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The IT software engineer job market seems warmed up a little bit recently, from my observations. I am getting some emails from the recruiters, and they looked like real jobs or openings.
I think during the middle of last year (June 2024) I came across the software engineers job chart from (FRED) Software Development Job Postings on Indeed in the United States, and the chart could be a bit misleading because the start date is Feb 2020. Basically, we can say it just showed the dramatic increase of software engineer jobs and subsequent declining of job openings due to the pandemic over-hiring earlier, big tech big cuts following Elon’s huge cut at Twitter post his acquisition.
I believe this hiring boom and bust trend is similar for the related area such as quality assurance (testing engineers), localization and translation, platform and dev ops engineering, product development and project management and so on.
Indeed and LinkedIn
In recent years, I mainly use Indeed and LinkedIn for job search: for my last 2 jobs (Mastercard and Ascension) I found them mainly through Indeed.com. I remember the days (year 2010) when I found my job at local craigslist, those days are long gone. I found my current job in year 2021 through a recruiter btw – I know the recruiter (recruiting company) through previous engagement (year 2011), and we kept that relationship over the years 🙂
A note on LinkedIn, LinkedIn has DESTROYED the job market (in 2024). I tend to agree – because LinkedIn aggregates a lot of jobs nowadays, and for one job especially the remote job, it’s quite easy for the recruiter to received hundreds of resumes in a day or two. For example, this staff software engineer job at GE Healthcare, I saw “(posted) 23 hours ago · 62 people clicked apply” right now (03-25-2025, 2:17 pm central). So this is a real problem. And I don’t know how to get around it – unless you know the recruiter or hiring manager.
Typical process (St. Louis based dev jobs)
Phone screen, technical screen and manager interview. Offer or being ghosted, or if they are nice, they will send you the rejection email. Note in STL we don’t do the leetcode stuff which is common among Silicon Valley, Seatle or Austin based tech companies. They needed those quizzes to filter out candidates – in a way it’s like the Gaokao in China.
Interview
There are usually two types of questions: behavior and technical. For behavior sometimes you can go to glassdoor.com and see if there are any. I guess we can do similar for technical questions too – but at the same time I think it’s probably more unpredictable.
Whatever the question you receive, try to be calm. Over the years I have interviewed at places, in rare cases the interviewer will have some sort of undesirable attitude – for example, I recall once at Tomson Reuters in year 2009, the guy commented towards the end – you are not the most ignorant person coming in in terms of technical knowledge 🙁
Occasionally you will meet some super nice people too: people with decency and true empathy. Once in New Jersey, I was interviewing at Ingersoll-Rand office all day, one interviewer said, let’s make it informal, so he took me walk around the cafeteria. It was winter, and we didn’t go outside.
Don’t be defensive, as much as practical obviously. Once my big boss at current place, asked me: it seems your tenure is not too long in this and the place, note the implied question here – are you a job hopper (I talked about this topic here too). More on job hopping for practical purposes, there are data to back up that for many people, salary or compensation increase is from “job hopping” (Forbes). A few of my job changes (not hopping 🙂 confirmed this trend too.
Some other tips
Background check
Don’t lie on your resume. At the same time, don’t stress over the background check. Sometimes at some old-fashioned companies or out of date places they will ask a question such as “have you ever involuntarily lose your job”: I would say No regardless the situation. Or ignore those places if they are truly “out of date“. Because you may feel out of places when you join them.
Usually, background check is a part of the pre-employment process, and you would need to give two weeks’ notice at the current place. That’s also sometimes people have stress – what if anything goes wrong with background check?
My experience with this is: as long as you don’t break laws, etc., you should be fine. It seems to me the background checking companies are mostly providing a service anyway, and in the process making some money. I have done quite a few background checking in last 5 years or so. In fact I did three (or 4) background checking in this school year: depends on how you count it.
First: the volunteer background check for the school district I volunteer. They have two background checks: one requires fingerprint (and I assume some sort of FBI database lookup) Missouri Automated Criminal History System (MACHS); another one is for Missouri educator sort of check called FCSR, stands for Family Care Safety Registry, this can be done online exclusively.
For Uber: it’s done fairly quickly. Cannot find the background checking company from my email now.
For Lyft: it seems they used checkr.
For my current job, I did background check via clariti (now a part of DISA Screen). Btw, I noticed they had a security incident recently 🙁
Drug testing
This is required sometimes. Nowadays they usually only require urine sample. And you can go to a specimen collection place such as Quest Labs, or other special places such as occupational health clinics, etc. In the old days when I got my 1st job, I recall they will cut some of my hair for testing – those are more rigorous testing in my opinion. Anyway, don’t do illicit drugs, marijuana and/or cannabis included. I recall when I was working for coal mining companies: they even said the company can ask for urine sample anytime.
Reference check
It seems this is rarely done nowadays.
Microsoft Teams – multiple Microsoft office 365 accounts
I learned my lesson the hard way during real interview. I clicked on the Microsoft Teams link on the Chrome browser that I usually use. But I forgot that I recently used that browser for outlook (another email account, different email from the link I was clicking). And the Chrome browser gave me an error right away. So I copied the link, and open a new incognito window and pasted my link there, it prompt me with some new information. I was not sure what to do. So I opened Safari as I believe I haven’t used that browser for a while, and got information similar to the new Chrome incognito window (at least they are consistent), and I just clicked the link there and it worked.
Reference
(MarketWatch, Paywall) LinkedIn co-founder has known Elon Musk for years. Here’s what he says Americans don’t understand about the Tesla CEO.
(Yours Truly) FAQs on work: tenure, job hopping, purpose of work, and overtime
