I. Am. Employed.
March 05, 2020
My job search is finally over, and I’ll be starting at Sift on March 23rd!
This job search was rough for a number of reasons, so I thought maybe I would jot down some things that I noticed during it in the hopes that maybe some of it generalizes and could help someone else in a similar situation.
So multiple people, including me, expected that an experienced engineer in the Seattle area wouldn’t find it difficult to get hired. There is some truth to that, but it’s complicated by observation #1:
Starting a job hunt in November is rough
Parts of this are, in hindsight, fairly obvious. Holiday calendars being what they are, November and December are incredibly difficult to schedule through, so if it would normally take around 3 weeks to get from informational call to offer, that can quickly turn into two months or longer at the end of the year just by the effect of people taking time off. But there’s a second, slightly subtle component too. Many companies align their fiscal year to the calendar year, which makes November/December the end of Q4. If you’re doing consumer-centric stuff, you might have a crunch earlier in the year, but for anybody else, Q4 tends to be an intense period where a bunch of things are all trying to land at once. This in turn adds to the difficulty of scheduling, and all-but-ensures that the folks who are being brought into interview loops are more stressed out than they would be at other times of the year. On top of that, hiring budgets tend to care most about fiscal years over other time slices, so it’s the time of the year when there’s the least number of people to do hiring and the least resources to fund it as well.
That leads into Observation #2
January is even worse
While you start getting people back in the office in January, many of them are going to be immediately consumed by planning or early execution of a Quarterly or FY goals (sure, in theory you start Q1 planning before Q4 is over, but see above about why it’s hard to get anything done in Nov/Dec). And, as mentioned above, this is when hiring budgets for the entire year are often being worked out (and if not the full bottom-line budget, at least guidelines). Finally, anybody who had a bad Q4 is probably revising their hiring dramatically at this point, which means that a bunch of positions that were posted in December suddenly vanish (those jobs weren’t real in December, honestly, but it adds to the sense that nobody’s hiring when the job boards suddenly shrink because a big company didn’t hit Q4 targets)
Now the good news.
February is when everything changes
Now you’re out of the Q4 crunch, you’ve gotten budgets approved, and as anybody who has worked in a position where managing budgets is part of the job will tell you, as soon as you have a budget for something, you try to spend it, because you never know what tomorrow will bring. The first Monday of February, my email, phone and LinkedIn notifications all lit up like I hadn’t seen since starting the process, and it then took just about a month from that point to signing an offer for a position that I’m excited to start. The main reason I think this one generalizes is that it was recruiter contacts (friends and professional contacts) who told me this exact thing would happen, and for this exact reason.
So, hopefully this gives someone light in the darkness if they ever struggle to find a new tech position at the end of the year, and maybe helps someone time a job search for reduced stress.