Comment by blindriver
1 day ago
This isn't 2021 anymore. You need to recalibrate your world view.
There are probably 300 people interviewing for the job you interviewed for. So they need to not just pick someone who checks the boxes, but the BEST of all the people who checked the boxes.
Assuming you checked all the boxes, you weren't the best and someone else was chosen. That's all it is. What makes them the best? Who knows. There's likely 50 of them they had to choose from.
Job hunting has always been a numbers game but now it's worse by a factor of 100x. Don't take it personally, and keep going.
There are 300 random candidates but probably only 3 viable candidates.
Yeah, at some level I know this; I've given interviews before and seen people get declined for the dumbest reasons, or no reason at all, and I usually give people this same advice when they're down.
Dunno, it's just hard not to take this a bit personally sometimes. As I said, if I felt like I knew what I was screwing up, then that would be something I could work on. It's not hard to buy textbooks and learn more about concurrency theory or distributed systems or something, or to build a project on my server to play with a library, or something like that. It's extremely hard to solve a problem if you have no idea what the problem even is.
You're not wrong with anything you said though. I just need to keep applying and go from there.
If you don't keep a stiff upper lip and be emotionally and mentally resilient about this, then someone who is exactly like you but has the resilience to keep going on will take your job.
This is the worst job market I've seen since the dot com bust. It's much worse than the Financial Crisis. There are tens of thousands of out of work programmers, and in the next few years more and more new grads are joining the mix. You have to understand who your competition is. There is also the existential crisis of AI taking our jobs as well hanging over us. It's pretty rough out there. That said, during the dotcom bust is when we first saw offshoring to India and people were worried to death that all the jobs were going to go to India and for the most part they didn't, there was still a competitive advantage to continue hiring in the US for the next 20 years.
The only way to get a job right now is either through connections from a friend or coworker that thinks you're great, or by hustling and applying to thousands of jobs, or by forming your own company.
Everything you know about finding a job, increase things by 100x. If last time you sent out 20 resumes and got a job, this time send out 2000 resumes. I'm not joking.
It's going to be tough, but if you're resilient, you will find a job. If you're worried about money, move your spending down to as close to 0 as possible. Move in with friends or family, eat ramen, and keep applying. You can do it!
> It's much worse than the Financial Crisis.
That's not saying much. While there was a month or two early on where it was a bit touch and go, granted, all-in-all the Financial Crisis period was one of the best times ever to be a programmer. That was the App Store gold rush era and all the investment dollars running away from every other industry due to financial crisis concerns was funnelling into tech.
Oh I know, I will keep applying and hoping for the best, obviously. I don't really have the privilege of being able to give up, as I need to pay my mortgage.
It's just a bit discouraging sometimes. I don't really think I'd be a worse engineer than most people they end up hiring, so it's hard to not take this personally sometimes.
99% of the time, when I'm rejected I just roll my eyes and move on, but every now and then (and it appears to be kind of stochastic), one rejection will just get a bit more under my skin than others. I've been rejected for thousands of jobs and I don't have a crisis for each one.
> or to build a project on my server to play with a library, or something like that.
If you are up for playing, why not play with sales and marketing? Playing isn't limited to tech. Grab a pencil from your drawer and try to get someone to buy it. Just like with those little low stakes tech projects, as you keep prodding at it to get it to work, you are bound to learn something.
And if you truly have nothing left to learn about sales and marketing, well, then you will have at least learned that the problem you have isn't what you are currently suspecting.
There are probably 300
This isn't really true. There are 300 people that might apply but only a few that ever get interviewed. If they are interviewing 300 people then the company doesn't even know what it wants.