recapping @wesbos tweet about the job search - solo show

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all righty good morning everybody we get started a little bit early this morning got a lot of talk about today a lot of talk about um good morning please say hey excited to be with you all this morning uh we made it made through the week time is fake i always say it time is fake in the business world caught up in meetings all day i feel like the week is just flying by gotta sneeze um so yeah we're friday already crazy Please say, hey, I'd love to hear from you. Actually, I'm going to drop it into the Torque stream real quick. Hold on real quick.

Good morning, everybody. Good morning. Good morning. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We are dialed in this morning. Yeah. So we're going to dive in today. So, you know, I would I would say I'm a social listener. What does that mean? means i'm on twitter twenty four seven right and i watch what people tweet i watch the comments um i see what people are saying um you know for me it's it's it's really the best way to learn about the state of the market where we're at yada yada um and so uh i saw a tweet by wes boss the other day um and i'm gonna share it here in a second but wes boss tweeted Who has been interviewing the last three months?

What are things looking like? What does the interview process look like now? So I am going to break it down. I'm going to break it down. We're going to talk about today. But for those of you tuned in, welcome. Good morning. Happy Friday. We made it through the week. Please say, hey, let me know where you're tuning in from. We had folks from Africa tuning in last week. That was crazy. It's wild when we get international this morning. Uh, Charles, did you crush the candies? Uh, I don't, I don't quite know what that means. You mean candles? You mean candles? I don't have candy. I don't, I don't have candy.

Try to stay away from candy. Makes my tummy hurt. Uh, I want to get through kind of a few housekeeping things. First and foremost, I want to give a shout out to app, right? Uh, I'm an app, right? Hero. Um, and, uh, love the people, love the product. Um, even though I don't code, but. I can still say I love the product. So go check them out. My guy, Jason Torres, is a fellow Torque, a fellow Aparite ambassador. So tell him the Torque boy sent you. Also, listen, Torque community kind of updates real fast for you all this morning. Our ambassador program is open. Our ambassador program is probably going to be open just for another month.

probably close the beginning of december we'll review the applications we already have fifty applications which to be honest is tremendous um the fact that we have at least fifty people who believe in kind of what we're doing and and want to spread the good word of what we're doing at torque means a lot so uh go sign up um uh did you oh it's a game candy crush no i don't i don't play candy crush uh i got time for games i ain't got time for games i'm in meetings all day So yeah, go check out Torque.community. We also have our mentor mentee program open too.

Right now we have eleven mentors signed up, twenty-two mentees for our second cohort. So excited to get that rolling. So again, if you want to be an ambassador, go sign up. Sign up is still open. I've seen some people go, oh, I missed it. I'm like, So I'm going to talk about this for a second. I'm going to talk about this for a second. There is... I will say this. Between me, Jason, our Torque social media handle, all the content we put out, there is no reason for you to miss out on an opportunity. So I will tell you this. Listen, get in the Discord.

If you want updates on what we're doing with Torque, shoot me a text. Join my texting community, which is this right here. Like... Follow us on X. We tweet about our events. We tweet about announcements. I mean, we use Twitter for like basically our announcement board. So if you're not following Torque.dev on Twitter or X rather, please go do that. On Blue Sky, we're on Blue Sky. You know, we are all over the Discord. So again, like, you know, come on, y'all. Like, you know, we had a Microsoft event yesterday and our boy Aaron was like, I didn't know this was happening. Listen, I posted to LinkedIn.

I've posted to X about it all the time. So please follow me. Please follow Jason. Please follow Torque.dev. Again, we publicize all the stuff we're doing all the freaking time. Yeah, Jason and I don't agree on much. We don't. But I will say this. If you are missing on what we're doing, that is actually a you problem. I will confidently say that. Between all the announcements on Discord, all the social media posts we make, my newsletters, Jason's streams, I mean, we talk about it all the dang time. So there is no excuse. If you tweet me and go, oh, I didn't know you were doing it, I'm like, well, that is on you.

There is literally nothing else I could do unless I showed up to your house and told you to come do something. um all right uh and then like i said if you want to know when i go live with with guests or myself in the topic just shoot me a text i i just text this number out um and uh uh just let them know when i go live uh we got m right here this morning jason maybe a sign you wouldn't be that good of ambassador that's funny all right so let me share my screen because i want to go ahead and uh talk about uh this tweet here right so uh we're gonna pull this up here To be honest with you all, I'm really just going to walk through some of these comments.

Also, my entire Twitter is really messed up. Half of it is Gamecock football and the other half is tech. I think this is a fascinating tweet from Wes. I want to address some things that I'm seeing here. First off, um uh you know again i think this is interesting from pierce right here um pierce is at microsoft more from a hiring manager perspective we redid our interviews for code product team they all start with an app building exercise you can use any ai developer tool you want super interesting you learn a lot about how everyone uses ai tools differently some spend thirty minutes playing then pass uh to ai then finish in five minutes some iterate much more with agent I think this is interesting.

Then we have two interviews focused on getting to the root of the problem and designing a solution. I love this. Like, I love this from Pierce. Pierce Boggan. I love that. I just followed him the other day. You know, I'll look at this with Jamin, right? Jamin at React, at Infinite Red, a React native consulting company. We interviewed forty-seven camps recently, hired three. I would say that number is really close, right? Typically, what I've seen... is typically a ten percent type of attrition, right, or to hire. So if he interviewed forty seven cans, he probably should have hired maybe four of them. The fact that he's three is probably pretty close.

Let's continue to go on here. Recently hired four devs and now hiring two basically vibes. Technical discussions on architecture approach. Lots of questions around their dev workflow. If they say don't they don't use AI, I skip them. i think this is interesting i will say this this is obviously a very controversial take here um but to me i think we are go we we we are so for the last year everybody's kind of been on the same page here um and and kind of been on evil even playing field i do think that you are going to start seeing more managers like this In that, if they don't know how to use AI, they skip it.

Did you text this morning? Oh, I never pressed send. Oh, there we go. That's why. Thanks. Appreciate that, Chris. There you go. I just texted it. um yeah i mean it doesn't come down to open roles you have one role you hire one yeah yeah but what i'm saying is is typically like if to get to that one person you typically have to interview a close to ten people that i've seen uh in my career um so anyways back to this i think this is interesting i think you're gonna see more uh individuals like this um I think this is interesting. I've heard from at least ten devs in the last week what the hell is going on.

One company was bring your own project, show and tell. And then a technical QA, which was systems design-centric. We also dove into specifics of AI assist. Again, kind of interesting. I like that. Interesting. Did you like it? Overall, yes. I happened to have a side project I was already working on. I do like this approach, bring your own project. I think companies should do that more. It really meets the person where they're at. Again, it's a much better approach than having take-home assignments. I totally agree with that. Matt comes in. I'm interviewing people. For now, there's a lot of AI gen with limited knowledge to back-end stuff.

Lots of people cannot be reliable without React and Tailwind. I think this is interesting in our Microsoft meetup yesterday, which is great, by the way. Shout out to the folks who showed up. It was a great conversation. I actually talked to some of my friends who were senior devs there. Because again, I'm always fascinated. I'm like, did you actually learn something? And one of my friends who's a staff engineer at Atlassian actually said he actually learned something. So we love that. But one of the conversations that Matt specifically mentioned right here is... We started talking a lot about this stuff in the workshop yesterday in that I still – and a lot of devs continue to say this.

When it comes to fundamentals, it's key, right? It is absolutely key. And so from a fundamentals perspective, we kind of got talking on how juniors would find a job right now. you know, really when it comes down to it, you still have to know how to do things, right? And I think a lot of people are really, really getting in trouble because they don't know how to do things. Amelia comes in here, but what could someone possibly learn from just vibe coding, not learning about the workflow of AI? No, no, no. And that's kind of what I'm going to, right? I think one of the conversations that we kind of got into yesterday at the Microsoft Talk event was the fact that like, hey, like you can use these vibe coding tools, but nobody knows what's going on.

And that is a very scary, slippery slope. So then we started, again, talking about how people get jobs in today's market. And I think what's still is fundamentals matter. But I think if you have the fundamentals and layer it with AI tools, I think that gap closes really, really fast. Charles comes in. I'm finding that if you use AI, you need to also understand the tools being built even more deeply. Yeah, yeah. A hundred percent. I totally agree with this. I think, again, if you know the fundamentals, And you can use AI. It closes that gap to being able to get things out the door quicker.

But again, and of course, there's my thing right here. Let's kind of go through more. So I think this is interesting. We had four companies that started interviewing in September using Wellfound. So my Monday stream is going to be about what job boards to use. Wellfound, for those of you who are watching or listening in the future. Well-found is formerly Angel's List. I had four companies in the fire. Two of four were boring. We think we're Google leak code. One of four was straight to director of ingenue, followed by a take-home that was sloppily put together and reviewed by a stable of mids. One of four hired me in a Marathon Twins, which is now Xero Flag.

Said company hiring me was a bait and switch. Yeah, I threw my network. So I promptly was out of six weeks. Threw my network from a great past job I was introduced to a company. So I think so if you scroll through this tweet, so if you go to West Boss, there's going to be a lot of referrals through here, right? Friend of mine went through Love You Perfect. It was absolutely what they were looking for. Didn't get it. Interviewing around June, July felt pretty typical. I was genuinely pleasantly surprised by the amount of interest I had. I'm curious to hear this. My experience is skew because I've been doing this for fifteen years, but I think parts that suck will resonate with anybody again.

Aaron's a fifteen year engineer. I only heard back from one tenth of the jobs I applied for, which makes total sense. Right. I think mass applying is not a way to cut through the noise. Once I got past the HR screen calls, a fairly mixed bag, some places know how to interview, some people don't, a hundred degree. I think AI tools on both sides have made it harder to get the job, that initial HR screen as well. And I actually wanna go to another article real quick here. Let's see here. If you guys do not follow the Pragmatic Engineer, um i do want to pull up this article real quick for you all because i think this is fascinating um let me pull up again it's a lot of screen sharing today i feel like i'm in a presentation um all right can you all see this i'm going to zoom in a little bit more All right.

So what's the state? And it's so interesting that Wes Boss tweeted this and then Pragmatic Engineer, Gurgly. I never know how to pronounce his name. I butcher it every time. So this is interesting. So well-founded jobs platform around six million software engineer profiles. Just put in perspective, we have close to three million on Torque. Job platform, falling demand for remote work, more barriers put up by companies. Junior engineer recruitment rebounds, more scales and publicly traded tech companies are doubling down on hiring new grad, which is interesting. I have not seen a lot of that data. But I do want to go down to here, which is kind of an interesting part that I want to bring up because I read this yesterday.

I briefly scanned this. It says hiring trends, candidates face more barriers, right? So screening trends, more barriers for job seekers. Inbound is noisy because there's lots of applications and most are underqualified. So companies place barriers like asking additional questions up front, scheduling async calls, assigning coding assessments, even doing AI interviews in advance. AI tools for ranking and filtering candidates to deal with high volumes of inbound, right? Interview trends, more in-person interviews, trial days or weeks, pre-offer. And so I want to get this fake jobs and fake candidates, which I think is incredibly important here. So fake jobs, not a visible trend, but ghosting is fake.

Posting fake jobs is not widespread, at least on our platform of companies. Fake candidates are ongoing problem. So again, one of the things I want to talk about is I saw a tweet from a recruiter I follow a few weeks ago on X. He said. Eighty percent of his job search or eighty percent of his job right now is verifying if candidates are actually real. I think there is a ton. There's a lot of vendors out there that will literally create fake resumes and submit them to jobs. And if they get the interview, then what they try to do is they slide people in who are similar to that background, who can speak to those skill sets, even though that is not their resume.

It is absolutely a thing. It is a mess right now, right? Biggest issue we're seeing is scam candidates. I will say this to plug Torque, just because I believe what we're doing is that when you work with Torque and our platform, you have to verify who you are. right so you literally when you sign on to your profile you have to do two factor off and like you have to verify who you are right um and so again like what this is one of the things and and the reason why i want to highlight this stuff to you all right now is because um is because that is why you're not getting callbacks like you have to understand something the amount of volume The amount of volume that is coming into job postings is ridiculous, right?

Going back to Wes Boss's tweet, I'll pull up here in a second. A lot of those are referred, like a lot of them go, I found a job because of referral. I found a job because of referral. I found a job because of referral. Right now, your referral network is going to be the single most thing to cut through the noise, right? Let's continue to go through this hiring trends. Hiring on site is dominant, right? But companies hiring remotely have the upper hand. right practically every startup well-found works with wants cans to work on site but many camps want the opportunity to work remotely um there are ai budgets for recruitment that's that doesn't apply for this conversation uh this is interesting auto appliers are growing I think this is fascinating.

Auto-appliers are growing. More candidates use auto-apply software to apply for hundreds or thousands of jobs. It's a vicious cycle with more inbound applications, fewer applicants. If you wonder why when you submit your resume, nothing comes back to you, this is why. Because there are tools out there that allow you to mass apply to jobs to gum up the process. I mean, now, now I will go, sorry, I'm back on the screen now. There, there has been some, some chatter since, since I clicked up. I can't see both screens. It's good to see everybody this morning. Sebastian, it's good to see you. Christopher, it's good to see you.

Charles, of course, it's good to see you. Ramsey, it's good to see you. Let's see here. I'm kind of going through. Cold applying is an exercise. Yeah, I mean, listen. But I will say this. Lawrence is here. If you go back and listen to my podcast, it's a two-part podcast with Lawrence Lockhart. There's the guy right there. we talk about this lawrence was very specific well so i i think there's a difference between mass applying and cold applying and lawrence and i talked about that is that mass applying you're just slinging your resume you're using these auto appliers it's just a mess lawrence was being intentional but still cold applying meaning that he still was submitting his resume to a job that he may not have any contacts at, but he was being intentional in, in editing and creating his resume.

Right. So, um, let's see here. Uh, I'm going through your vibe coach, people who knowledge, which is so sovereignty, AI assistant. I like that for those who are still exploring. I'm sorry. I'm, I'm trying to, I'm, I got a lot of words I'm trying to get through right now. Um, that's a Michael. I love you. It's funny. Uh, the boys were throwing the down. Oh yeah. Oh yeah, dude. Oh yeah. Always. Um, let's see. I'm kind of going through it. We do have human matching. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a little bit of a barrier. The two-factor auth is a little bit of a barrier, but yes, the human matching is the most important part to our platform, which I totally, totally agree with.

Let's see here. yo the tactics that these auto are using yeah it's it's just not good um let's see here maybe instead of just reading someone else's social posts we could get into the system that's auto applying because i bet a lot of people don't know about it and what it entails yeah i mean listen uh i think for me i i don't know but i will tell you that there there is there is prof there is software that is just mass applying for people right i would highly recommend not doing that um You know, again, we saw this right here, highest demand for software engineers with three to fifteen years of experience.

Obviously, that's a very broad range. Location has become suddenly important. Again, we talked about this a little bit yesterday in our workshop. is that there there is an emphasis to hire people in cities right so again jason i talked about this in our stream is that hey if you are um uh if you are in a city like a big city i would put your address on your resume if you are especially willing um to uh look into it all right so i think this is interesting right here think this is interesting so i've been talking about this for a lot the front end engineering side i've been saying this and i'm glad this verifies with this front-end engineering is down right i in my opinion the i truly think um because of just how hot the market was for react and front-end engineering a few years back most code schools still got stuck in in doing front-end development work with Angular and React, it is now you're starting to see a negative shift towards not hiring front-end engineers, right?

Also interesting thing, mobile engineers right here are going down. Even though we do a fair amount of mobile engineer hiring at Torque for a lot of clients, um but i think these stats are are exactly right again it really leans more towards the back end side of things right devops data backend engineering data engineering machine learning engineering again i have i have been i've been um blowing this horn toting this horn tooting the horn tooting the horn i've been tooting the horn now uh for a while in that hey back end where it's at, right? If you are comfortable and interested, I would definitely go onto the back end side of things.

All right. I do know we're supposed to be going to West bosses. So let, let me go back to West bosses tweet here. And we can kind of continue to read through some of these responses. Y'all continue to comment. And I will get to comments here shortly. So again, right. I was able to transition from my software to my social article, but honestly, it's been a game. It's been a game of who, you know, Let me read this again. I was able to transition from my software development role into my solutions architect role. But to be honest, the job market is crazy. It's been a game of who you know.

Some people I know have been successful, but I have former colleagues still out of the job for twelve months. I hope we see a shift back to employer market. I only hearing people of getting hired through referrals. One to two talks with hiring managers and the team for all it takes is these. Yes, I agree. Let's see here. a lot of big company stuff it's been a grind seven interviews a hundred percent um From my angle, interviews are harder when you apply everywhere. They're much easier when you connect with the right person first. Let me read that again for the folks listening now or in the future.

This individual goes, his name is Bratislav, says, from my angle, interviews are harder when you apply everywhere. They're much easier when you connect with the right people. When you build a micro developer brand in a niche, something interesting happens. Some interview rounds disappear. You go straight to the VP of engineering because they already know who you are and what you are building. And if you go back to my tweet from I think two days ago, I specifically say niche right now is better. Niche right now is better, right? If you are a... java engineer focusing on a certain industry and a certain subsection with the industry that is what you need to be talking about online if you go back to my interview with jerome hardaway from guidance counselor that's live in every app store right now he specifically talks about how he um how he used LinkedIn to boost his brand to start conversations, right?

Incredibly, incredibly important. Let's continue to read through these. Not a lot, but referrals have and likely will increasingly get more popular and important. Again, folks, these are not my words. These are what other people are saying, but things I have been saying for a long time. Let's see here. I'm a job search coach. So if you are able to articulate your story, things are looking bright. Going back to what Jason and I do in the Discord. Fact of the matter is, is most of us in the resume, we bury the headlines. And when we get into interviews, we cannot clearly articulate how we move the needle.

Again, these are other people's words, not just mine. Another thing, hire more based on attitude, not skills. I've worked with extremely skilled people who are very difficult to work with. Again, another thing we have talked about. Let's see here. Don't know which is it. Yes, employers market multiple calls, a lot of behavioral assessments. I think this is interesting right here. The ant used Grok. He goes, Grok, can you analyze the comments of this thread and see what percentage of interviews now consider AI? Grok says, I don't think you can... I'm messing up a lot of sayings this morning, y'all. I don't think you can sit on your hands in today's market and not learn AI and be successful in the job search.

There is... There is a movement that is happening. I have been talking about it. It was my keynote at All Things Open. You have to learn how to integrate Gen AI tools like a cursor, like yesterday VS Code, like a cloud, whatever, to build solutions. It is a thing that... You know, if Wes posted this post again in a year, I'd be fascinated. Is that thirty one percent now at sixty percent? Right. I think we're going to continue to see that. All right. Let's continue to move on. I've been a candidate for like one and a half months. The truth is that's Europe. That doesn't necessarily apply.

Right. see here mixed bag i've done assessment of the hacker rank the mixed bag uh between take home traditional screens ai no ai um some companies are absolutely against using ai coding some companies are great and especially prefer ai coding um let's see here to the duh Let's see here. I'm kind of reading through these, seeing more and more trials being baked into the process. Yeah, I really think, you know, I think we're going to start seeing more of this stuff, right? Like to me, I've always said from the longest time that I don't think you can not adequately judge anybody, anybody during three hours of interviews.

You just can't. You just can't. So I think think you're going to start seeing more of these trials pop up i i i honestly think so i honestly think so um all right i'm going to get to comments here in a second we're kind of coming up on time already um decent senior devs are hard to find last round i had eight hundred fifty applicants interviewed fifteen and serious and seriously considered three first interview is a career review all right so that's again there's a lot of volume here right a lot of volume um again i'm interviewing people and the big thing i've seen is how unreliable take-home assessments are in ai we've moved to a pair programming interview because of this i think that's interesting as well i'm mostly looking for culture fit another kind of soft skills thing right so like to me i'm gonna stop sharing my screen because we're almost at time and i want to get through the comments here like to me i i think reading and you can go read this post it's a recent post by west boss so you can find it again at west boss I actually DMed Wes if he wanted to come on and talk to me about it, but he said he was busy today, this morning.

But to me, I think if you read this thread, there's a few things that stick out. One, AI is here. It's here. It's being used in some interviews. You cannot ignore it. You cannot stick your head in the sand and think it's going to pass. The second thing is referrals. Referrals are key, right? Absolutely, incredibly important. The next thing I take out of this is that the amount of applicants out there is staggering, and there's no way for you to get a really good eyeball test. Referrals are going to be the way to go. Incredibly, incredibly important. I think trying to get back to in-person stuff, I mean, literally yesterday and literally yesterday in the meetup we were at and, and the, and the Microsoft event we held, there was, there was staff engineers from Atlassian.

There were staff engineers from, um, uh, Microsoft. There were staffing, uh, there was other staff engineers, hiring managers, like, and they showed up to this event, right? Again, trying to get out to events. If you're in Atlanta, uh, We're throwing a private tour community event in Atlanta Tuesday night. There are going to be some high caliber people there. I see the guest list. They're going to be again like and if you want those details, just join our discord. It's under announcements. Right. So again, like getting out and shaking hands is going to be the thing that cuts through the noise right now. All right. Let's see here.

Yeah. going through the through the comments here any statistics about quantum community computing i have no idea that is that is not in my realm of expertise um let's see here going through the comments here live in the app store oh boy yeah yeah words are hard this morning words are hard this morning um i heard that there's a cool down period exists after applying for company uh i've never heard that But I'm just one person. I'm just one person. Let's see here. Going through the comments here. All right. Off to me. And Lawrence, thanks for tuning in. I'm in Houston. There's nothing here. Just oil and gas.

Yeah, yeah. Again, like I said, I think what I'm seeing for in-person, it's San Francisco. It's New York. It's Seattle. I think if you live in a big city and you are willing to go on site, you will be able to stand out. I still think more companies are remote. I still think the split is like sixty percent remote, forty percent in person. But obviously that has shifted. But yeah, I mean, going to Anthony's comment here, I need to head to Dallas or Austin. If I will say this. if you, if you have the ability to do that, I would do that. Like, like if you are single or married with no kids and you're not like deeply, deeply rude, like you have no family in town, highly recommend you getting to a big city.

Um, I think we're only going to continue, um, seeing that trend. Yeah. And I, yeah, I I've heard cool downs more about interviewing. And then also like when you contract at a company for like We're at time. I just wanted to go over this. I think it's a lot of interesting data. I mean, I could still go over this pragmatic engineer one. I think it's really interesting. I'm kind of going through here. It is interesting. This pragmatic engineer email newsletter does start talking more about hiring junior devs, which is still good, but obviously it's still tough. I think employers are picky. I just think And again, Jason and I and the Torque team are going to continue to beat this drum.

I think your resume has got to be rock solid. Your LinkedIn has got to be rock solid. You've got to get out and meet people. You've got to do the things. You've got to do the basic fundamental blocking and tackling. Jobs aren't going to come to you anymore, but people are still getting jobs. My LinkedIn right now, my feed, so many people are getting jobs. But you have to get out there. You have to push stuff out there. All right, so I felt like today was good. A little bit of rambling on my part. I got a lot of sayings wrong, but hopefully you enjoyed it.

Hopefully you got some information out of it. Monday, I'm going to go live before the team heads down to Atlanta for all hands. Monday, I'm going live. So again, I've talked about resumes. I've talked about how to build your LinkedIn. Both of those are on the Torque YouTube page. So go follow that Torque. It's Torque.dev on YouTube. Both of those are on the YouTube page. How to build a resume, how to build a LinkedIn. Then today obviously was kind of like a grab bag day. Want to go over some things I'm seeing. Monday, we're going to talk about specifically job boards, the importance of job boards, job boards you should look into.

Probably going to do some workshops on like probably using ChatGPT just to look up job boards. And we're going to talk about the power of using platforms like a Torque, like a Dice, like an Indeed, like a WellFound to really work for you. So again, hopefully you enjoyed today's episode. If you like it, Please repost it. We'd love to help somebody else in your network. Otherwise, y'all have a great weekend, and we will see y'all on Monday, nine thirty a.m. Central. Peace.