You're Not Interviewing for the Job. You're Auditioning for the Job Title

I was 14 years in a job at senior level and got laid off.

And yeah, it's pretty much as bad as you describe.

Yep. I didn't even "pass" some of the coding challenges despite hiring, firing, and writing coding challenges myself!

What I often saw was many of those jobs were sitting on the market for months and months just getting relisted every few weeks. The ones that actually led to interviews, I had one dipshit proudly tell me about his 2-hour commute five days a week. Another told me they wanted to vomit-out mini-MVPs and were replacing the new guy who wasn't doing it fast enough. Just an ocean of fake jobs and awful jobs lol.

I had a coding challenge where if you didn’t implement what was essentially a Set in the exact way that they expected, you couldn’t proceed since the evaluation assumed you’d match their ordering (which was arbitrary). One of those automated test things and there was no way to contact a human and say, your process is broken. I’m eagerly counting down the days until I can retire. Between broken hiring processes and the rise of LLM coding, I’m left wondering if this is how I want to spend my precious time.

Greatly enjoying working on my own software for now!

The cynical mind would assume that would be an excellent way for a corporation to rig the hiring process by preventing American qualified applicants from progressing and therefore making a claim that foreign labor must definitely be imported at a fraction of the salary and under visa-indenturement who … wouldn’t you know … magically happen to know the answers and pass the very arbitrary coding challenge somehow.

The only way this gets solved is by making any and all H-1B hires require the hiring corporation pay a 200% tax in addition to all other employment related taxes for the absolutely necessary and critical H-1B talent.

Any tips for doing that and making money?

Or just establish the H-1B salary by some third party through evaluating what similar positions pay in the most expensive areas of the US and making each sponsoring company pay whatever it costs to get that data.

> Just an ocean of fake jobs and awful jobs lol.

Oof. Is that true of the "who's hiring" posts here on HN?

There's many awful things, but HN who's hiring isn't one of them IMO. Because HN has maintained an image of being for "smart in the know" people and discussions despite being huge, connections fostered here tend to start off with a stronger weight than completely cold interactions, there's some minor level of inherent trust there.

I can't remember the last time someone didn't reply to me from here, but then again I choose my applications very carefully. You also get to meet a truly diverse set of people and opportunities rather than "more of the same".

I'm betting on Steam's "early access" personally.