Reflections on the US Tech Job Market Challenges

The US tech job market is challenging, with companies demanding unrealistic expectations from candidates during interviews.

### Reflections on the US Tech Job Market: Misconceptions and Realities
* 🤔 Initially, I believed the US tech job market was thriving, but my recent interviewing experience revealed a **different reality**, prompting me to share my reflections.
* 📅 Four months ago, I began my job search, convinced that the market was **strong** and dismissing online complaints as the result of **laziness among job seekers**.
* 📊 One major issue I identified is that companies fail to filter candidates effectively, relying heavily on **LeetCode assessments** that do not accurately reflect a candidate's **potential performance on the job**.
* 😩 The interview process often overwhelms candidates with excessive rounds, leading to **burnout** as companies expect them to **remain sharp on numerous technical topics** over extended periods.
* ⏳ I noticed that while some companies conduct interviews quickly, others stretch the process over weeks, making it difficult for candidates to **commit the necessary time to prepare**.
* 📉 Additionally, the hiring landscape is competitive, with many applicants vying for a **single position**, which can create a **discouraging environment** for job seekers.
* 💬 Communication is another area where companies falter; many fail to provide **clear feedback or even respond to candidates after interviews**, which can **damage their reputation and discourage future applications**.
* 🌱 Despite these challenges, I believe that each interview experience is an **opportunity for growth**, and as I move into 2024, I am optimistic about the **lessons learned and the potential for new opportunities**.

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 let's get into it, guys. Around 4 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, uh, 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 deep 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 state of the 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 5 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 because 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 5 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 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. 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. 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, etc., 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 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 lead code 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 service level understanding and that's not the best way to test a

candidate's knowledge and their ability to retain information 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 on 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 spends potentially hours if not weeks preparing for multiple rounds and you can't even tell them why they weren't pressed forward or like what the issue was that to me is shocking it's not the

way you 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 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 guys want to leave

you with this in 2023. I interviewed, I interviewed at multiple companies, three months of my time and it didn't work out, 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, 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 too if you guys would like to speak to me

one-on-one maybe you want me to review your resume click the link in the description box below guys if you 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 my life behind

the scenes I post nothing Quant don't message me about Quant I will not respond people keep messaging me it's my Instagram has nothing to do with Quant trading you can follow me my life behind the scenes and 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.

Coding Jesus

Initial Misconception and Context of Job Search

Speaker initially underestimated the difficulty of the US tech job market.

Speaker resigned from their previous job and accepted a new offer.

The job search process began approximately 4 months prior.

Speaker initially believed online complaints about the job market were due to laziness.

Speaker acknowledges their initial naive perspective.

Problems with the Current US Tech Job Market

Companies are not effectively filtering candidates; LeetCode is criticized as a flawed metric.

LeetCode scores reflect available time for practice rather than actual job skills.

Companies demand excessive knowledge across various technical areas.

Interview processes are often too long and demanding.

Low hiring rates and high competition create a discouraging environment.

Lack of Clarity and Poor Feedback in the Interview Process

Candidates lack sufficient information about interview content.

Inadequate preparation due to lack of clarity from companies.

Companies' lack of transparency hurts their own hiring process.

The prevalence of ghosting candidates is criticized as unprofessional.

Lack of feedback prevents candidates from improving.

Lessons Learned and Advice for Job Seekers

Speaker shares their experience of improved success in 2024 compared to 2023.

Maintaining current employment is the worst-case scenario.

Encourages viewing the process as a learning opportunity.

The experience may lead to self-discovery and career clarity.