No it's not you. It is the market. I am seeing a couple of phenomena:
1. Every company wants to show off it's "really high bar" ... For building yet another crud service ... handling 1qps (that is still a 100k qpd so don't laugh at it).
2. So they read about what the fangs do and naturally copy all the terrible parts (impact impact impact, more artifacts just for evidence, write realms and realms of repeated documents before writing a line of code so you can show "influence", leetcode and more). Why aren't they copying the good parts - oh we are still a small company and tight on resources.
3. Naturally they couldn't demand this when the market was hot. Now they feel unleashed. So are going nuts either in the form of taking their sweet time ("evaluate and dig deep into our hiring pipeline") or with ridiculous and arbitrary hiring loops. (I had one cto ask me to demo a personal project only to back out after he felt insecure about what I had built - sure could be my opinion).
Another one I had never written a cover letter in my life before and this time I had to write 2000 word essays on why I thought company X was better than Jesus and why and when Id sacrifice my left nut for the honor of being chosen by them.
Sigh I suppose human nature had to come out. But thankfully I did get lucky and met some amazing people who were there when I needed them. My only advice (ok selection bias) is to network like hell. Good roles aren't coming by just applying on LinkedIn (I don't this was ever true but more so now). If you have to send a resume you've already lost is what I am getting reassured of. Hope ymmv.
Some of the difficulty is also because smaller companies are wary about interviewing and hiring people who will leave as soon as the market bounces back. They want a unicorn candidate who is "perfect" technically, will accept significantly less money than their current/previous job, and won't run off to double their TC at a big tech company in 12 months.
When you apply all these filters you're left with... no one.
This is the irony - The unicorn candidate (IMO) is a myth. I can assure you (we) faangers wear our pants one leg at a time and dont just "jump" into it :) Having hired at startups - hiring for passion, curiosity and desire has gone a long way rather than trying to act all big. Now key here is to be honest with yourself and the candidate (TC) that your pay is "mediocre" and X,Y,Z are going to be the mutual benefits. Best case scenario company and TC grow together. Otherwise TC learns a lot and is ready for their next role when ever the market bounces and I am glad to be the guy who helped you launch rather than tried to hold you back with BS. Ive literally said that and I mean it.
1. Every company wants to show off it's "really high bar" ... For building yet another crud service ... handling 1qps (that is still a 100k qpd so don't laugh at it).
2. So they read about what the fangs do and naturally copy all the terrible parts (impact impact impact, more artifacts just for evidence, write realms and realms of repeated documents before writing a line of code so you can show "influence", leetcode and more). Why aren't they copying the good parts - oh we are still a small company and tight on resources.
3. Naturally they couldn't demand this when the market was hot. Now they feel unleashed. So are going nuts either in the form of taking their sweet time ("evaluate and dig deep into our hiring pipeline") or with ridiculous and arbitrary hiring loops. (I had one cto ask me to demo a personal project only to back out after he felt insecure about what I had built - sure could be my opinion).
Another one I had never written a cover letter in my life before and this time I had to write 2000 word essays on why I thought company X was better than Jesus and why and when Id sacrifice my left nut for the honor of being chosen by them.
Sigh I suppose human nature had to come out. But thankfully I did get lucky and met some amazing people who were there when I needed them. My only advice (ok selection bias) is to network like hell. Good roles aren't coming by just applying on LinkedIn (I don't this was ever true but more so now). If you have to send a resume you've already lost is what I am getting reassured of. Hope ymmv.