Yeah if you're good and have the resume/experience to back it up, you won't have any issues getting great offers even in this market. Great candidates are not easy to find in any market.
This must be extremely subjective. Many times over I see very well qualified candidates spending months in this market looking for a position - when it took them weeks before.
Anecdotally, this. I'd never spent more than 3 weeks looking for a job prior to my October/November job hunt post-layoff. This one took about 6-7 weeks, all told (and likely would have come out closer to 8 had one branch path played out). I was intentionally looking for remote-first companies that seemed halfway stable, and was prioritizing those open to sub-40h workweeks (30h, 4DWW, 9-80, etc.), which admittedly, all three shrunk the pool tremendously (each), but particularly on workweek length, I was negotiable. I still had an overall horrible experience with the dozen or two companies I chatted with, and notably got some absolutely wild rejections (however, quite thankfully, also landed somewhere great after sifting through all of these):
- absolute crickets, which made up about 33% of the "rejections" after a phone screen. This was unheard of pre-layoff rounds, but I understand that recruiters themselves suffered a lot of losses in this wave so I somewhat get it.
- "We only hire SREs, and any role leveled Senior+, in San Francisco, there's too much context to offload remotely for leader roles" (this is, itself, such a glaring red flag that I was considering walking from this process anyway)
- "You mentioned your preference to not do Coderpad-style interviews, and sadly, we only hire based on timed+video call Coderpad interviews, good luck!" (I basically never ran into this pre-2022 despite my stance on this issue almost never changing in my career, this was the cause of several rejections this time)
- A subtype of the above, bombing a surprise (or once, "forgot to ask ahead of time and got scheduled for one that I decided to go to anyway") Coderpad/l33tcode/etc. style interview. Rejections on all but one of these, where I advanced and backed out for other reasons.
- Being an SRE not married to Kubernetes I've learned is now often akin to no longer being an SRE. In fact I now question whether I truly consider myself "an SRE" in the current startup climate's sense of the word anymore. As an egregious example, one interview asked me to rate my skills and opinions on Kubernetes specifically. I answered honestly that I thought it was the right tool for many jobs, but not all jobs, and that I wouldn't claim to be a guru at it as I often use other tools that fit the tasks at hand better. Rejected.
Cargo culting the wrong tool is a pretty good sign of a company that will eventually not make it from a tech point of view so better to let such go. If you're Calimero and you want to pretend to be Godzilla that's fine by me but not need to tie yourself to that particular mast.
They would much rather miss out on potentially talented individuals than hire one sub-par person. They care much more about avoiding false positives than false negatives.
I also had someone candidly tell me that they deliberately select for candidates who have put extensive time into preparation because that correlates with effort and the willingness to work under crunch conditions in the job. Gross, but effective.
By this logic, maybe leetcode is a sign of somewhere that indulges in death marches and should be best avoided working for?... except when everyone does it, and/or applicant is out of work
