i thought user_ids were ok

The rules aren't incredibly clear.

2 and a half weeks without hearing from this job, is it safe to assume i didnt get it?

should I email them? I didn't email back the tire-kicker game company, decided I could do a lot better.

No idea where to go from here though. I left both of these places feeling underqualified and ****ty. i don't want to do it again.

The last time something similar happened to me wrote a scathing, but anonymized and totally within their TOS review of the interview process ****show at that company on Glassdoor, and within a day not only got my obvious rejection email but Glassdoor took down my review as it was "too much personal info" so screw them.

I've sent out ~30 cover letters since November and the reply rate on rejections is way less than 50%, had my first interview I haven't anything back from week before last and would follow up with them but the guy who interviewed me was a bit of a dick and nothing he told me made me want to work there. This interview was with a place that took a month to talk me after sending in my resume/coverletter. I'm not a developer, but if you aren't hearing back it's because they really aren't that into you. Whether you want to throw your soda on the their floor or not is up to you...

So it is rude, right? I’m not overreacting? I flubbed that db interview but overall i felt it went pretty good.

If other interviews are like that one I either need to retake all my classes or just give up because I am not cut out for this.

The general advice I was given is to follow up with a "thank you" email either the day of or the day after the interview. If you don't hear back from them in a week, just follow up with a "Hey *******s, plz respond."

But probably the most important thing to know: interviewing is not the job. It's ****ing stressful and a broken process, but it's also not going anywhere anytime soon.

Hmm I think you guys are investing way too much time and emotion into job interviews. I rarely ever wrote cover letters, and I applied to 145 jobs. The only time I ever write a cover letter (short 2 paragraphs) are when I email it personally and I know a human being is going to read it.

It's a numbers game, you interview, you fail and move on. I still get emails till this day that my application is rejected and it has been over a year!

That time you spend writing a cover letter or a thank you email, is time lost that could have been spent on leetcode or applying for more jobs.

out of 145, how many interviews did you do?

I've gotten interviews at every place I've applied to. I absolutely cannot do more than 10 of these, I hate this entire process.

QFT

It is amazingly terriblle. I get inundated with emails about jobs daily. My favorites are the ones that have "urgent" in the titles. Mostly it is "urgent" for the recruiters. Wait to you've dealt 10 recruiters or so, then you'll reach a new and deeper level of hatred. Shortage of developers?

The problem you have to overcome is that being a new grad you have no particular area of experience you can leverage. From your posts here, FWIW, you have absorbed a lot of the concepts you learned in school well, you're competant enough to code solutions in at least a couple of languages. Again, FWIW, those skills coupled with being a new grad should make you highly desirable to many companies.

Generally agree with this - especially at the entry level, it's a numbers game because fit is so wide open. I'll add the caveat that a thank-you email may be worthwhile especially with older interviewers who go out of their way to give you their contact information, mostly because it's relatively cheap, compared to writing cover letters to companies where you have no idea if there's any kind of interest at all. I personally don't bother any more with thank you letter because I don't want to work at places where this matters (and at top employers generally interviewers don't give you contact info, unless it's a hiring manager who is offering to answer questions) but YMMV.

I think we agree but I don't think there's any shortage of developers - the main reason for all this spam is that the hit rate is so low - for bad jobs, very few decent developers are interested so they must cast their net very wide. For good jobs, almost everyone gets rejected, so they need lots of interested applicants to meet their hiring needs. And the need for numbers ensures that recruiters can't spend too much time on you as a candidate, which leads to spamming everything to everyone. The less time the recruiter has for individual candidates, the more all developers look alike.

Also, I think a lot of the top companies seem to use internal recruiters much more heavily than they used to, probably because too many shady external recruiters play up their connections to top companies to compete for attention, while not adding any actual value in terms of screening candidates or matching them with the right opportunities. Even in my network, it seems that the tendency is for people who have worked as external recruiters for a long time to get internal recruiting gigs at tech companies - people don't seem to be transitioning the other way. So this may be why external recruiters are even more desperate.

I think playing the numbers game is a big mistake. Much better to focus on networking and get your foot in the door through other channels, a la
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/summa...-philip-hoberg

Good points, but I'm going to extend a couple ideas.

I agree with you in spirit and in pure total numbers. However, what this notion misses is that in order for FANG to hire the numbers they do, they require a large long-tail. The same point is made when you say "very few decent developers are interested".

If finding great developers is a standard power law distribution, then the pool of overall developers must be large (and possibly exceedingly so) for the demand of great developers to be met. Those who find themselves in the excess will experience a lack of demand and should probably retrain in some form.

Two points here:

1.

I worked at a recruiting company for exactly 1 year. (I was responsible for gaining net new accounts, not sourcing candidates, I had recruiters who did that for me and my team that I would then be the next line before sending them to the hiring manager). So my conversations with recruiters now are nuanced, to say the least, and I know many (some as friends growing up, etc.).

Regardless of how I try to explain things to them now, even being able to connect on a very good level, basically none of them really understand or care to understand technology that well. I met with a boutique vc-backed recruiting company and their "Front-end UI specialist" with React/Redux jobs was not technically literate at all.

We were having a friendly conversation and he asked me something like,
"So react is really small right, like 20 lines of code or something?"

And I replied, "huh?, what do you mean by that... yea you can write some small components/functions/etc.. but react itself is a serious library"

"Oh a recent candidate told me that React was only like 20 lines of code, I thought it was just really optimized".

So on one hand, the spam approach is truly because they do not understand the technology. Ask the next recruiter you speak with if they know the difference between Java and JavaScript (don't actually do this), and you'll see that the competence is very rarely there at all.

2.

Recruiters are just like almost everything else in the universe. They seek a more efficient/lazy way to do the same or less amount of work and achieve the same or more results.

There are recruiters who are actually technically literate in their fields and overall very competent, and they resemble speak fisherman, compared to the net approach in 1. One of the dude's at the company I worked probably sent out 10 emails a day and made 10-15 phone calls. He was the #1 producer. The #2 producer could get you 10 qualified Java developers who could work on site in 3 days lead time.

You are unlikely to interact with many of these people because the market is relatively large, but they are out there. Consider one placement is 25-45k average commission. Not hard to just do a few of those and take a lot of time off.

3.

Hiring is horrible inefficient and broken.

unless you didnt properly relate how things went, it doesnt sound you flubbed anything. maybe I am thinking of a different interview.

if you really want to work there and feel you did well, I dont think it would hurt to reach out to your professor and ask whats up.

There is a massive shortage of competent developers.

Of course, use whatever connections you have first, go to meetups and other tech events to get referrals, etc. But given that most tech people are pretty bad at networking and recent grads who have never worked, even more so, spam-applying is the next best strategy.

This may be true in some generic sense but if you're a tech company with strong talent and a decent brand that is willing to commit to running a decent recruiting operation, it's not hard to hire great people or at least people who can become great for you. The places that have a hard time hiring competent people usually have one of the following issues:

1) No seed talent - the existing talent isn't strong enough to attract, keep or discern strong talent.

2) Terrible recruiting operation - recruiting isn't run well enough or isn't enough of a focus for the company to attract talent.

3) Not willing to pay - they simply don't pay enough to close the deal or strong people tend to leave because they can make more elsewhere.

Obviously there are other things like company culture, funding success, pedigree and/or networks of founders or early employees, etc but by and large if you get those three things right, you can generally find talented people. Despite all the rhetoric, it's always a buyer's market - there's stupid amounts of talent and at the low end, you have to justify your salary against off-shore dev shops.

This is obvious, but I'm not getting back into this argument again since its mostly stupid semantics.

If your answer is "You just need to pay enough", then sure, there'll never be any shortage. But that's a pretty silly way to look at it, imo.

I feel like we've talked about this before but I don't remember - what is a not silly way to look at it? I would like to hear any argument that doesn't amount to:

1) outrage (or gratitude) at how much software developers make
2) something we tell ourselves (look at all these stupid developers!) to feel more comfortable about our own economic security in a field that is frankly not all that kind to older people.
3) a coping mechansim for companies and hiring managers when the developers they deserve aren't as good as the ones they desire.

It can't be a tautology - what would convince you that we don't have a shortage?

The guy I interviewed with who hasn't called back said something interesting as we were talking at the end of the interview, I don't know if he was talking IT in general or what. He said there was an opinion out there that all the good people had jobs. This is in Portland which appears to have a lot of places looking so I wonder if this because his friends are having problems recruiting or because he is.

The only problem I have with spamming your resume is why waste time with a company you know you don't want to work for? Writing cover letters is easy after the first dozen. Granted I'm not a developer and am not applying for developer jobs but it seems impossible that if you applied for 100 positions you were a fit for that you'd get less response than 100 random jobs.

Candybar, I feel like you sort of danced around my post. So, first, could you tell me what it would take to convince you we had a shortage?

Saying its not a shortage because companies can hire who they need if they just pay more money already feels like a tautology to me.

I guess it only applies if you're in the bay area or somewhere else with tons of tech companies that are run similarly but I don't think you could figure out what is a good fit or not without spending a lot of time. Applying everywhere effectively is a cheap way to figure out the fit. I guess I shouldn't recommend this since it's not a good thing if everyone does it but I don't really see how it's not a dominant strategy, assuming you're a desperate new grad (school or bootcamp) with not a lot of connections or strong set of preferences beyond getting foot in the door.

I may not have been paying as much attention to the "recent grad" part of the equation as I should have been.