I was wrong about the current state of the US tech job market, and I only realized it after I started interviewing. The fact that I'm admitting that I started interviewing already means that you guys know I've resigned at my current place of employment and I've accepted an offer elsewhere.

But I really just want to reflect on the entire process because I have a lot of thoughts, and I want to, you know, use my platform to communicate those thoughts with you guys.

So let's actually start off with some context. I've written these notes down here. It's almost midnight on a Friday.

I'm wearing a tank top, but let's get into it, guys. Around four months ago, I started interviewing.

I started interviewing because I wanted to look for new opportunities, and as I was interviewing, or actually before I was interviewing, I came into it with the thought process of, "The market's great.

I don't know what people online are talking about." As you guys know, I'm a very online person. I have a YouTube channel where I talk about software engineering religiously.

I'm on Reddit looking through forums, um, you know, hearing people complain, and I thought to myself, "They're just lazy." I'm not afraid to admit it.

I'm being vulnerable with you guys. I'm telling you how I really thought it was.

I was, I was, um, what's the word? Boomer-pilled, I guess. So I thought you just have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, hunker down, and everything will be okay.

There's a lot of different problems out there, and that's really what I want to talk about.

So now that you guys understand the context, let's get into my own personal observations.

The first thing that I think is broken with the current US tech job market is that companies are not filtering candidates properly.

CS career students are going to disagree with me on this because in my opinion, LeetCode doesn't measure whether or not you will excel at the position you're applying for.

It measures how well you can test in correlation to how much free time you have. Let me tell you what I mean by that.

Let's say you currently have a job, you're in your mid-20s, 30s, 40s, you're looking to interview elsewhere.

You might be dissatisfied at work, or maybe you just think there might be better opportunities for you, you know, out there. Essentially, you need to study while maintaining your current place of employment.

So you're working 8 to 9 hours a day. By the time you get home, you might have other obligations.

You have a partner, maybe you have kids, maybe you have hobbies, maybe you, you know, you're just playing video games 'cause you're tired.

By the time you're done all that, it's 9:00 p.m. Are you really in the mood to grind through inverting a binary search tree?

Are you really in the mood to figure out how to find an element in a rotated sorted array? Probably not. And that's why I say that CS career students are probably going to be more adamant against this point than I am because they're not in industry.

They have three to maybe five hours a day of classes at most, and then it's essentially a couple of projects and free time.

And LeetCode tests how much free time you have to problem-solve.

That's about it in my opinion. All right, let's talk about very something very similar.

And I think that nowadays, companies expect too much from too many people. What do I mean by that? I've gone through interviews where you have multiple tech rounds that are broken into networking, computer architecture, concurrency, etc., etc., etc., etc. These are important topics, but to expect a candidate to remain sharp on these topics for that long of a time, I just don't think it's very reasonable.

I think that companies are not very comfortable just not knowing a lot about a candidate, so they test every single faculty of his or her reasoning, and that causes candidates to burn out.

Think about it like this: let's say you're a very strong Spartan, and you're a, you know, you're a gladiator in some sort of ring, and you get three lions thrown at you.

You know, three rounds of lions: kill Lion A, kill Lion B, kill Lion C.

You can probably do that if you're very well prepared and you're the top gladiator in all of Rome.

But can the top gladiator of all of Rome go through 30 rounds of lions? No. It doesn't matter how smart he is, eventually he's going to get tired, and eventually he's going to die.

And that's what's happening to candidates in interviews.

They're metaphorically dying because they're being given so many tech rounds, and they need to remain so sharp and brush up on things so quickly that it's virtually impossible to, you know, do so and excel in the way that companies are looking for you to excel.

That brings me to the actual rounds themselves. I've interviewed at a bunch of different companies. The companies that I really like are quick they iterate very quickly.

So, you'll have, you know, five rounds. They might be over the course of two to three weeks at most for those five rounds.

Other companies that, in my opinion, don't do things well, and this is the majority of companies in the US tech job market, which is why it's such a mess.

They will have eight rounds over the course of six weeks. Asking somebody to remain sharp for six weeks is a very difficult ask.

That's asking them to brush up on whatever they need to prepare for behavioral, technical, et cetera, for at least an hour a day for those entire six weeks. And that's a big time commitment that a lot of not a lot of people can make.

And some of the best candidates out there just don't have that, the ability to do so, that time commitment to give to these companies that they're asking for too much, and they're stretching their rounds over over a period of time.

Let's also kind of just get to something a little more basic. Not a lot of people are hiring.

I don't know why people are painting rosy pictures of the state of the US economy. If tech is struggling, there's a lot of other people struggling out there.

And there might be, for example, one opening to hire one person, and there might be 3,000 applicants in three days. So, you you're facing 2,999 other people.

From that perspective, it'll really blackpill you. It'll make you feel like, oh, there's no point of of applying.

I understand that it is depressing. It's depressing because you are now comparing yourself to others instead of focusing on yourself.

And that's going to put you in a state of mind that makes you anxious. And as a candidate, the last thing you want to be is anxious, I think, on the front end in terms of rounds.

Candidates nowadays in the US job market don't get enough clarity.

They don't get enough clarity. What do I mean by that? A company will say you have a technical round. You'll ask, "Hey, what type of technical round?

Pair programming, computer architecture, concurrency, uh, high-level discussion about my experience?" They'll say, "It's a technical round." That's like a professor saying, "You have an assignment, but I'm not going to tell you what you have to do.

Do you want me to fail?" You know, how how am I supposed to do a good job if you're not telling me what I'm being tested on?

Now, a good company will say, "You're doing a a LeetCode question." That's all they really need to provide.

And I've interviewed at companies that are like that, and that's great. But a lot of companies are just very, very set in their ways as to not telling a candidate how they need to prepare, and that only hurts, in my opinion, the company itself.

Because what will happen is a candidate will say, "Well, there's 40 technical topics that can be asked about. I can be asked about 100 different things. I'm just going to study them all and have a surface-level understanding." And that's not the best way to test a candidate's knowledge and their ability to ability to retain info, because then they're tested on concepts that they might have not even studied for, which don't really reflect how well they're able to study and what they know.

Or they're tested on a topic that they've studied maybe 30 minutes for at most. And you're not going to have a good time if that's how much you've studied for a topic that you're asked about in an interview.

Okay, that's the front end of the rounds. Now, the back end. The back end of the round is essentially the feedback part.

So, if you're doing great, great. You have good feedback, you're pushed through. But where companies in the US market really struggle is they just don't give great feedback.

The worst thing they will do to you is ghost you. Now, the fact that people are ghosting candidates in 2024 still amazes me to this day.

A candidate spent potentially hours, if not weeks, preparing for multiple rounds, and you can't even tell them why they weren't pushed forward or like what the issue was.

That to me is shocking. It's not the way you you treat people. So, you'll spend all this time and then you just want to know, okay, you don't want to pass me through, great, but at least tell me what I could have done better.

That will only make the candidate pool better, and it will only increase the likelihood that people will want to apply at that company because if you ghost a candidate, it reflects poorly on your firm's image.

They're going to talk to other people, and other people are just going to say, well, it might not even be worth applying if that's the way that they treat other candidates, right?

So, it's not a really good reflection on the culture or the firm's image.

Not only do I want to hear about your guys' opinions or comments or thoughts about what I just said, but I also want to leave you with this: in 2023, I interviewed at multiple companies, three months of my time, and it didn't work out.

I got very far, but I just ended up landing an offer, and that's okay.

because in 2024 I was able to land more than one offer. 2023 made me stronger for 2024. The worst case, really guys, is if you currently have a job, you'll continue working your current job.

That's really the worst case. If you currently have a job, you'll become more aware as to where you rank in the job market and the certain skills you might need to learn in order to perform better next time.

There's always next year, there's always the next couple of months.

Heck, there's always new industries, right? You might be interviewing for Quant, but you might say, hey, I might try Big Tech, or I might try a Fortune 500 company, or I might try a different field.

I might try going back to school. I realize, hey, I want to actually learn something else, I want to do something different.

So see it as a learning opportunity as opposed to a trial that you failed.

It's a door that closes, but like they say, another door, maybe two doors will open because you'll now start to realize things about yourself that you haven't realized before entering this process.

Some of you might come out with offers, some of you might just learn a ton about where you rank in the job market and, you know, you might say, well, I've actually realized that I really like working where I currently work.

That happens too. I've had friends that that's happened to.

If you guys would like to speak to me one-on-one, maybe you want me to review your resume, Calendly link in the description box below, guys.

If you'd like to watch this video early, I release this video early to my patrons. Patreon link in the description box below, guys.

And if you guys would like to see my life behind the scenes, I post nothing Quant. Don't message me about quant.

I will not respond. People keep messaging me. My Instagram has nothing to do with quant trading. You can follow me, my life behind the scenes on my Instagram, The Coding Jesus.

Link in the description box below, guys. Thanks for watching this video. Cheers.

The US tech job market is worse than I thought.

The US tech job market is worse than I thought.

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