Comment on Choose wisely
sobchak@programming.dev 3 days agoMay depend on location and experience. I used to have so many recruiters contacting me on LinkedIn (1-2 years ago), I hid my account. Now, when I’m actually looking for a job, I get maybe 1 random recruiter contact me per month, and then ghost me even before the first call. I’ve probably applied to over 750 job postings, had maybe 7-8 interviews, and no offers. 14 yoe, mostly in web-dev at small companies and startups with unrecognizable names; my last role was staff-level. The city I live in is probably one of the most impacted by tech layoffs; was one of the cities tons of people and businesses flocked to during covid, now it’s shedding businesses, jobs, and software engineers.
fushuan@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
I don't really get the "city" sentiment since I only search for countrywide remote jobs (Spain), but country by country the experience will differ ofc. I also specialised myself really quick into a data based field which is needed since all the fucking banks want to update their 3 decade or older systems. And by the time all of them finish being updated they will need to be updated again sooooo... :)
sobchak@programming.dev 2 days ago
Being in Spain kind of explains the difference. There’s a big push for offshoring US software engineering jobs right now, and I know Spain is one of the countries where some dev jobs are being offshored to (along with Eastern Europe, LATAM, and India). I’ve interviewed with a few startups, and their dev teams where in India, and they just wanted a US tech-lead/manager.
fushuan@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
well, I wouldn't say that's my case since most of my job postings are of spaniard consultant companies that have projects for banks. Also, data engineering is kinda different from generic software dev, we build data manipulation pipelines, database migrations... etc. Not many end user facing applications or APIs or such, most input/output is databases.
sobchak@programming.dev 1 day ago
Yeah, but it influences the job market; there probably are jobs you or your colleagues can get from US companies, and some may take, which results in a healthy job market.
You are correct that I’m a generalist and that may be hurting me; I have designed and implemented ETL pipelines, but I’m more of a “jack of all trades master of none” kinda guy. On the other hand, being a generalist can be beneficial at a Staff level (on another foot, US companies are all about “efficiency” right now, and purging their more senior, expensive employees).
To be clear, I’m not really upset about offshoring to most of those countries. It kinda sucks for me, but it’s fair game if you can do the job better than me. I can live in most of the US fairly comfortably with Spain salaries. The offshoring to India is what upsets me, because they pay and treat them like shit. One company I interviewed with “assured” me that the Indian teams worked US EST, and that’s just ridiculous to force software engineers to work night shift for such little pay or reason. And I can’t really live comfortably in most places in the US for what they pay Indian engineers (could make similar money as a fast-food worker in the US).