On the Mark...The IT Market in Austin, Texas

Apologies to my reading audience for the somewhat pessimistic blog post but I continue to experience these kind of experiences with top 1% Software Engineers and as a result, I want to pass these updates along to everyone else.

We can never forget that small things do add up and as challenging as the labor markets are for software engineers right now, I simply wanted to share a quick story regarding a question that was asked by a candidate and the great result that was realized…

As always, with the continued layoffs going on in the Tech labor markets, I simply wanted to write this post so as to potentially help any senior software engineers that might be looking for a job right now.

I'll be the first to admit to my reading audience that when a software engineer gets very close to a potential offer with a company, yes, it is time to start talking numbers with the executive team and internal recruiters.

As always, I'm simply sharing an approach that a Senior Software Engineer and I agreed to take with a startup firm here in Austin and it worked out well.

As we all very well know, the interviewing process for software engineers is very challenging and you truly do have to be at your best to make it an offer stage.

I completely understand if some of my reading audience gets a bit upset with me regarding this post but this is precisely where my heart is right now.

My apologies for the pessimistic post but I wanted to write about the critical value of our professional networks and how much it means in our careers to have others speak highly of us.

It's not spoken enough about the experience that when software engineers are interviewing at a company, both technically and interpersonally, they are having judgments applied to them.

I recently worked with a really talented 26 year old software engineer who was part of a layoff at his latest employer and working with him in his job search, we realized a really special moment and as you can imagine, I just had to write a blog post about

My post on February 22nd spoke about how software engineering cultures can be significantly compromised when a company undergoes a large layoff.

By no means at all am I critical of the AI movement that our country is realizing right now but I very much wanted to share this story that I experienced a couple of weeks ago.

Quality conversations are everything and something that is not spoken about enough is that you always want the absolute, best experience for the other party, especially in these current times.

This post discusses a dynamic that most all of us are familiar with but given I am continuing to both hear it and see it from top 1% software engineers, I felt i just had to write about it.

I promise that I am not calling this a trend at all but recently, in my engagements with some startup companies both here in Austin and across the US, the CEO's of the firms have been including their Venture Capital Advisors in the interview process.

This is a classic "observational " post that I wanted to share with the Austin IT community.

I'm sure I do not need to remind my reading audience just how challenging the labor markets are for our recent college graduates and yes, this continues to include Computer Science/Computer Engineering graduates.

My entire motivation for these posts are to simply share experiences that IT professionals have in the labor markets that turn out to be very successful for them..

I try my best to not be too concerned with all of the podcasts and news stories discussing how much "in person" networking and communication is struggling these days.

As comprehensive as the software engineering interview process is, I still have to hold on to the core fact that 95% of it comes down to the technical assessment.

I wanted to write this post primarily on the basis of the fact that with Amazon's recent reduction in force, the candidate pools of IT professionals/Software Engineers on active job searches has, once again, grown significantly.

Quite a few people have been writing about how the quality of Socializing and Networking has decreased significantly over the past few years and while I am primarily an Introvert, I can say that when people spend less time around each other, it can impact…

I've written about it many times that when we enter an interviewing process with a company, from a Q&A standpoint, the company will ask a boatload of questions and the software engineers have no other choise but to address all of them in excellent fashion.

I'm continuing to hear from software engineers as well as IT professionals of all disciplines talking to me about companies going quiet on them after 2-3 rounds of interviews.

The reason I hold the Software Engineering profession in such high regard continues to be the large volume of hurdles that they must jump over when interviewing with a company.