If you do get laid off you can reach out to these folks immediately and get recommendations or even just feedback on your resume. The sooner you start doing this the better, don't wait to be called into a private meeting with HR and your boss to start this process. The harsh reality is that for senior positions you're either going to spend a LOT of time smashing submit on hundreds and thousands of applications while hearing _nothing_ back, or you're going to tap your connections and have a job lined up relatively quickly. New grads have it a lot easier in the open market IMHO.
This advice always cracks me up.
Most people don’t have deep networks of people who can hook them up with a senior level engineering position. Like, even the people I know who are quite well connected don’t really have this option.
Sure, everyone has a buddy who’d love to pay them half for twice the work. But we’re talking relatable fields and jobs that are worth it and that’s just not realistic for majority.
Alternatively, if people had social networks with people who have potentials roles for them, who wouldn’t already think in the social media era “oh yeah, i’ll ask the people I know who have an in instead of going to random strangers”
And, yet, all three jobs I've had in the last 25 years (including one in 2001), I landed because I knew someone senior at the company pretty well. Not strictly engineering but tech and tech ecosystem companies. Was that lucky and atypical? Perhaps. But those were my experiences.
The last job I got through "normal" channels was from a campus interview at grad school.
If you started your career 25 years ago, you were present in the field before it massively expanded. Your peers are nothing like my peers (Started 13 years ago), and nothing like the peers of someone who started 3 years ago.
I’ve had around 5 jobs, am much younger, and none of them were due to connections (which I have well over 100 professional people who would vouch for me)
I think you’re either in a very fortunate place in society or you’re old enough in this industry to feel the small world effects
Trust me, for the vast majority your situation isn’t normal.
Maybe the top 10% of new CS grads have it easy, by virtue of having easier access to university -> big tech hiring pipelines for junior engineers.
But there’s no comparison to the ease of being a senior and having job offers flood in to your LinkedIn on a weekly basis. Getting a new job becomes a function of simply contacting the past 5 recruiters and asking for the interview.
Splitting hairs a little here, but I've got > 25 years of experience and have not once, ever, received a job offer through LinkedIn, let alone weekly. I've had recruiters showing varying levels of interest contact me there, but never "Hi, person I've never met, great resume! Here is your job offer letter, we're offering $XXX,XXX compensation..."
Senior people do get contacted by recruiters, but they're fishing, and all of these contacts are extremely early in the pipeline. We have to go through the whole process, just like junior folks. The endless phone screens, the whiteboard hazing, the ghosting, the salary negotiation. Being senior and experienced doesn't let you bypass it. "Networking" doesn't let you bypass it.
I know that's probably what you mean, but the simplifying-meme "job offers flooding your inbox" gets repeated and I think people get the wrong idea about how easy it is.
And we're not talking some fluke small company with no controls. This was a fortune 500. The job had no particularly interesting requirements so I guess somebody just said fill the seat for a few months and I was just grabbed. At the time I was doing a lot of international wandering so it was a nice easy refueling top up stateside.
I disagree with this take entirely.
* Senior engineering positions, at least looking at the layoffs over the past year, trend to be the least impacted by layoffs. Empirically this appears to be the case, and it makes logical sense: they may be more expensive, but if that person/role is capable of doing more with less then its worth that investment versus training up mid-levels/juniors, dealing with inexperience, etc. Of course, ideally companies want both, but the industry has matured well past the point of "just keep the cheapest people"; we know better nowadays versus previous recessions.
In other words; during a layoff, there's less liquidity in the senior engineering talent pool than in other pools.
* In a similar vein; when companies have openings in this recession; they want Senior people. Either in the title, or just a bias when interviewing candidates; seniority matters. I've seen this in my own small-city startup community; startups with three or four junior/mid-level engineers, put up a posting for Senior talent, and it stays up for months (I'm looking at some right now which date back to October). Great companies, great culture, great compensation (not FANG, but); just very low liquidity in that talent pool to meet the demand.
The one caveat; Senior engineers who come from a FANG-salary background may have issues if they enter interviews with that expectation. But there's a lot of numbers between entry-level compensation and FANG-compensation.
* Why do companies hire junior/mid-level talent? Its the most liquid talent pool. Cheaper. Maybe you make the argument that junior talent has more loyalty/staying power because they can grow with the company. Etc. One issue with this recession is: All of these companies still have a LOT of money. This isn't, for most companies (especially FANG), an issue of "we don't have the money to meet payroll so need to cut"; its an issue of spending the past two years blowing cheap money on as many people as they could, realizing that they got a lot of low-tier talent, managing all that growth is HARD, and in some cases there just isn't enough high-impact work to justify some roles. This recession legitimately isn't leading to layoffs which are just about cost-cutting; its as much if not more about reorganization, refocusing managerial resources on high-impact projects, cutting bloat, cutting moonshots, etc. That changes the firing/hiring dynamic; its not necessarily about saving money on hires, its about reindexing on what makes a Good Hire.
That makes being a junior engineer very hard; after all, the best way to convince a hiring manager that you're a great hire is to say "Yeah I've worked on something similar to this problem before, let me tell you about it." Junior engineers don't have that.
> you're going to tap your connections and have a job lined up relatively quickly.
But this is absolutely, undeniably true. Its universally, physically, fundamentally impossible to overstate how much impact connections have in getting jobs during a flat or declining job market.
To the point of the original post, and to junior engineers: Stop worrying so much about actual technical skills. Obviously, be competent. But: Your #1 priority needs to be networking and socialization. Go to tech meetups. Offer to give presentations. Join local young professionals associations. Make friends and get drinks with them.
Say a company averages a $1M ROI per engineer, but a senior is 3-5x more likely to actually produce that ROI within a year. They’re not gonna bat an eye towards paying them 200k vs a junior at 100k
I also have a good friend who is already department head in my countries biggest bank. I keep telling me he can always get me a job when I can‘t fall asleep.
