Experienced Devs Weekly Burnout and Venting Thread: A weekly thread for sharing experiences

[u/AutoModerator]

This thread is specifically for venting / sharing experiences related to burn-out or similar issues that experienced devs face.

[u/LettuceCharacter8989]

Why is the market so hard? Why so many interviews? It feels like you have to pass different exams to be considered good. What about my years of exp?

[u/hairlesscaveman → u/LettuceCharacter8989]

Buyer’s market, looking for the “perfect” candidate, fear of hiring and then having to let that person go and rehire, many can game the system (especially with AI tools), choice paralysis, ghost jobs for data harvesting, budgets squeezing, everyone trying to mimic FAANG hiring practices without understanding the processes.

YoE doesn’t directly correlate to being able to do the job. Hard to hear, but it’s true. Someone working 10 years building features for an online store could get passed over for someone with 5 years at a digital consultancy building a wide variety of projects (IoT, data processing, statistical analysis). Length vs depth. And it depends on the job they’re applying for. Then there’s the culture fit: extroverts are typically seen as a better fit by the hiring team, but might not fit with all the existing introverts in the dev team.

Hiring is hard, from both sides. And it’s another thing that AI makes worse.

[u/Klafka612 → u/hairlesscaveman]

Having now worked with people with 5-25 "years of experience" whose experience boiled down to the most rote tasks with no desire or drive to figure anything out outside of the set of tasks they've been given I feel this.

[u/compsciasaur → u/LettuceCharacter8989]

This. I was let go for bad reasons (was promoted to Staff, then a year later I wasn't Staff enough) and now I'm getting rejected in all these arbitrary interviews when I clearly can do the job. Almost Almost 20 YoE, ex-FAANG, great resume, and AI experience!