Unraveling of the tech hiring market
I&#x27;ve been facing the opposite problem. I&#x27;ve been in a lengthy job search and despite being in a situation where I really need a job, I&#x27;ve been forced to reject all the offers that have been made -- because the working conditions are just too unhealthy.<p>The article mentions that a side effect of exploding offers is that you don&#x27;t get to see the full landscape of opportunities and trade-offs you&#x27;re facing before you make your decision.<p>On the other hand, after a year of job searching, hundreds of technical phone interviews, dozens of take-home &amp; interactive code tests, and a significant number of job offers that I have turned down, what I can say is that I think I have a pretty good picture of the overall tech job market, and it is exceedingly depressing.<p>For instance, I have a mild case of misophonia, and so being seated in an open-plan office layout is simply not doable for me, physiologically, and listening to headphones obviously doesn&#x27;t make sense if the problem is misophonia.<p>Many companies have been excited about my skills, experience, work ethic, and my ability to communicate.<p>But they have been 100% no-questions-asked outright indignant at the idea of a candidate negotiating the ability to work in a private office.<p>Even if I explain that it is related to misophonia, and the extreme aversion I have to ambient noises, conversations, small movements, and so forth, they don&#x27;t seem to care. In all previous jobs, my teamwork ability and my effort spent collaborating was always praised as one of my best attributes. But in today&#x27;s job market, collaboration == sitting in an open-plan office.<p>Far from worrying about exploding offers, I am worried about the overall industry shift that has happened to make it so that it is effectively impossible to work in a private space as a developer.<p>I feel bad for all of the intrinsically introverted people who are nonetheless excellent collaborators and developers -- the very nature of physical workspaces is harmful to their cognitive health, yet employers outright, under all circumstances, refuse to negotiate about it.<p>I&#x27;ve never been very interested in the idea of a software union. But the egregious lack of privacy in the workspace has made me start to feel like a union would be truly the only possible solution.