<story><title>Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?</title><text>I got laid off at the start of the year, and ever since then, I&amp;#x27;ve been applying constantly but have only gotten one interview. Before being laid off, I held a job as a front-end dev for the previous 5 and a half years.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve had my resume looked at by three different services (TopResume, Indeed, Levels.fyi) and am currently subscribed to Resume Worded, which scores my resume. Despite all these efforts, I keep receiving rejection emails.&lt;p&gt;So, I just wanted to reach out and see if anyone else has had any similar experiences with applying for jobs.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>pc86</author><text>Intermediate&amp;#x2F;mid for sure, but if I get a resume from someone whose first programming job was 2018 and they&amp;#x27;re calling themselves senior, I&amp;#x27;m throwing that in the trash unless like you said they&amp;#x27;re from VC-funded startups that are going to have massive title inflation &lt;i&gt;and&lt;/i&gt; they&amp;#x27;re applying for a realistic (mid-level) role.</text></item><item><author>ryanbrunner</author><text>5 years for junior for better or worse is well out of step with the industry - while you&amp;#x27;re right that you can get some massively inflated titles that are out of step with the norm, the norm is that you&amp;#x27;re an intermediate developer at a minimum and most likely a senior after 5 years.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s dumb, but it is the standard nowadays.</text></item><item><author>rsynnott</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not a good job market, but it doesn&amp;#x27;t seem normal to spend six months applying and only get _one_ interview.&lt;p&gt;It might be worth asking friends or former colleagues, ideally people who actually are involved in recruiting (hiring managers etc) to take a look at your resume and LinkedIn profile and see if there&amp;#x27;s anything glaringly wrong with them.&lt;p&gt;Is your resume in a weird format, or is it structurally weird&amp;#x2F;overdesigned? For instance, a recent trend in resumes was to show (programming) languages known in a pie chart (do not do this; it is nonsensical). In many companies, the text from your resume is going to end up in a standard format anyway; they&amp;#x27;ll have tools for this and if their tool can&amp;#x27;t extract your text they may not bother. Unless you&amp;#x27;re a graphic designer or something, you probably want a boringly-designed resume.&lt;p&gt;Are you applying jobs for which you are dramatically underqualified? One thing to keep in mind is that some small companies (if you&amp;#x27;re coming from one) have _wild_ title inflation; a small startup might call someone with 5 and a half years experience their director of frontend engineering, say, whereas everyone else would call that person a junior engineer.&lt;p&gt;Does anything particularly unfortunate come up if people Google your name? For instance, a real-life version of that Seinfeld episode where Elaine&amp;#x27;s dating a guy who has the same name as a notorious local serial killer.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dkarl</author><text>That doesn&amp;#x27;t seem fair, and it doesn&amp;#x27;t seem like an effective filter, either. Titles vary wildly for a lot of different reasons, and you can&amp;#x27;t expect candidates to present themselves to you in your terms. You can&amp;#x27;t expect them to take your job descriptions at face value, either. If mismatched title expectations bother you, blame the industry, blame other companies, blame hiring managers, but don&amp;#x27;t blame an engineer who has only been working for five years. It&amp;#x27;s on you to explain how titles and compensation work at your company and work out what their position would be.&lt;p&gt;I wouldn&amp;#x27;t pigeonhole someone into a level based on their years of experience or previous job titles, either. Interviews can reveal some surprising things. I&amp;#x27;ve worked with people with less than five years of experience who were senior-quality developers at all aspects of the job, and I&amp;#x27;ve worked with people with ten years of experience who just wanted to sit in their cube and write code without making any decisions or talking to anyone except their boss. And these people aren&amp;#x27;t going to straightforwardly tell you what their position should be. The one who wants to sit in his cube with no responsibilities might tell you he&amp;#x27;s senior (and his resume might back that up) and the one who is ready for a senior position might tell you they&amp;#x27;re mid-level, because at their last job they worked with extraordinary people.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?</title><text>I got laid off at the start of the year, and ever since then, I&amp;#x27;ve been applying constantly but have only gotten one interview. Before being laid off, I held a job as a front-end dev for the previous 5 and a half years.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve had my resume looked at by three different services (TopResume, Indeed, Levels.fyi) and am currently subscribed to Resume Worded, which scores my resume. Despite all these efforts, I keep receiving rejection emails.&lt;p&gt;So, I just wanted to reach out and see if anyone else has had any similar experiences with applying for jobs.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>pc86</author><text>Intermediate&amp;#x2F;mid for sure, but if I get a resume from someone whose first programming job was 2018 and they&amp;#x27;re calling themselves senior, I&amp;#x27;m throwing that in the trash unless like you said they&amp;#x27;re from VC-funded startups that are going to have massive title inflation &lt;i&gt;and&lt;/i&gt; they&amp;#x27;re applying for a realistic (mid-level) role.</text></item><item><author>ryanbrunner</author><text>5 years for junior for better or worse is well out of step with the industry - while you&amp;#x27;re right that you can get some massively inflated titles that are out of step with the norm, the norm is that you&amp;#x27;re an intermediate developer at a minimum and most likely a senior after 5 years.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s dumb, but it is the standard nowadays.</text></item><item><author>rsynnott</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not a good job market, but it doesn&amp;#x27;t seem normal to spend six months applying and only get _one_ interview.&lt;p&gt;It might be worth asking friends or former colleagues, ideally people who actually are involved in recruiting (hiring managers etc) to take a look at your resume and LinkedIn profile and see if there&amp;#x27;s anything glaringly wrong with them.&lt;p&gt;Is your resume in a weird format, or is it structurally weird&amp;#x2F;overdesigned? For instance, a recent trend in resumes was to show (programming) languages known in a pie chart (do not do this; it is nonsensical). In many companies, the text from your resume is going to end up in a standard format anyway; they&amp;#x27;ll have tools for this and if their tool can&amp;#x27;t extract your text they may not bother. Unless you&amp;#x27;re a graphic designer or something, you probably want a boringly-designed resume.&lt;p&gt;Are you applying jobs for which you are dramatically underqualified? One thing to keep in mind is that some small companies (if you&amp;#x27;re coming from one) have _wild_ title inflation; a small startup might call someone with 5 and a half years experience their director of frontend engineering, say, whereas everyone else would call that person a junior engineer.&lt;p&gt;Does anything particularly unfortunate come up if people Google your name? For instance, a real-life version of that Seinfeld episode where Elaine&amp;#x27;s dating a guy who has the same name as a notorious local serial killer.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>webdood90</author><text>great example of why hiring in tech is broken.&lt;p&gt;decision makers making blanket generalizations because candidates don&amp;#x27;t fit the mold they&amp;#x27;ve invented in their own minds using only their personal experience as a baseline.&lt;p&gt;tech experience is wildly diverse. looking at candidates with a one size fits all approach is passing up plenty of qualified people, but everybody wants to hire like Google.</text></comment>