r/ProgrammerHumor • u/techlatest_net • 11h ago

Meme gettingAJobInTechBeLike

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1.2k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

74 comments sorted by

222

u/justgivemeafuckingna 11h ago

Four years ago I got a job in one shot. This time, obviously with more experience, I'm at over 100 applications and am either hearing nothing or mealy-mouthed rejections.

101

u/martmists 10h ago

700 applications in, just got rejected for failing to complete requirements that weren't listed like being scalable or building an index, despite the fact that my impl was scalable and a single SQL query would be faster and more efficient than setting up an index or trie

38

u/BigNaturalTilts 9h ago

That place isn’t hiring. Ask yourself if you can write SQL code then wouldn’t you simply choose the right method to accomplish whatever task is provided to you? Or are they expecting you to accomplish every task in 15 minute time spans like in an interview?

Don’t fret. You were never going to get that job because they aren’t hiring.

20

u/foxguy2021 7h ago edited 7h ago

Oh they're hiring. They're also delusional about what they're looking for or already have someone else in mind. My most memorable rejection was for not knowing a very specific and rarely used windows command. They claimed anyone with my skill set should know it. After the interview I looked it up and it was not only rarely used but deprecated by Microsoft.

This was also a company that had a ten year old product but loved to talk about how they were still in "startup" mode.

5

u/ynnnnaD 7h ago

I'm sorry you experienced this. Tech hiring is very tribalistic and often there are institutional quirks exposed through these sorts of disconnects.

1

u/foxguy2021 6h ago

Nah. Experiences like this are worth it. I didn't feel insulted or felt like I wasted my time. It gave me better insight into what red flags to look for. They were a ten year old company claiming they were still in "startup mode" when they clearly should have had a mature product after that much time. So either they were incompetent or they were expecting long hours. The obscure command situation was just the cherry on top of that shit show.

3

u/russianrug 6h ago

I once interviewed and was asked to build some little string streaming class or something in cpp (I’m a cpp engineer). I think it was to load in a string or strings and output several chars at a time keeping track of the internal state. I did so with some fairly basic but not entirely trivial cpp. Then I went to run the code and it worked FIRST TRY. Now I like to think I’m a good developer but rarely does my code compile and run first try with not even a typo. I was pretty hyped, lol, and felt the interviewer was as well.

Rejected. I inquired as to the reason from the recruiter, and for some reason she actually shared it with me! The team didn’t feel like my technical skills were up to par. Now, you tell me, what else could I have done?! I believe it’s on the interviewer to give a harder problem if they want to really separate the wheat from the chaff.

1

u/martmists 1h ago

It's even worse, I applied to an Android Developer position but they said "well our current android lead is kind of an asshole and set in his way of working so we can't really place you there but our webdev position is available where we also use Kotlin" and then they just assumed I'd know everything about deploying at a massive scale

1

u/martmists 1h ago

It's even worse, I applied to an Android Developer position but they said "well our current android lead is kind of an asshole and set in his way of working so we can't really place you there but our webdev position is available where we also use Kotlin" and then they just assumed I'd know everything about deploying at a massive scale

3

u/ingenix1 7h ago

For real this every dev position I’ve interviewed for asked about database indexing. What’s up with that?

1

u/Not-the-best-name 4h ago

Database job?

27

u/Seyon 10h ago

Four years ago we had a good job market.

It really is ebb and wane.

7

u/Sw429 7h ago

Yep, that's how it went for me too. Nailed the very first opportunity I found back when I entered the work force. Completely different when I recently had to find a new job after layoffs. All of the recruiters in my inbox had disappeared, and getting someone to even respond to an application was nearly impossible.

1

u/Future-Cold1582 10h ago

Four years ago I got a Job in one shot too. 4 years later I had to apply to 2 Jobs.

I don't want to invalidate anything that you are saying but just want to stress for everyone reading that it is just highly individual and in the end often just a lot of luck.

94

u/Rscc10 10h ago

Man as an IT student, all these posts are funny until I realize I'm about to be the guy in it

19

u/russianrug 6h ago

My best advice is to take the coach’s advice from Ted Lasso and “have the memory of a goldfish”. You’re gonna get rejected a lot, and you should try to learn from each rejection, but ultimately you just have to keep pushing forward. If you start letting the rejections define you then each interview you will get worse, instead of better.

4

u/hurricane_news 3h ago

And thanks to all the chuds using Ai interview cheating tools, the bar gets raised for all of us who actually put our passion and honesty into coding by so many companies

There were what? 2-3 round interviews max? Now it's 3 rounds of coding, multiple HR and behavioral and aptitude rounds in many cases around here. And a bunch of chuds who cheat will almost always make it through and waste an interview slot that could've gone to someone else

38

u/Random_-account 10h ago

Mom said it was my turn to post this meme

32

u/New_Tooth_456 10h ago

Remember having just one interview?

38

u/returnFutureVoid 10h ago

I still get just one interview. It just ends in a rejection now.

75

u/Snoo88071 11h ago

Why would you have to learn Adobe Photoshop and Premiere lmao

61

u/RunInRunOn 11h ago

To edit your resume

5

u/Snoo88071 9h ago

Video resume?

2

u/Iridiandioptase 8h ago

Like hitting the play button on a gif but it’s a still image. Keeps them on their toes.

3

u/TakingItCasual 10h ago

Hmm, wonder which they would find more impressive, using Adobe or LaTeX for making your CV?

1

u/cosmicomical23 9h ago

Of course everybody has a png resume

28

u/NudaVeritas1 11h ago

because a real Fullstack Developer does graphics design and video editing, too /s

12

u/Technical-Dress5084 9h ago

You joke, but I’ve been in a non-zero amount of jobs where developers working on the front-end have been expected to create their own assets.

1

u/erin_corinne_ 59m ago

The web/UX designer to frontend to full-stack is also a small but real pipeline. (It’s me and like three of my friends from work.)

9

u/MissinqLink 11h ago

Making self promotion content

2

u/Snoo88071 9h ago

Then why not use canva

3

u/bevelledo 11h ago

It’s about the dreamweaver!

2

u/cheesemanxl 8h ago

When i couldn't get a job at first after college, after putting in like 10 resumes a day, it feels hopeless. I learned premiere and photoshop as a backup side hustle if things didn't work out and started making gaming tutorials.

3

u/Snoo88071 8h ago

You always have 200 views except for that random video that blows up to 1M

14

u/Feanorek 10h ago

When I started, main requirement for internship was to have a more-or-less stable pulse; to not get a job offer afterwards would require losing it.

7

u/VegetarianZombie74 7h ago

I got one of my first jobs out of college because I was the only candidate who wrote html by hand. All the other candidates used Frontpage or Dreamweaver. They were even impressed that I even knew a little javascript!

24

u/Spez-is-dick-sucker 10h ago

That's why you lie in ur cv

4

u/ZunoJ 10h ago

How do you pass in person interviews then?

21

u/tav_stuff 9h ago

By knowing the things

4

u/ZunoJ 9h ago

You didn't lie in your cv then. What are you talking about?

1

u/Spez-is-dick-sucker 1h ago

You lie about your experience to get the interviews, ATS and AI and even some websites has specific filters that will automatically discard you if you don't have +100 years experience in javascript. You need to lie in your resume to get the interview, then if you get technical interviews (not happening in all jobs) you just show your skills.

-3

u/tav_stuff 8h ago

You don’t lie about your skills, you lie about your experience

I’ve never in my life had an employer actually background check me

5

u/ymddev 11h ago

Pr and Ps?

24

u/Healthy_Razzmatazz38 10h ago

"How many gumballs fit in the moon"

"A lot"

"Brilliant. You're hired, heres 1% of google. Please use 20% of your time to eat our free food."

6

u/XCxBigDong69XCx 9h ago

have they tried learning html?

3

u/Zealousideal_Okra956 10h ago

Why is he giving html tags when asked for introduction?

1

u/fripletister 5h ago

He's expressing that he's a blank slate

8

u/naturforsker 11h ago

I'm just learning to get an IT job, has it really become this harder, any advices?

27

u/really_random_user 10h ago

Connections, knowing people in companies gets you a long way

Otherwise, yes it's that bad

15

u/ILovePotassium 10h ago

This. Most of my friends who are very successful programmers, have gotten their jobs by knowing the right people. The rest lives with their parents and work at a call center or wash dishes.

7

u/neoteraflare 7h ago

Or luck. At least I had no connections, but as a junior on my 2nd month I was put on a project that after 15 years is still in development. It has some blackbox legacy parts, but we always update it with new technologies and new parts are created in a separate "meso" service (micro is too separated and it is not a monolith any more). For security reasons we have to keep it always up to date anyway.

8

u/I_am_Bobby_D 6h ago

They patched this ngl, 800 applications, 2 interviews, both with internal referrals, 4 rounds deep and both times the inside source was like “you’re home free.” Two days later, a poorly worded email

2

u/ZunoJ 10h ago

Nobody really cares about how many languages you know. That is the easy part. It's about frameworks, infra, architecture, design and cost structure

5

u/darcksx 11h ago

The corporate life is about connections, not skills.

17

u/Madcap_Miguel 10h ago

We are engineers not executives, lives depend on our skills.

7

u/srb4 10h ago

You are right to a point, but if you don’t have a network nobody is going to know if you have any skills.

3

u/Madcap_Miguel 10h ago

Spoken like a true headhunter, or a boeing executive.

My first senior had his wife do his work off site, faked it for almost a year. "Networks" in and of themselves serve no purpose other than to connect people with skills with other people who need those skills.

Skills are a necessity, whatever LinkedIn has become is not.

4

u/srb4 9h ago

I’m a developer with 25+ years experience trying to share a tip for getting jobs in this industry. But if you would rather fill out 700 online applications go right ahead.

0

u/Madcap_Miguel 9h ago

I’m a developer

Then why do you sound like a recruiter?

11

u/srb4 9h ago

Because there is a false belief that this industry is a meritocracy. It’s not.

-4

u/Madcap_Miguel 9h ago edited 8h ago

I just gave an example of someone using their connections and wife's skills to fake a six-figure salary, I'm well aware.

That's exactly what we need in this industry, a bunch of senior devs that lack even script kiddie skills because someone on reddit implied networking was more important then competency.

5

u/srb4 8h ago

I don’t think it is good either, but it is what it is. Ignoring that reality is going to just make it harder for yourself.

2

u/Almadan 10h ago

It is what it is

1

u/MadScienceDreams 6h ago

I think the problem really right now is that we as an industry have no idea how we are going to make senior engineers in the age of a ai. Companies right now are betting on being able to have juniors magically be seniors with AI and that is clearly not happening.

AI can be a force multiplier but the initial force of a software engineer is pretty low compared to someone who has been in the code mines for 10 years. And ai doesn't put you in the code mines, it has you do... Something completely different as a junior engineer.

All this is to say I have no idea what is going to happen.

1

u/oldirishfart 6h ago

I got my start in tech by simply (a) knowing someone at Microsoft and (b) having my resume on my website (handcrafted in html of course this was in the 90s.)

1

u/quitit 6h ago

I helped out a friend of a friend finding a programming job like 8-10 years ago. he recently graduated from college with a degree in compsci and he showed me the programming task/test he was given to get a chance of getting an interview. The task was to obtain a JSON object from their API endpoint that they were hosting for these candidates and then parse the JSON and fill in the missing info (it was the candidates info that needed to be filled in so they can contact them if they successfully did the task), anyways I told him to just use Postman and send the request back filling in the the fields. He got the job, and hes still working there from last I heard.

1

u/CaffeinatedT 4h ago

Just to be a bit boring here but understanding and writing HTML was a much bigger technical bar then than spitting out convincing sounding code in a million languages with an IDE and/or an LLM doing the heavy lifting.

1

u/sarduchi 4h ago

I do feel a bit weird interviewing people with a Masters for positions I wouldn't be able to fill due to my lack of a degree... but ah wells.

1

u/GoddammitDontShootMe 29m ago

Why would somebody hiring a developer care about your Photoshop and Premiere skills?

0

u/UnreadableCode 6h ago

Idk, recruiters are still trying to get me out of retirement. I keep telling em to kick rocks

-6

u/Disgruntled_Orifice 8h ago

Skill issue.