The job market has been a bit tough lately, even though you see there are a lot of position posted, but some of them may or may not be real tbh. A lot of layoffs were happening, there are people who just lost their job, there are people who lost their job for 5 months to 10 months, and there are people who just graduated from college. So many different talented people in the pool, and all of them are trying to get attentions from recruiters and hiring managers, it is hard to stand out. When I see there are 200+ people applied for a position, it is a bit scary.
My current job is called “Architect”, and I also noticed there is a big gap from the understandings of what the companies are looking for and what they actually are. The following are my understanding. Anyone can call themselves as an architect, in IT, architects are the glue who can connect a product and the consumers, some of the products can solve certain problems. Now I look some of the positions online, architects not only needs to know how solve a problem, they also need to be developers. Now there are also a bunch of people claim that they are developers, but the results may vary. Some developers don’t even have a github lol, so you never know what you can believe. With AI and all that out there, it is even harder to figure out what’s real or not real out there, we will talk about that in a whole different post. As I also have some fun encouters with AI and what’s out there.
With the job that I have, it is a bit hard someties when people ask you what have you worked on, I have been on 33 various projects in 4 years, and recently, the strategy of the projects and what people do have changed to only 1 or 2 big projects for each person. It has its benefits and down side, the benefit is you are fully devoted to the project and that’s all you need to focus on, so the stress and everything is a lot lower; the downside is, if you don’t have a good team on that project, you are stuck. I cannot choose who I want to work with, when you have someone who just wants to ignore you, the communication can’t even happen. I am an over-communicator, so to some people it might be a lot, since we are all working from home, I think that’s totally necessary. I communicate everything on spot, when I see a red flag, I point it out, just so that I want the project to be successful. When I came out of that project, everything else changed, there are new hires that I didn’t know, the whole project process was changed, you have people who are not listening to you even though you have more experience in one area; people no longer likes to hear you point out the red flags any more. I felt like the world changed. Maybe the company culture changed without me noticing it. That would be the downside of on a long time project.
I went to couple social events, and just see what’s happening, so that I can still keep up with everything. The bar out there is so high, also it may could be the bay area standard, it is high to start with. For a senior level role, they are looking for 10 years of solution architect experience, and with 4-6 years of experience. For some of the positions, even though they are looking for solution architects, but then the recruiters told me they are more looking for a developer. I am not sure where the disconnect is, since when we met face to face, they were excited for my background and what I can do. All I can tell now is, due to the situation I mentioned in the first paragraph of this article, there are a lot of options out there. With the amount of competitions out there, you have to be better to stand out more.