late 2008 in the midst of the financial crisis relatively quickly and had two offers.

Fast forward to 2023. I was looking for regular old enterprise dev jobs where they wanted C# developers with AWS experience as a Plan B. I had 15+ years of C# experience, 7 leading projects and 6 years of AWS experience including 3.5 working at AWS (Professional Services).

I heard crickets sending out hundreds of resumes looking for remote opportunities. Every single opening had hundreds of applicants (LinkedIn shows you).

The same happened in 2024 when I was looking again.

I was able to get offers quickly both times for my “Plan A” jobs based on my network and in 2023, I found a couple of companies where the “nice to have” was implementing and modifying an open source “AWS Solution” for which I was a major contributor.

My “Plan A” was a full time job at a third party AWS consulting company where I would be leading cloud + app dev projects.

But, most people don’t have my share of “unfair advantages”.

I got an interview with the worst resume ever when covid hiring was ramping up. It ended up not working out. When the layoffs started shortly after, I submitted hundreds and got nothing.