Over the past few months, Ellis has been sharing the challenges of the modern job hunt. As I'm one week into my new gig, after a weird and protracted search, I thought I'd add my two cents, because kids: it's nasty out there, for sure.
So, for starters, I wrapped up my time working on space robots, and have shifted over to farm robots. That's right, I'm a farmer now. While it may be less glamorous, the business prospects, and thus the prospects of continued employment, are better. That said, I'm working with a startup so I wouldn't say it's all that safe. Still, good change for now, and maybe I'll talk a bit more about what that's like at some point. But that's not where I want to focus today.
While my job search was shorter than many folks- about two and a half months- it was still a difficult trek. The biggest thing to my advantage is that embedded software engineers are in low supply relative to their demand. Also, the training data for embedded software remains a very small proportion of AI training sets, so LLMs remain pretty bad at it. It's a good subfield to be in, right now.
And yet, the market still sucks.
Now, I'm an old person, which means I distribute resumes more as a k-selector than an r-selector. I wasn't sending out hundreds of resumes, but I did send out dozens, which honestly is much more than I usually do by an order of magnitude. Of the dozens I sent out, I scored four interviews, one of which was a cold call from a recruiter, which we'll talk about.
Getting Railed
One interview was with a company in the railway industry. I spoke with their internal recruiter, and we discussed what kind of work I was doing, and what I'd like to be doing. It went well, and led to a call with the team. And that's where I found out they were hiring for a management position, not an engineering position. I was wildly unprepared for that conversation, and both sides of the conversation felt weird and awkward about it. Our expectations were misaligned, and by the end of it, neither I nor they wanted to continue the conversation. The commute would have been terrible, so no real loss from my perspective, but boy, am I annoyed with that recruiter.
Nuke It
A second conversation, which I'm not counting as an interview, since I only spoke with the recruiter, was with a local contracting company. They handle a lot of government contracts (up to and including work on nuclear weapons), and were looking to staff up. The conversation with the recruiter went well, she had a number of positions (not involving nuclear weapons) that she wanted to recommend me for. She warned me that, as it was the end of the year, things might not move until early this year. I was fine with that. Things did move, though, right in the middle of the holidays I got an email saying the organization wasn't going to move forward with my candidacy. No further insight was provided, but given how enthused the recruiter was, I was mildly surprised. But I have a suspicion about what happened, based on two other positions.
Fancy Robots
One position was for another local robotics company. They had a brand spanking new office, had just matured their main product into something really polished and sell-able, had an on-site cafeteria and were eager to hire. Their interview process was a bit involved with a number of phone screens in addition to the whole day on-site, but everyone was great to work with. They had big scaling plans, and there were going to be plenty of positions behind me to bring on.
"We're going to get you your offer letter Monday or Tuesday of next week," their internal recruiter told me. "It's just our leadership team is at a summit, and we need them back before we send out offers."
That was a weird thing to hear. It seems to me that you should be able to hire an engineer without clearing it with leadership, but what do I know? Monday came and went. Tuesday came. The recruiter called me back: "So, we're not hiring anyone for any position at this time." She was extremely apologetic, related how much the team was disappointed that they couldn't bring me on, and that if positions re-opened I was at the top of the list for hiring. I found out later that the company did a round of layoffs, and the recruiter (who was great through the whole process) was a victim of them.
Left Cold
A different position came from a cold call from a third-party recruiter. Now, I don't normally give third-party recruiters the time of day. I think, as an industry, they are parasites and scum, and generally more interested in their commission than making either employees or employers happy. But this position was doing embedded work for high-end audio-visual equipment for broadcasters, and was a massive raise. Oh, and it was 100% remote.
I verified that this company was real, actually shipped products, and had a decent reputation in the industry. So with that, I decided to hear the recruiter out.
"They're really eager to hire," he said. "So the plan is this: we're going to set up one single panel interview for an hour. Everyone who needs to be involved in the decision will be there. After that, they'll review, and give you a thumbs up thumbs down ASAP."
That was a terrifyingly short interview, for both sides, but I've gotten some great jobs that way, so I was down for it. It went great, everyone was happy. Everyone on the call wanted to move forward with hiring. There was just one problem: not everyone who was supposed to be making the decision was there. A member of their leadership team missed the interview. And they couldn't move forward without this gentleman's thumbs up.
This lead to weeks of back and forth with the recruiter. They went from "eager to hire" to the recruiter saying "I don't know, I can't get anyone on the phone."
Once again, the end of the story is that they opted to not hire for any roles, and yes, a round of layoffs ensued.
On Read
While we're talking about recruiter cold calls, I got a cold text from a recruiter. I didn't particularly like that on its own, but hey, it's the modern era, everyone communicates via text. Worse, it was a significant down-level and salary decrease. So I replied back that I wasn't interested.
I understand, and your experience certainly warrants consideration for a higher salary
That was the reply, along with a glaze about my skills and the opportunity for growth. It was obsequious, sycophantic, and unfocused. I exchanged a few more messages and the conversation started to get repetitive. And you know where this is going.
That's impressive and very relevant! Working on critical systems for guidance and navigation pairs excellently with this role. Here at Smith & Nephew, you'll need similar rigor developing algorithms for surgical robotics, where precision is key for patient outcomes. Your experience handling highly reliable systems and your background ensures you have what it takes for such critical work. Any platforms or microcontrollers you're particularly excited about using?
Normally for job-search stuff, I'd conceal the source or be vague. I haven't named any of the companies that strung me along because they were at least trying to hire me. But Smith & Nephew deserves to be named and shamed. Look at that: that is 100% chatbot. The recruiter can't even be bothered to do their job, they have to outsource it to a chatbot. And if you're not convinced, I replied: "This conversation can continue when it's not with a chatbot."
I understand your preference for more personal interaction. Thank you for chatting with me! I'll make sure someone from the senior recruiting team gets in touch with you to continue the conversation on your terms.
I have not heard from someone in the senior recruiting team, which is a shame, because I have many rude things I'd like to say to them. It's one thing to get a form-letter email, but a cold-text from a bot that just nags you for replies and tries to keep the conversation going is an entirely new level of "I don't care about the candidate experience at all".
On the Funny Farm
The process with the farming robots company was about as you'd expect. A few phone interviews, a most-of-the-day on-site. Two separate technical screens looking for different things. A fun exercise was "pretend this is a pull request I submitted to you, do a code review with me."
After the on-site, the director of operations (who was acting as the recruiter) let me know: an offer is coming, but there's some paperwork they had to do on their side, so it'd be a few days. And boy howdy, after the job search I'd had up to that point, I expected "needing to do paperwork" to drag out for weeks and then hear they weren't hiring. But that's not what happened, and I've changed jobs.
While it's only been a week, it's so far, so good. There's certainly a lot of work to do here, and they've got plans to expand their embedded footprint that will make me pretty pivotal to their future hardware revisions, and so it's all exciting.
For those still hunting, and especially those between jobs: good luck. You're not alone, and you're not crazy for thinking things are bad out there right now. They're awful. But you're great.
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