Ah, the job hunt. I missed the 2008 economic difficulties by going back to school to finish my Bachelors degree and got out by the time the market had rebounded. There have been other economic downturns in between then and now, but I’ve always managed to be steadily employed during those times so I guess I’ve been pretty lucky so far. Throughout my entire career so far, I’ve only been through two “involuntary separations” - long, long ago at Comcast when my position was eliminated and the office relocated to Michigan (I was in Indiana at the time) and then now when the startup I work for has run out of money as the crypto market takes a downturn.
Anyway, I find myself looking for a job now during…very strange economic times which are compounded by large language models people refer to as “AI” making the market even weirder. There are a ton of new job sites out there that integrate AI as part of the job search, which seem to expose contact data to various groups that very badly want me to pay them to market my resume in front of Fortune 500 companies. These groups will also manufacture references for me, will coach me before and during interviews, and some will only charge 30% of my take-home pay for this service. When I told one of these people “This sounds like a scam” he laughed and said “Don’t worry about that.” I laughed and disconnected the call. I’ve also commiserated with recruiters who are having the same problems I’m having - just on the hiring side. One really excellent recruiter I worked with mentioned that he’d seen over 1400 applications for the position I was interviewing for and more than 90% of them were obvious fakes - either AI-written resumes, totally different people at the initial screening, no photo on LinkedIn, or not a citizen of the country the job is based in. Interspersed throughout this process are lots of “influencers” (not sure what the LinkedIn version of “influencer” is) on LinkedIn that advise job seekers to do keyword matching for ATS systems, LinkedIn influencers that advise job seekers to not do keyword matching for ATS systems, recruiters that advise cold reach-outs to hiring managers on LinkedIn, recruiters that advise against cold reach-outs to hiring managers on LinkedIn…the list of diametrically-opposed advice goes on and on. Recruiters blame candidates, candidates blame recruiters, etc.
I don’t have any answers for any of that, really, and despite the FUD everywhere - which does, in my opinion, have some merit - none of these things are really new problems. The scale is bigger and that’s a new thing though. I’ve seen woefully unqualified people move on to fantastic positions during my time in tech, just due to family connections and wondered how in the world some folks have ended up in seats near mine. None of that is new, but it does feel a little different. Maybe its because I’m not in control of my own immediate future for one of the few times in my life, plus this new focus on AI, which I have some strong reservations about despite seeing some very real and cool possibilities.
On top of all that, other patterns I’ve noticed are that many job postings are no longer looking for AWS or GCP or Azure. Many are looking for “AWS, GCP, or Azure” experience, which seems like a strange departure from the last time I was looking at jobs a couple of years ago when JDs wanted one specific cloud provider. Titles have also changed - DevOps Engineer is now (sometimes) Cloud Infrastructure Engineer or Platform Engineer. The use of leetcode-style tests seems to also still exist, which means some places think I’ll be checking for palindromes in arrays, which has never shown up in a ticket I’ve ever worked, but I suppose having that skillset at least makes me practice my python more. I’ve also had some real nitty-gritty technical questions about kubernetes that makes me wonder if these places are really using EKS. It can be difficult to prepare for interviews when you’re never sure if any given title will include IaC questions, coding quizzes, or internal architecture problems that are largely solved by the use of managed services.
So, stream of consciousness over, here is some hard data. I’ve applied for a handful of jobs before I knew for certain my job was ending, but nothing serious - just trying to maintain my interview chops as I’ve always advised folks to do and been advised of that myself. I went back through my email after I really started looking at roughly the end of May and tallied everything up:
Applications: 58 Rejections: 7 Rejection rate so far: ~12% — but most haven’t responded yet, so this will climb Active interview tracks: 6 active
Despite not hearing a word from the majority of these potential employers, the ones I have heard back from have been fairly quick about it one way or the other. I have a Claude subscription so I asked Claude and it says the quick rejections suggest quick automated filtering. The current still-in-progress apps all took about a week to get back to me.