Notes

I have approximately 15yrs experience in the field. Half of that was spent making enterprise software for various famous companies that are not anywhere near FAANG. I was notified my contract was ending on the 23rd of August this year. They need C# backend devs; I'm an e2e JS guy, and they want a "hybrid office," meaning in the office four days a week. I wanted remote work. Makes sense. Honestly, great company. Organized, humble, friendly people. I did not know a company could get that much hardware, snacks, and booze into an office space. It was a fun experience I would do again. The last work day was the second of September. The cost of a home in my city is approximately 250k-500k. I uploaded my resume to Indeed and set my requested pay to 140k, which I understood to be the national average for 2020. Clarifying that is 370k New York City, 235k Palo Alto, 225k Seattle. I put in about 50 applications that night via Indeed when I found out. And then on up to over 100 throughout the next \~30 days. I set my LinkedIn profile to available and tried to respond to every recruiter and talk on the phone with them within 48hrs. I had one to four phone calls each day, and an interview every other day, sometimes every day, sometimes multiples on the same day. It was exhausting. Took me till the 30th of September to get an offer. Recruiters and companies seem to do things to avoid you holding multiple requests at once so you can do a fair market evaluation. I haven't fully dived the logic yet. The first company that gave me an offer also happened to give me warm fuzzies. Thirty-five applications were auto-rejected from Indeed, with no contact from the recruiters. 41 Recruiters reached out to me on via LinkedIn. I did a few tech screens from the recruiters, some liked the results some didn't. Some companies I just didn't want to work for because of how they interviewed or policies they had I knew I didn't like, six of those. A lot of recruiters would make contact, and I looked at the tech stack and just said not interested. A few tried to trick me into going on a tech stack I did not want to. So red flags I looked for. A screener called "Glider." This will be a pain for you if you are not a white male who doesn't have an internal monologue. It's also a way for companies to lie to recruiters and test you for specific skills directly. If doing two leetcodes is like a seven aggravation, this was like a nine. They should probably be sued for the attention deficit test in each one. Lying about the number of interviews. This bothered me. It was a consistent behavior of saying, "oh, just one more." After the 4th interviewer (read human in the process), I moved them to the declined pile. It's a sign of internal communication problems. Those are problems a programmer can't fix. Im still trying to figure out if it's just a patience test to see how much BS you can deal with from management. Not sharing notes between interviews. Programming is fundamentally a job about teamwork if even each person is doing a lot of work individually. It all has to come together. Puzzles. This is a more complex one. Puzzles are effectively just intelligence tests. Businesses with established training systems like Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc., only need high-intelligence people. They don't need to have any actual skill. Those companies and similar companies will train the person. Gives them the tools the same way a factory provides someone tools and training. That's not me, so I'm not going to sit through that insult of frustration. I'm also not an academic; I'm business oriented so it was a red flag that the people in the department have limited business understanding. They could be canned, abused, kept in the dark, etc., as long as they have "a puzzle". It's easy to be more discriminatory about this because that personality type favors more extended interviews with more people in an odd approval-seeking fashion I frankly just find infuriating because of its childlike nature. If no one in the interview process could articulate the "purpose" of the department or business. Part of the above usually. If they couldn't explain their positions' business value in the interview (Steve Jobs Elevator Moment), it was a no. That means the department is an expendable money pit, a pet project of a political faction inside the company, or the management is incompetent. All that means I will get fired eventually, so hard pass. ​ Yellow Flags Framework obsession. Thinking all JS is Angular, or React, or something of that nature. Some companies just want an "expert in X framework", because it makes it easy to reason about the person and will just hammer you about the quirks of the framework. Quirks that usually if you hit sane devs would rip the framework out. Snide remarks about being able to see me. Jesus, I don't even work for you folks and already on the corporate overlords script. Insulting my stack. Yeah no. Everyone wants to be respected at work. I don't want to work in a place where the FE vs BE culture war is still raging. ​ Interviews over 3hrs usually mean some of the above, but it could mean they are testing if you are ok sitting in meetings all day. That's a valid test for an invalid style of business operation. Hard pass. My stack not existing at the company in full, again communication issues with HR/Recruiting. Green Flags Interviews with no test and LOTS of questions about the technology and how its used. Business purpose Having me build something with even the vagueness of what I do daily. Now I've failed some of these and after getting feedback, it was more so that I just didn't code at a breakneck pace. And with my experience, I don't think that's a valid critique. Who cares how long it takes to google something or remember the name of a specific function in a particular framework when you work with hundreds of em annually? The place that gave me an offer, and for 10k above the initial ask at a nice famous company, was "how do you build a front-end framework." It was a single interview for 1hr with 3 people. The science shows you want about 4, but they highly trusted the recruiter and used her as part of the screening. tldr - Takes about a month to find a job if you are trying hard. - Dont let interviewers waste your time. Make sure you feel respected in the interview. - People that want your skills will ask you about your skills. - People that know what they are doing will ask you questions and be organized.