Devs involved in hiring: Whats it looking like after the holidays? (My take too)

Posted by Botbot30000000@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 23 comments

My workday role is a senior director in large corp. In reality my working day is of a senior manager by a technical definition that I manage managers and a few key devs that have been under me for 3+ years that doesn’t make sense to shake it up.

Hands on code everyday is to keep my skills.

To answer my own question for you: this was looking DARK during the holidays. I laid off a few offshore staff and was worrying about having to layoff my onsite staff.

Seems everyone woke up from the holidays and now I regret letting go some offshore team members and I may be screwed if I can’t hire fast enough.

[-]

Syntactico@reddit

EU-based. We finished last round of lay-offs. We have tried hiring new senior devs, but it is impossible to find someone qualified despite offering above market pay and a very permissive home office policy (have to live in same city so can come in on short notice, but 90%+ home office days is the norm). We get tons of applicants, but even the ones with good companies on their CV fails basic code exercises.

We have started hiring juniors again. Many duds - the universities became too lax during the pandemic. It seems they've been slow to recover. But also got a couple of very good ones.

It seems the talented ones are able to "supercharge" themselves with LLM's. The two great juniors we got are the best juniors I've worked with by a mile.

[-]

ventilazer@reddit

Do you ask leetcode? What is meant by coding exercises?

[-]

Syntactico@reddit

It's much easier than leetcode. Slightly harder than Fizzbuzz. Basically, they won't ever be able to contribute meaningfully to a codebase.

[-]

ventilazer@reddit

fizz buzz is easy though

[-]

Other-Progress651@reddit

I'm sending in applications but getting no responses. I'm employed but would like to ask for a raise or job hope. My company brought on one h1b but he left for Amazon. He was a bad hire by my standards but has offers left and right.

[-]

NegativeWeb1@reddit

Do H1-B applicants have to go through the same interview process or are they hired differently because of the sponsorship, etc?

[-]

Other-Progress651@reddit

Same interview process. However even after our team rejected him he was still hired. Then I found out there was never even a job listing posted and he came straight from a recruiter. I also learned about how these h1b visa people have a financial knife to their throat and that's why they are willing to work 10 hours a day for less pay than normal.

[-]

serial_crusher@reddit

Company was trying to hire a senior dev on junior-mid salary, but it was the best budget we could get after hiring manager put his foot down and said had to be US-based. Most of the applicants were duds, but we ended up hiring a pretty solid mid level dev. I’m optimistic about his performance and hope for his sake he jumps ship for a better job once the market improves.

[-]

jaypeejay@reddit

What’s the salary?

[-]

serial_crusher@reddit

Recruiter was telling candidates the range was 80-110.

[-]

jaypeejay@reddit

oof

[-]

Ecstatic_Wheelbarrow@reddit

Nothing better than hiring somebody, training them up for 6 months, and watching them leave for an offer that doesn't lowball them. Meanwhile the hiring manager will be like, "Nobody wants to work anymore."

[-]

Other-Cover9031@reddit

serious question, does anyone post complete / coherent thoughts on this sub? How hard is it to write complete, sensible sentences?

[-]

andrewhy@reddit

Luckily for you, there are plenty of devs on the market. Unluckily for you, you'll have to sort through hundreds of applications.

[-]

andrewhy@reddit

Luckily for you, there are plenty of devs on the market. Unluckily for you, you'll have to sort through hundreds of applications.

[-]

travelinzac@reddit

I was the primary technical interviewer at my company and was responsible for setting up the coding problems for the pipelines and choosing the problems for live interviews and so on. Did a significant portion of technical interviewing to the point that at times I was basically the gate to get hired here (I pushed hard for this to not be the case). I haven't interviewed a candidate in over a year now. We're supposed to have open recs to backfill some roles and they're still not posted so not keeping my hopes up there.

[-]

thisismyfavoritename@reddit

got a stroke trying to read this post

[-]

Buttleston@reddit

I have no idea what the question is

Why is he trying to hire if he had to lay people off?

Why did he have to lay off his offshore staff, and maybe his onshore staff?

What does it mean that "everyone woke up"?

Honestly I can't really even parse the first paragraph. "that doesn’t make sense to shake it up after promotions." What?

[-]

destructive_cheetah@reddit

Company had a great year, we landed some major new business, things are looking up, we are hiring. First interviewee of the year ghosted me so...market can't be that bad.

[-]

MinimumArmadillo2394@reddit

market can't be that bad.

As with everything, it depends on your YOE.

Things have picked up since the new year, but holy shit since before thanksgiving I've been working on 2 different leads with recruiters and the hiring managers STILL haven't looked at any applications. I applied to multiple positions ~November 4th through the agency and not a single one has told the agency about any of their candidates.

[-]