Ask HN: V2 – Laid off folks, are you getting hired yet?

Product designer, 10 years experience. Laid off mid-December. Recruiter screens and hiring manager interviews have picked up somewhat, but it’s still proving very hard to get into late-round interviews. I have only my third portfolio review in nearly three months coming up next week – here’s hoping.

Got laid off in October, worked on open-source projects, two of those ended up in the front-page, got contacted and signed an offer this month. I felt like shit and spent too much time getting baked, but it's over now.

I also didn’t know that. For others like us:

> get baked

> Smoking a larger than normal quantity of marijuana, usually resulting in a good few hours of laziness, desire to eat fast food (or junk food) and/or fall asleep.

Um, I just wanted to let you know that I had never considered that anyone didn't know that slang.

So, thank you for that data point. There's such a big world out there!

If you want to keep this a throwaway, delete this.

As a CTO the number of unsolicited inbound emails from recruiters with fawning profiles of potential candidates is not like anything I have seen before. I think it’s a signal that very highly paid engineering leaders are not able to find jobs like they had before easily.

I work as an AI research engineer, so I’m having a totally different experience than the others I’m seeing here. Job market is very very strong for senior AI roles. Multiple offers that were 2-4x what I was making at a BigTech research lab. Interview process was much easier than I was expecting- mostly situational interviews (although I was referred in for those).

Having said that, many places refused to interview me because I didn’t have experience with LLMs. I was surprised how strict some places were with experience requirements.

It's like night and day from a year ago. I've known some very high quality people who had to do 8 onsites to get one offer (and obviously a lot more applications, recruiter calls, and tech screens to get those opportunities). There are still jobs out there but companies know they can be very very picky right now and will reject you for the smallest reason.

But HackerNews comments told me everybody makes $300k-$500k/yr working remote

Nope, "virtual on sites". Zoom call and codepen.

I’ve been posting where helpful, but early stage companies are still hiring!

If anyone is struggling and is on the mid/senior/director side of their career (3+ yrs), I'm helping place people at my friends' Seed and Series A companies. Email me at j{at}markovmanagement.com if I can help ya!

I was laid off in November - few false starts here and there but I start my new gig on the 20th. Better yet I have $20k left from severance which is really nice.

I assume non-startup / large company? Congrats on the role.

people i knew got one or two years contractor with 10% more pay increase right away, i was offered more than that for two year contractor at meta twice so far but i prefer staying at where i am. we are all decades experience in embedded system,this field seems to be more aging proof? i am not sure.

Embedded took a huge hit recently. Google and Amazon uninvested significantly in IoT.

embedded is more than IoT though, I don't know how many embedded engineers Google has, seems not a lot as its consumer hardware are probably outsourced. Amazon does make it own devices and have quite a lot embedded engineers, from my circle, not a single engineer was let go so far, and I know more than 10 of them in various locations and departments.

problem with embedded is that it was paid less than SWEs, maybe that's another reason it's "easier" to have jobs.

I've been hiring fairly steadily. The level of talent that is applying has definitely increased. My hiring managers are able to be way more picky, and people are accepting first offers at a higher rate.

There's toug competition for those looking to be hired.

Nope, it's pretty bad. Out of maybe 40 applications I've had 2 interviews, made it to round two for one of them, no offer.

LinkedIn positions get 150+ applications within hours. For the first time I got nearly zero response from HN Hiring as well.

I think the issue is everything is skewing wildly towards senior roles, even non-senior roles are getting inundated with 200+ applicants that are over qualified.

If you're like me and have 3yrs of (FAANG and growth stage startups) SWE and 1yr of product eng / TPM'ing you're basically fucked. Hard to tell if I've fucked my career (by not just working at one company with my longest tenure being 2yrs w/ zero resume gaps)or if the market is just not great rn.

I've been staying afloat consulting for a friend's startup - granted SVB probably just nuked any chance of their series A actually happening.

Future is very bleak atm - but thank god I have cash to live on.

Hang in there. I’d say your experience is pretty good. Maybe try AB testing your resume structure and wording, improving social media, etc.

Whenever I've seen a situation with low supply/high demand, networks trump credentials

For me, when hiring someone, I want to have a track record with them. Having known them over a long period of time helps me be less guarded and more sure of their intentions.

This also applies if the person is a friend of a friend — building a “network” just means knowing people who can vouch for you as a valuable and trustworthy person.

The ability to build relationships and be stable over time is a merit.

Totally agree, fortunately I have a decent network to draw from. Unfortunately, I have to refresh leetcode to take up friends who have rec's to offer + most of those friends work for orgs that have completely frozen hiring pipelines.

Network could be better though, going to spend the week at a friend's in Austin at SXSW to accelerate potentially growing the network at cringe founder events. Yes, I'm that desperate.

Get LinkedIn premium and msg the recruiters for the job. I have a non FAANG profile and am regularly collecting offers doing that.

Going through the resume pile is work. The recruiter would rather not have to do the work and get a hire in the job.

Will do, thanks for the tip. I'm somewhat tempted to start grifting Blind and just paying for recs.

I've only seen entry level positions being hired lately (across APAC). Market is very dry and layoffs continue across the industry.