I had a friend with plenty of experience in HR get laid off.
He looked for a job for 13 months. One of the top 3 smartest people I’ve ever known looked for seven months and had to take a big step back in his career, despite having Amazon and Home Depot on his resume.
Both of them said that even getting an interview was almost impossibly hard.
These are people in different parts of the county, and in different industries.
I think we have a serious problem on our hands with employment that’s probably not getting better any time soon.
Don't want to discredit or invalidate your/your friend's experience, but I do want to offer some hope during these times where a lot of what you see on the web is doomer posts.
From Google:
The Jevons paradox occurs when technological improvements increase the efficiency of a resource, but the resulting drop in cost causes demand to rise so much that total consumption of that resource increases rather than decreases.
The message being, it may seem now that because the friction for creating software is so minimal now that there will be no need for software engineers in the future. But historically when friction has been reduced, we have seen an increase in demand that outweighs the efficiency gain, increasing total consumption. I believe that software won't be an exception to this millennia-old pattern.
While what "software engineering" may look like might change, I still believe strongly that people who understand software will actually be in higher demand than ever in the future.
To paraphrase Keynes, in the future we are all dead. His friend is suffering now, not in some theoretical far off future where the magic market had been blessed by the invisible hand.
HR, particularly recruitment, was one of the biggest hit departments when the blood-letting started at Meta in 2022. The hiring freeze that followed didn't help.
My current job search has been the longest and most difficult of my career (5 months so far). Caveats:
- I’m only applying with climate tech companies
- I’m trying to transition back to engineering after a detour into product
- I’m trying to pivot into more hardware-focused roles
Most companies I apply to don’t respond at all, and I’ve had about 6 phone screens, two technical interviews, and one “we’d love to hire you once we get the funding for this position sometime in June”.
So from my perspective, the job market is awful, but YMMV.
P.S. if you’re working on any clean energy related software, I’d be a great addition to your team — https://matthewgerring.com
Having just been on the job market, my experience was that career pivots are much harder now. I initially intended to transition to a neighboring field after an education break - but none of the companies in that field would speak to me. At most I had a recruiter call with one who decided to reject. To complete this transition I had been planning on a massive pay cut.
When I focused on areas I had some more credible experience in, I got significantly better engagement and eventually found a very narrow niche where I had substantial success.
I think we're partially adjusting to a world where employers expect a very narrow experience match to their role. Employers are also paying a premium within that narrow match.
How was your detour into product? What kind of skills/instincts you developed being in product? I always imagined it being kind of freeing -- leaving behind engineering implementation details and thinking more in terms of the final results.
A lot more of my time was spent fighting to keep the resources I needed to execute my roadmap than I liked. I spent waaaaay too much time explaining why my product area, which covered business critical data and internal processes, was worth funding to an audience that didn’t understand what I did, and by extension, did not really understand their own business.
When it’s ideation from customer interviews with a designer and an engineering manager, it’s fantastic. I like solving problems and I don’t really care about the specific technical approach, so that’s where I want to be. However I will happily write the code (or review it, or just wrote specs or whatever it is we do now since December 2025) if there’s no one else around to do it.
Be sure to talk with and apply at https://charmindustrial.com/ I dont have an in / network I can share with you, but Peter was a great person to work for :)
can you talk about the art installation section of your resume? it sounds really cool. how did you get into this niche and found projects? and is this kind of work not suitable as full-time freelance work?
Started with attending Burning Man starting about 12 years ago. Got jealous of my friends who were doing “real” engineering on these kinds of projects, and started volunteering, applying for and winning art grants, meeting other artists, and climbing the skill ladder.
If you attended Burning Man in 2019, Climate Week in SF in 2023, or Verge in San Jose in 2024, you may have seen my project Awful’s Gas & Snack. I also worked on the Love Blocks and the Jacks at the Conservatory of Flowers in SF (among many other projects).
I now run a small art fabrication business that just barely makes my studio rent most of the time, and is currently supplementing unemployment to pay my bills. It’s really, really hard to turn this kind of work into a livelihood, but it’s happening by necessity because I have no other work right now.
It’s also given me legitimate hardware experience — I’ve written code from scratch in Arduino and written modifications and extensions to WLED, and built custom controllers, remote sensor devices, and power systems (solar and batteries, relevant to the clean energy field). But I don’t quite know how to present this work as “legitimate”, even the stuff I’ve done as a full-fledged professional (like the work I did at Urban Putt San Jose, which you should definitely go see, it’s fun!)
I suspect the third criteria might be the hardest.
In my experience HW companies are rarely interested software engineers from other, non-related domains unless they’re hiring a team to do web interface or something.
It's primarily a discovery problem, on both sides of the market.
Candidate-wise, everyone is slinging ChatGPT'd resumes left and right, which just leads to an arms race where the other side has to use LLMs to filter them, which just makes the situation even worse. The bar for "senior software engineer" is insanely low right now (and no, Leetcode doesn't count - I'm talking more pragmatic skills like being able to use a *nix terminal).
Employer-wise, everyone wants a unicorn that will lick their ass but isn't willing to pay (in either money or benefits) well for said service. Then they complain that "nobody wants to work anymore" or that there are no good candidates. Well, it's just that the good ones don't even bother applying.
As a result, lucky, good actors on either side find themselves via networking, while the less lucky ones are left to swim in a sea of trash.
> Candidate-wise, everyone is slinging ChatGPT'd resumes left and right, which just leads to an arms race where the other side has to use LLMs to filter them, which just makes the situation even worse.
Everyone had to start doing that to get through the often dumb-as-a-brick ATS system filtering that became farcical - I remember applying for one position that was around building care and management systems for pregnant mothers - EHR, practice management, claims benefits, etc., all of which I had over a decade of experience in. "Name something that might stand you out from the crowd." "In addition to all this I've also delivered 12 babies as a paramedic". Twenty minutes later "we are looking for candidates whose experiences and skill sets are more closely aligned with the role we are looking to fill". That was my push to realize "I need to do something to ATS optimize my resume and plan otherwise I'll be unemployed for months."
> Employer-wise, everyone wants a unicorn that will lick their ass but isn't willing to pay
"Principal Product Manager. Must have 10-15 years experience, much of it in healthcare domain, including leadership and team ownership. Salary range: $90-130K".
You can 100% work your way to a senior position without ever leaving windows. The people who are like that just don't tend to be hanging out on platforms like HN.
Now the number of senior C# engineers in Europe who couldn't fix a broken deploy on IIS or SSL cert problem on a windows server? That is rather high in the windows field too.
To be clear, this was developing software running on *nix environments, and they were all using Mac (or WSL) and the usual open-source *nix dev tools. This is not a case of developers purely targeting Microsoft environments (indeed it would be excusable in that case).
i was hiring for a senior devops role a few years ago. part of the interview was ssh into a machine and debug some web server configs we purposely broke. step one was email an ssh public key to me. now, i dont remember the command cause i do it so rarely, i dont expect them to, but for a senior role we expect you can google this, its not supposed to be hard. the number of people that could not generate an ssh key was crazy. i had people emailing me their current company private key. and if we did spend half the interview on the key, they never could pass the trivial part of how we broke it, which effictively just required reading the log file.
They know that it's a magic box into which you paste whatever incantation is in the README.md or spoonfed to you by an LLM, but otherwise have no mental model of how it works. Hell, they didn't even have the reflex of pressing "arrow up" to correct a mistyped command. And don't get me started on the lack of mastery of their tools - whether Docker, package managers or other tools they use daily.
(and speaking of LLMs, those can actually be a wonderful teaching aid - but they don't seem to be bothered by their lack of knowledge and so don't even try to take advantage of them)
I bet the guys are good at Leetcode though, or whatever bullshit interview process that hired them. This is in a Western European company that has adopted all the "best practices" possible, and places high importance on career progression, and these are considered senior SWEs on track to become engineering managers.
@noprocrasted - thank you for your 100% spot on comments. +1. And you summarised it so well that I hope they will be remembered by job seekers of today.
I have 2-3 years of professional software experience. I've been unemployed for 4 years, barely able to get a response from employers, let alone interviews, let alone a job. My response rate (even just a rejection email) from applying to jobs has gone from an average of ~35% down to an average of ~18%. Numbers wise, the job market is very frustrating for me.
I apply everywhere in the US, and at this point I consider it a success if I get a rejection email, since that's getting pretty rare. The only recruiters who reach out to me are very clearly shotgun recruiters who have not read my resume and bring positions which are obviously looking for a different type of applicant.
I know I can do the work. Half of my friends work in software or software adjacent roles. I'm at least as capable as them, and, based on how much they have to complain about them, more capable than some of their coworkers.
So, I don't know what the issue is. Clearly I'm not good at marketing myself, but what exactly to change, I'm not sure. I know the 4 year gap looks awful to recruiters, but it's not getting any smaller and I didn't choose it willingly. At this point I'm just mindlessly sending out more resumes, because I don't know what else to do.
Wisepilled response. The state of hiring is completely broken. I started a new position recently and what they told me the position was like vs what I saw/learned after I started were two completely different things. It's like managers don't even know what their own team does.
I'm surprised no one here talked about the junior side of the market yet. It's underrepresented on HN, but I would have still expected to see something. I'll share what I subjectively gathered from this job market.
Senior devs, people with many years of experience, people who have had the chance to funnel themselves into something specialized are doing okay. It's still not as good as it once was, many still find themselves out of a job and unable to find another one without having to settle for worse conditions or a lower wage, but the squeeze isn't nearly as bad on them.
For juniors and new grads, it's a bloodbath. The best people I know are sending hundreds of tailored job applications to try and get just about anything, and it's still almost impossible. Rates of applications to interviews are probably <1% for most people. Internships still help, but it's not as much of a difference as it once was. Everyone is desperate, and people are lowering their standards as far as they'll go, but employers are still not budging.
Basically, it seems like the sides of the job market are diverging. People who are already in are usually still in. You're either doing great or living through the most hopeless and soul-crushing time of your professional life, with a small portion of outliers in either group.
I have about 3 yoe and agree my friends who’ve gotten laid off took 6months to a year to get a new job and new graduated are taking about the same even longer.
What’s interesting to me is what this looks like in 10 years when the lack of junior engineers and smaller amount of cs grads come to fruition
On the freelance side it's not much better. People who used to hire me back on project after project as a contractor aren't doing that anymore. I don't get replies stating what gaps in my skillset they're concerned about despite them asking me to tell them, I don't get information sent as to what the project entails, most of the time nobody even gets past the bidding process because they never update any contractors bidding on it.
It's been about a year since I've had a big project, and my attempts to slide out of freelancer work and into the mines are all getting shafted. The longer I go without a big project, the more toxic my work history appears. At the same time, I can't find any big projects because either the ones who sent out the contract don't know the skillset needed or just don't post anything externally anymore.
I'm on the very tiny side where projects pay $200 to $300 on completion and take a day or two from acceptance to submission, not triple digit salaries for months long rewrites. The smaller you go the worse it gets.
Candidate discovery is absolutely miserable right now. For a lot of people standing out is their resume and their LinkedIn page and the processes that exist just plain aren't getting the right eyes on those.
If you're getting recruiters continually its probably less about your qualification (not to downplay them, I'm sure they're lovely) and more about being on a handful of company's candidate and talent banks.
Everyone hates resumes, and being involved in any process a company can pay to bypass them is a huge advantage.
You can also tell how garbage a pipeline ATS screening and other such shit is by the sheer number of positions you see that are advertised for four to six weeks, go off-market only to re-appear 2-3 months later.
You know what's even more exhausting for an employer than having to invest energy into the top of your hiring funnel? Having to redo it every few months because an ATS filtered much of the cream off the top and sent you keyword stuffers to choose between.
Yes, and also the "we're not actually hiring, but we're leaving the listing up anyway incase we get an application from some rockstar/unicorn/whatever candidate" ghost jobs
Have to be honest, I do sometimes wonder how many of those might be cases of literal liars/scammers getting the roles thanks to heavily puffed up CVs and lots of AI usage, only for said companies to end up needing to lay them off again when they realise their claimed skills don't match reality.
I feel like someone has to be getting past these systems, and I get the feeling it's not the people these companies want to be hiring.
And some of the frustration there is I suspect then that some of those companies don't want to then return to their final round participants to see if they're still available because they're hit with a duality of "we don't want to admit we passed you over for a BS artist" and "well, if they haven't found something yet, were they really a final round person for us?" (not saying that's a valid perspective or not, but I could absolutely see it happening).
From my non objective, not looking but I try to stay as informed as possible across South Africa, Europe, US perspective and regularly talk to people on both sides and ask them directly
- it's not as bad as it was in the last several months
- it's still very hard to get noticed, get interviews, etc there's so much noise on both sides that personal references are much more important than front door applications. This was always the case but much more now
- there were previously a lot of jobs for low agency people who were good at doing what they were told and meeting specs, AI is taking these as if you are willing to spend hours per week writing specs and checking results then tokens are better bang for buck than freelance devs now
- approximately all the demand now is for directly AI related plays and even people who get them don't feel secure because the whole industry feels so unstable and bubbly, but there's no money in anything not AI now
> it's not as bad as it was in the last several months
I think this needs to be caveated by the fact that the job market is seasonal. The beginning of the year is usually the best part for jobs since departments have shiny new budgets, with a boost again around March-April as people quit after getting their bonuses triggering of another set of churn.
This matches my experience as well as a sr. Ruby/Python engineer (NE USA based)
The market was pretty barren in late 2025, but wasn't too terrible in Jan 2026 and I progressed nicely through two interview processes. Got an offer from one. Made it to the final round with the other but timeframes did quite not align.
shiny new budgets
I was curious about this aspect. Lot of companies have fiscal years (and, presumably, budgets) that do not start at the same time as the calendar year.
I'll bite: 15.5 years tech experience across SRE, SWE, PM, PGM, & strategic initiatives-adjacent things. Last roles was Director/Principal level. Last projects were driving hundreds of millions of dollars worth of portfolio acquisition integrations (successfully) at a $5B public company. NYC metro area but I've been remote for 13 years. No degree, self-taught, first real tech role acquired when I was recruited after hacking a company back in 2010. Laid off in Feb, though garden leave ran through April.
I've had mixed results overall. Primarily looking at senior+ TPM, TPGM, SI roles. My network is hard to leverage due to being remote for so long. Lots of cold applications. 25% of applications got recruiter responses within a day, 25% within a week, 50% blocked at ATS, ghosted, or hiring being re-evaluated. Not as many direct recruiter outreaches as I've received in the past.
From the JD side, salaries seem to be more stratified and requirements, even for lower roles, seems to be higher than before. I've seen quite a few requests for 10+ years experience for mid-level PGM roles. In loose convos with friends, everyone wants a big name on a resume but no longer will pay a premium to get it.
No degree seems to be a bigger gate now than it was the last time I was searching. Being a generalist also seems to be more of a risk but I'm sure that's at least partly a fault in my own framing. I do not play the LinkedIn game well. My major contributions have been either inside a company (internally-focused, hard to share publicly or company-specific), mildly popular open source dev work (>100 stars), or things actually used everywhere but no one cares because it's not "real" dev work (created puppetlabs-firewall module, 10M+ downloads, adopted as part of Puppet Enterprise, used globally, no one cares). Without a strong public profile in a specific direction, I've been told I read as too hard to quantify.
Overall, it seems "bad" in that everyone is battling uncertainty about where things are going and being more vigilant to avoid the wrong hire. Credentials and resume pedigree seem to matter more than ever and roles are much more vertically aligned than I've seen them in the past. If you're good, with some amount of credentials, and a lot of vertical ownership then you'll probably be fine though it might take longer. If you're a generalist who's hard to pin down, you might be in for some pain.
No degree seems to be a bigger gate now than it was the last time I was searching
Anecdotally during late '25/early '26, I didn't seem to see an increase in sr. engineer roles with explicit requirements.
I did have one surprise rejection during a screening call due to the fact that I had 4 years of compsci but no degree. I don't recall that happening before in ~30 years. I don't believe it was listed as a hard requirement, else I wouldn't have applied.
requirements, even for lower roles, seems to be higher than before.
My (small sample size) experience was that the "nice to have" lists of keyword soup got larger, but companies remained pretty flexible about them. Probably because for most roles, LLMs can help developers paper over these experience gaps.
ie - React shops were cool with my recent Vue experience as a substitute, since I was primarily a backend guy anyway
Not rejecting your experiences, just adding to the anecdata
There's no monolithic "Job Market", so specific details matter. I have not been tracking details too closely but here are two things I am tracking:
- CRUD generation by running through JIRA tickets and clearing backlogs seem to be replaced by agentic workflows. So if you were an extremely productive dev who would machete your way through CRUD and API integrations, agentic workflows do it better, faster and for cheaper. I can point CC, Codex (Cursor in progress) at design specifications and it can turn those into perfect Django apps with well written test cases like there's no tomorrow. It might not make sense for such a business to continue to hire humans to do the same work
- Tokens for frontier models over the API are really expensive. I am personally aware of some companies that have monthly high five figure token expenses and one company that has a monthly six five figure token expense.
It's still worth it because they are churning out code 24x7 vs a typical human's 8x5 if you're putting in the right workflows, guardrails in place - that's a 4x productivity gain.
You're getting done in a month, what a full quarter would require humans to do. However, the company still has to pay for that and unless they are signing up 4x more paying net new customers every month with 0 churn, engineers have to be let go to pay for those tokens.
But how do they scale the reviewing of the agentic output? Or they just blindly trust it and worst case scenario they get to write a sob story on HN about how Claude has deleted the production db?
> But how do they scale the reviewing of the agentic output? Or they just blindly trust it and worst case scenario they get to write a sob story on HN about how Claude has deleted the production db?
A company can operate aimlessly for a long time and carry along due to inertia and/or monopoly position. So chances are nobody (competent) is reviewing it.
Having a decent linkedin profile, and getting regular contacts by recruiters on linkedin is the way.
Those recruiters tend to be internal recruiters working directly for the company, which I find less pushy/annoying to deal with, and they tend to be already somewhat keen on you by the time they contact you, because they have already decided you are an appealing candidate. They'll generally fast-track you to an interview, not make you fill in some long ATS application form, keep in contact regularly, etc. - it is a much better experience than cold "applying" via an ATS / workday portal and having that go into a black hole.
I'd say, if you're not regularly getting recruiters contacting you on linkedin every week, your profile isn't very good and you should fix it until you do.
It amuses me a bit when people complain about linkedin post in the newsfeed being lame (which they are), or reminiscing about the old days when people would have their email addresses next to loud warnings saying "do not contact me if you are a recruiter!!!".
It turns out, the only thing worse than being contacted by recruiters is not being contacted by recruiters. It only takes a second to respond with a polite "no thanks, not looking right now, maybe another time!", and it is far easier to start engaging with a steady stream of regular contacts than trying to create that stream when you need it.
Hiring is now by filter. Corporations do not try to hire good people, they just avoid hiring questionable people. In other words they are looking for the lowest common denominator.
If you do not think this is true, then ask yourself whether the company is attempting to use AI. THAT IS WHAT THEY WANT AND VALUE. The safer and easier you are as hire the better you will be.
So yes. You were probably hired because you are not a super genius and because you don't have a fancy company name. Not despite it, but because of it.
The question I have is why do I now think many corporations are "too stupid to succeed"? I know they will not fail, but the panicky rush for the supposed safety of AI is stunning.
Depends how you look at it. In tech its probably a lot easier get a job in most of e.g. Eastern Europe, of course unless you are at the top even (where the competition is higher) even adjusted by CoL salaries are much lower.
I have been wondering if my LinkedIn just happens to hit all of the right content somehow. I've been afraid to post or change anything just in case I upset some secret balance!
Wife is a lead motion designer, ex Bumble etc. 6+ months of no job results in NYC. Not sure what's going on honestly, all very slow. Any tips welcome :)
I've been looking for 4 months and only had one phone screen from HR. Cybersecurity in Raleigh, my last employer was MAG 7. My particular problem is I took off 6 years to be a stay-at-home parent.
I was able to get 2 offers last year after a 4 year break (distributed systems), but it was difficult to get thru front doors, references make a bigger difference nowadays.
I took a position 1 level down from previous to pay the bills. Am now interviewing for positions 2 above since I’m already performing at that level and my current company is too bureaucratic to bump me quick enough.
Having them reach out to you is key. Most job postings get thousands of applicants. I don’t think it’s possible to screen them. I just waded through the first 20 till I found someone who would work and hired him. I most certainly could have done better if I wanted to do a lot of filter and screen legwork. When they reach out you’re skipping the hardest 13mo of the job search.
I took your point to be "hirers would rather that job seekers contact them directly than look through resumes", but then your example is one where no one contacted you and you hired without looking through many resumes anyway. That doesn't really prove your point, and makes it sound like advice for people who don't much care who they hire.
Anyway, if people start to follow the advice of reaching out directly, that channel will become exactly as clogged as the job postings.
> I just waded through the first 20 till I found someone who would work and hired him.
You get lucky, sometimes. But I also watch that - that mostly leads to "hire someone, can them within 3 months, recycle that job ad". I've seen companies who have taken the same position on and off their Careers page 3+ times a year (for the same req, to be clear, not company growth).
I think Wellfound (f/k/a AngelList) is doing this.
The jobs advertised on there are real...
I'd been on the job market four months. Every day I did the rounds: Levels, Wellfound, YC/jobs, Glassdoor, Indeed, LinkedIn.
It is what it is, as a crappy jobs market.
Wellfound? I didn't ever hear from anything from their job ads.
And I'm pretty certain that whatever Wellfound/AngelList was, it has become a company that just markets resume writing services, resume review services, all sorts of other services that draw in your money somehow.
Why do I say that?
120+ applications on Wellfound since then. Crickets. Absolutely nothing.
One day I got an email, "Your profile has been viewed!". Weird, never seen an email like that from Wellfound. Indeed, "You have 1 profile view in the last 90 days".
Huh. 120+ applications, 120+ times me answering filling out Wellfound's content questions on "why you would be a good fit for this role", "tell us about x and y and z", no interviews, no contact, only ONE company has ever even viewed my profile (and for what it's worth, it's not a company that has any positions open).
Well, maybe my answers suck, you say. Maybe my resume isn't as impressive as I think it is.
But similar answers and the same resume get me fairly steady hits on every other site I mentioned, I've got to multiple final rounds, I've been explicitly told I was hirable, I was just the number two, I was "in the top three".
And to be clear, many of the companies I see on WF are advertising on other sites too.
My suspicion? WF does take job listings, but they also harvest them from other sites - the job is real, but there's no-one from the employer reviewing the applications to their "phantom" job... and meanwhile all people like me are doing are providing content for WF to harvest and train models for their AI-driven resume writing and review service and other products.
I have spoken to a couple of founders in the last few months and what I keep hearing isn't "we're not hiring" but "we're hiring fewer juniors and being pickier about the ones we take." The bar for what a screen actually tests for moved a lot in the last 18 months and most companies haven't caught up. Its like everyone has so much to absorb before they can decide who to pick. Most down-selected candidates have gone through 5-6 rounds of interview in their selection process.
Is this specifically for software development ? Are you just looking at large companies or also medium sized stuff that may hire in house but not be super well known ?
Ragebait. Haven't been contacted by a single recruiter in years. The only time is someone trying to sell me their shitty interview course/grad school program.
I'm contacted by recruiters not constantly, but steadily. But they all want me to accept a pay cut of about 50% for a contract role of 3-6 months half way across the country.
Appreciate the anecdote and your other comments on HN. But I strongly suspect you are incredibly atypical based on your background and previous work experience in ways that would tremendously down weight the probability that any part of your experience with recruiters would apply to even above average engineers.
This is anecdotal and purely vibes based so YMMV but my view is that it’s a lot worse looking if you’re restricting yourself to just Big Tech like all of the programming subreddits do. There’s tons of companies outside that sphere who need engineers, but too many programmers thing it’s MAANG or bust.
Yeah definitely this. I work in silicon verification and there's strong demand, weak supply and easy to get a job. My impression is it's very different in e.g. web frontend dev.
Nearly 10 years of experience at Microsoft, I've been looking for a remote position for almost a year.
Even just finding appropriate openings has been next to impossible. Every company seems to be looking for either a generalist (lots of full-stack) or a senior in an exact specialized bucket and stack. My role at Microsoft was a sort of specialized databases/compilers/functional programming hybrid, but without clear buzzwords no one seems interested. What was once a frequent stream of corporate recruiter messages dried up a little over a year ago too.
My suspicion is that things are a lot better for non-remote positions in the usual hubs.
When I was laid off as a senior fullstack developer I received a few calls and interviews. There was one time when I received two competing offers with prestigious companies but both required relocation.
My learning about JavaScript employment is that, for the most part, it’s permanently a beginner’s area of software. If you have done that kind of work forever you have some hard choices to make: pretend to be an expert at really beginner things or wait a really long time for extremely rare opportunities to open. So I don’t do that work anymore. My 6 months of unemployment was largely self inflicted.
My other learning about software employment is that when you enter management your technical skills in a given language matter so much less. Other generalized factors become more important like strong communication skills, multitasking endurance, soft skills, a wide distribution of technical knowledge your developers won’t have.
Not sure why you are being downvoted. This is my experience as well. If you have experience at FAANG doing “foundational work” (read: datacenter engineering, core software infrastructure, multi zone computing, point of presence management) you are still in high demand. Many of the people I know in such areas are going to the big hyperscalers to build the infrastructure to run AI inference. There are not a lot of people who have experience doing this stuff and that domain is in very high demand.
The logically consistent explanation for both your experience and my experience is that you are on the other side of the K as people who are in demand and I am on the same side of the K as people in demand.
My guess is that one of the following applies:
1. You do not live silicon valley
2. You do not work at a FAANG
3. You have not built foundational infrastructure
I think if all three of the above are true, you are in demand to build AI hyperscalers. The trillions of dollars going into datacenters has to be built and managed by humans.
Unfortunately no. I made the jump in 2022 from doing on-prem at a small company to doing on-prem at a hyperscaler when software engineers were very in demand and got placed in an organization which does physical datacenter design and core software infrastructure (software defined networking, service discovery, host management, datacenter failovers).
Back in 2022 you could make the moves, but I think now it is very hard to make the jump.
Part of the issue with building and running very large on-prem infrastructure is that you can only get experience by doing it. It not like you can run thousands of racks in multiple datacenters as a personal side project.
OK shitty job market means different things to different people.
For my self, I was making over 300k, took a job (remote) at a little over 200, and now struggling to get that much and considering jobs at 170-180. I think the job market sucks, those jobs paying 300+ would normally respond to me aren't.
Honestly in a high COL city in the US, having 4-5 kids would be doable on $300k TC but it wouldn't be easy to give them more than a middle class lifestyle at best.
Elsewhere in the US in smaller towns, I could see it being much more feasible.
Yeah, this is my current read on the market. If you're looking for typical $400k senior software eng role at a public tech company - you're going to be having a really hard time. Meta closed many roles and is laying off 8000. The rest of the public tech market seems to be following similar.
If you're looking at 200k/yr roles in SF that are in person and looking closer to 996 than not - plenty seem to be hiring and trying to recruit. Downside? You have to be in SF 6 days/week and it's shit pay for the region. (You will likely have to do roommates because $200k/yr is borderline for a decent apartment in SF now due to 20% yoy price hikes)
I say the following not to brag but to offer up some more perspective for you: you’re comp is in the lower-mid range of the market. Comp was there for remote, startup eng positions back in 2017.
As you move up in comp, the market actually gets more difficult, not just because the market is more competitive but because some companies won’t even interview qualified engineers with FAANG on their resume because they don’t believe they can afford them.
So I can understand why you might have an easier time compared to other engs.
I've never had a problem getting contacted. I've done some self reflection, and practice and now I'm much better able to communicate technically. It also helped that my last project before I was laid off was pretty wide reaching and impressive and being able to talk about that has made things a lot easier. I still haven't gotten a job I want, so I don't have a lot to offer you, but I'm getting better at interviewing.
I am currently employed, remote but not in IT. I have been applying for various jobs the last 6 months because there isn't much growth left for me at my current company. I am a really strong candidate for what I am applying for. If I apply to a local company, I get contacted almost immediately. If I apply for a remote job it is crickets.
I think for remote, you are going to have to be recruited or have a strong network tie because that is the only way to filter the volume of applications. Cold applying is just a waste of your time and energy.
Finding crappy jobs is easy. Finding a decent job is proving challenging.
Crappy I don't mean only job in bad companies, but sometimes job in good companies but a bad situation or project. For example one of my recent-ish experiences was in an excellent company but the project was pure firefighting, the people that knew the thing well were leaving, and the company policies were getting in the way of the project, so I got hired to "replace" people, this just sucked and in the end didn't work.
My company rarely laid off full-time employees, but we are mostly cutting contractors or cutting their contracts without extending their work. But every full-time employees seem worried.
From a different perspective: I do volunteer resume reviews and some coaching in a local group. Luck and timing play a role, of course.
I do see a lot of resumes that are really bad, though. Other people need a lot of help communicating during interviews. Some people go through their careers getting jobs during easy times where hiring managers will overlook a lot of things and be willing to take a chance on candidates with not so great resumes or communication skills that need help. That all stops in a job market like this where hiring managers aren’t going to waste their time on anything other than the 5-10 best applicants they get.
There’s a lot of cope material out there that shifts all of the blame to the companies: Stories about “ghost jobs” or beliefs about nepotism or “you dodged a bullet” comfort when someone doesn’t get hired. With half of the people I talk to getting them to accept that they need to improve how they’re applying and interviewing instead of blaming external factors is most of the battle. For the other half it can be things like focusing too narrowly (only FAANG, only remote, only a big title, only a compensation number they got 3 years ago during COVID and now they don’t want anything less) or some times just poor luck.
What sector/size are your offers? The "who is hiring" is shifting. Many large corps are now feeling a couple of squeezes from more expensive capital, to finding their footing in a quickly changing world, to over-hiring, to market pressures to "AI-ify" themselves (doubles as excuse to layoff caused by former three squeezes).
Mid-market saas seems to be getting crushed at the moment for different reasons.
Startups and the AI shops can't hire fast enough, but also seem to be looking at different candidate profiles.
This contract I took was out of town for me so I’ve been commuting 300km week on/week off. Smallish “college town” in Australia that used to provide steady IT work no longer does. I am older 50+ so I don’t know whether that is a factor.
I was using Seek.com to get jobs but it’s increasingly difficult to get past the fake jobs, the resume harvesting and the thousands of AI or overseas applications.
The only real solution seems to be referrals or recruiters.
From my perspective the job market here is brutal.
It's super super hard for companies first and foremost, forget employees for a second. The environment is extremely hostile to private industry right now
Because in the last year you responded to Linkedin messages from Recruiters, this boosted your visibility in other recruiters’ searches.
That’s something I think every working person should do: if they get outreach from recruiters, respond to all messages. Maybe even jump on a call/interview.
I saw this shitstorm brewing back in Jul 2025. Gave up on finding a job. Started 100% looking for cofounding (or at a minimum being a founding engineer in a startup). Networked like crazy. Landed exactly what I wanted. Cool startup, motivated people around me, money to burn on crazy projects.
If I had stayed for job hunting, I would be unemployed IMO.
You have to go to conferences and meetups. Paid conferences are worth is most of the time IMO. I spent $500 for the most expensive one and it landed me a really good offer later.
Go to conferences and shake hands with people, try to be friendly and ask questions. Later check companies of people you've met for openings - and ask the guy you met, directly, to put a word in for you, pretty please.
Might vary depending on where you are and where you're applying to. I'm from the UK, spent a year and 500+ applications applying to remote or Gulf roles. Turned up nothing.
Yeah, I think so. It’s so bad that I pass 2nd and 3rd round interviews and when I email about it the recruiters email bounces alongside several cc’s that were on the thread.
Recruiters are ghosting me if i won't reply to their LinkedIn messages same day. I've applied to 65 jobs in the last month and landed three phone screenings and zero interviews.
I have 5 years experience including two at an F500 and two as a tech lead on my current team.
In 2022, with less than 2 years experience, i had competing offers all over 100k within a month of starting to apply places.
I've been applying off-and-on for a full year, consistently for a month.
I've been in the industry almost 30 years and the job market we have now is the worst I've ever seen. This includes the dot com crash, great recession, and COVID times.
Fortunately, I am still employed, but I am looking.
Yeah I'm employed but once this project I'm on wraps up this year, I'll be asked to work on a project that violates my personal ethics.... So really hoping i can find something by the fall, we'll see
As someone who has made hiring and firing decisions at the Board level, the people who are the most severely affected were either (in no order):
1. Working remotely in North America but demanding Bay Area salaries without the chops to justify it.
2. Working in Western Europe (they complain more about stuff irrelevant to the business but shy away from business critical decision making when offered the opportunity, unlike their Czech, Polish, Romanian, and Bulgarian peers despite us paying €90k-150k TCs across the EU, and Warsaw+Prague becoming Berlin level expensive).
3. Bootcamp grads who never fixed skills issues (foundational knowledge is foundational for a reason).
4. Getting paid Bay Area or Seattle salaries while living in LCOL regions like RTP. The whole point of a Cary office was inshoring - the talent was meh but if we needed a cheap QA engineer or move ops for a stagnant part of our business in 2019 we'd move that job and BU there. They didn't realize they were viewed as at the bottom of the totem pole skills wise.
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So long as you keep your skills sharp, have foundational computer science and engineering knowledge, and live in the primary tech hubs globally, it's a pretty good market.
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Edit: can't reply
> What, in your opinion are the “foundational” CS skills the #3 people are missing
If you've survived this long, I think you will be fine. But I'd recommend anyone from a bootcamp to take an OS course comparable to CS61 [0], an algos course comparable to CS170 [1], and a programming language design course comparable to CS421 [2].
There is foundational design and architectural patterns and knowledge that are taught in OS, Programming Language Design, and Algos classes that cannot be taught in a bootcamp.
My recommendation for people in your shoes is to do GATech's OMSCS or UPenn's online MCIT to learn some of the foundational stuff you were never introduced to at a bootcamp.
As someone maybe in group (2). What kind of stereotyping is this? And why do you want to have non-complaining worker drones? Maybe older people from those countries are good at keeping their head down in soviet style work configurations, but is this the kind of company you want to have?
I'd more guess it is that there is a severe income tax advantage, B2B contracts are also easier in eastern Europe.
> why do you want to have non-complaining worker drones
We want opinionated engineers. But we want engineers who will respond to a slack message after 5pm during a P1 escalation.
> I'd more guess it is that there is a severe income tax advantage
Somewhat but not enough to move the needle because depending on the local government, they are matching cross-EU subsidizes.
> older people from those countries are good at keeping their head down in soviet style work configurations
Other way around. The Western European employees want a heads down and no input but high paying job.
CEE peers will push back and be opinionated but also try to think from a business outcomes perspective.
> soviet style work configurations
Which ironically is closer to German business and work culture instead of in Eastern Europe.
Edit: can't reply
> Of course if you pay someone 135k vs 70k real income
Salaries at the 75th percentile and above for SWEs are kept constant across Europe.
Heck, the companies for which I am a board member as well as companies at I have previously been management or line-level engineers all pay in the €130K-€170K TC range in Germany as well as across the CEE.
This is waaaaaay above TC for the average European in tech and we know it.
It sucks but the reality is the talent density in Western Europe is weaker than in the CEE, and it is mindset driven.
A German SWE wants a 9-5. A Czech SWE wants to build the next JetBrains.
We want to hire or fund the latter, not the former.
It's idk 10% for B2B in Poland and more than 50% in western Europe. Of course if you pay someone 135k vs 70k real income the first person will put in more effort.
In western Europe you'd just have to specify the availability requirements and they'd do it there as well. You'd just have to pay for it.
Edit: If you pay someone 150k€ in Germany what they see after-tax is just not that much. They are going to compare this with the 9-5 IGM position (when it is available...). Why not just admit that you don't want to pay equivalent wages for accessing the western european market?
> If you pay someone 150k€ in Germany what they see after-tax is just not that much
For Germany this in not true, I have direct experience of this. Your income is really high at 150k€, even taking in account all taxes you pay if you’re self–employed (plus insurances, social security contributions, etc). You’re way above what you would get from the German market, unless you go into management.
The IGM 9-5 35 hour work-week 30+ holidays job pays nearly 100k€. Add the employer social contributions and it is 116k€. He wants good work ethic so I'd say at least 25% more work time, probably less holidays, say 20. The IGM job scaled for this would be already at 150k€. He wants availability at 5pm US time, that's (best-case) 23:00 here, so night-shift work. The IGM job would pay double for this or something (this is how you get air traffic controllers earning 150k€ here).
> Why not just admit that you don't want to pay equivalent wages for accessing the western european market?
Is it his responsibility? If some countries have a better tax policy, why should he not take advantage of it, and ultimately end up in a situation that benefits both the employee and his company?
Well, if he says that a solution for me would be to move to a country with better tax policy.
If he says that it is some issue with western European work mentality, that won't help because my CV would show that I am western European.
This is terrible advice. Source: been there, done that (worked my ass off to waste half my TC on taxes and the other half on cost of living). I ended up moving to a low-tax Eastern European country so I can actually feel like I'm being fairly compensated for said talent and work ethic.
I don't actually see how your advice improves the situation - the net disposable income you'll end up with is about the same you'll have from being lazy in Western Europe - except at the very least, some Western European countries are actually nice to live in. If you're gonna be poor anyway, may as well be poor in a nicer place.
We do. €130K-€170K TC is at the top of the range across ALL of Europe outside of HFT. Even London Investments Bankers don't make that much outside the 75th percentile and above.
Money ain't a problem, attitude is.
The Western Europeans with the right attitude either move to America (eg. I'm sponsoring the O-1 of 2 founders who are shifting from London to SF for that reason) or end up becoming leadership for American companies in Western Europe.
75th percentile pay doesn't go as far as it used to, tbh. I'm on about that in Western Europe and am looking for more as my costs have increased massively.
And even though I could easily move to London (modulo family) I wouldn't as the wages there are much worse for my specialty.
Honestly based on talking to friends and former colleagues I think you're probably underpaying for many Western European markets, TC of 200k is where it's at now.
I'll leave your attitude comments out as I don't have enough context to reply effectively.
You're a Russian national (though I do recognize you appear to be opposed to the status quo back in Russia). Sadly it's too difficult to hire a Russian passport holder.
I’m a bootcamp grad (although it was an intense 5-night a week, year long bootcamp, not some 6-week build-a-demo class). I have a college degree but it’s in the arts.
I do try to continually improve my skill set, refresh on design patterns, etc. I’m currently employed and have been for the last six years. I don’t really know if I fall in category 3 or not.
What, in your opinion are the “foundational” CS skills the #3 people are missing?
Naw, I would never work there unless I was given Jeetu or Ammar's job.
That said, you seem like someone who actually has the calibre to be hired at a good Security, DevTools, or Infra company.
This is my throwaway, but my two cents to you is to leave asap and try to find a way to work at a company that values OS and kernel level knowledge (probably GCP atm), but that would require relocating to the Bay or NYC.
Many others from the big labs are moving back to their core EE field into stuff like optical networks for data centers and so on by the way. That is a lot of the attrition.
At his level and position I doubt that is actually the primary reason simply because at his level, a way would have been found to retain him despite family issues (eg. opening an OpenAI tech office in Bangalore, Hyderabad, or Chennai or make him GM for OpenAI in India). Something else is going on with Srinivas' departure - either pushed out by Fidji or planning on starting his own thing.
That said, in my peer group I would say around 25-35% of people left for the family reason - especially after how COVID was handled in India. At one point, Google leadership was offering to match MTV salaries for engineers and PMs who Google wanted to retain but who decided to shift back to India to care for family during and slightly after the pandemic.
> Many others from the big labs are moving back to their core EE field into stuff like optical networks for data centers and so on by the way. That is a lot of the attrition.
My hunch is he is probably leaving to work on something like this or an adjacent space, but admitting as such would leave him open to litigation. That said, given his age I'd assume family decisions are also somewhat playing a role.
Ofc, some Indian diaspora types do leave for other reasons (eg. Sridhar Vembu and his divorce).
On the EE and optical side, diaspora founders are actually serious about leaving the US for Hyderabad simply because the Indian vintages of American deeptech funds plus the RDI are giving ridiculously competitive funding terms for startups in that space.
And yeah that makes sense on the returning from the bay part. Many of those people ended up being fodder for startups here to poach. Work with a few of them.
I find it absurd how she generalized that Western Europe is complaining a lot and less pragmatic than whatever. The same for working remote but not having the chops like the 'Bay Area'. Could have been a serious question as well, why do you find it absurd?
I'm doing OK, I can get phone screens / interviews at big tech. Can't manage to get any from AI labs.
My current company is highly abusive and is doing a bunch of saber rattling over layoffs and I'm honestly fed up at this point.
They want us to work 7 days a week and are like "ohh maybe we'll lay half the company off, we'll see". And all of the reorgs are making my life fucking hell. (It's a large company that's run by an asshole. Guess which one)
The hard part is just getting the time to prepare for interviews properly. I'm not even bothering interviewing at the more leetcode heavy companies right now.
Personally my experience has been kinda brutal, having been struggling to find a new job for a few months now. Interviews haven't been that rare all things considered, but as someone who's neurodivergent, it feels like the chances of me getting through one successfully is lower than ever now, especially when there are like 3-5 rounds of meetings and calls to get through.
I'd also say it's a mix of not having the best company experience in the world (even the larger ones I worked for didn't use cutting edge tech), not having enough war stories about times of adversity, and having to compete with both top tier engineers from FAANG companies and liars just using AI to make up everything.
But based on other people's experiences, it seems like some people get way luckier than others in this job market. I know people who've gotten a job in a week or two without any hassle and others who've been out of work for months or years now. One of my friends had probably the best luck I can imagine in that regard; they got laid off from one job and then a week later found a job in the same exactly industry doing the exact same thing at approximately the exact same salary range. They went from designing brochures and posters for medical companies at one company to designing brochures and posters for medical companies at a direct competitor.
But yeah, it seems like a very tough market right now, and one where success pretty much depends on the stars aligning in the right way.
Like many things in life, it's highly situational and individualized. If you have top credential from a top school, your prospects are going to be better than someone with worse credentials, all else equal. Or if your expectations are too highs , things may seem worse.
your experience isn't rare.it's the silent majority.people who land quckily don't post about it.The ones who struggle are loud.
"Hundreds of interviews"is just ongiong price discovery.you were runing the experiment before it mattered.
Declined a local offer to stay at your company?That'sjust knowing your leverage.Nothing special.
"Bad" is relative. It can be more difficult in compressed markets where talent is either in surplus (read: SV, Dub, etc) or where there's a distinct lack of enterprises/startups/whatever providing the surface layer. Given some of the retraction of "warm feelings", esp. re: US contractors in other countries circa American imperialism these days, it can also have a chilling effect on localized markets. But, this is all highly influenced/mutable daily.
> It can be more difficult in compressed markets where talent is either in surplus (read: SV, Dub, etc)
The Bay Area hiring market is extremely hot right now. Most of my peers who have been laid off and people I have laid off landed on their feet within weeks with Base+Bonus being comparable to big tech and some startups giving all-cash TC comparable to Netflix during it's peak.
My experience mid-2024 was pretty much the same, and when I look now things do seem easier to find. The only caveat is the wider white collar market still seems pretty affected. I have a handful of friends in advertising who have been laid off and looking for more than six months.
My friends have told me that here in LA there are positions but many want you to move or commute excessively far, and there's real wage suppression going on. Also, many of the positions are "unicorn" roles, where they want someone with very niche experience. It's an employer's market for them.
I had a friend with plenty of experience in HR get laid off.
He looked for a job for 13 months. One of the top 3 smartest people I’ve ever known looked for seven months and had to take a big step back in his career, despite having Amazon and Home Depot on his resume.
Both of them said that even getting an interview was almost impossibly hard.
These are people in different parts of the county, and in different industries.
I think we have a serious problem on our hands with employment that’s probably not getting better any time soon.
Don't want to discredit or invalidate your/your friend's experience, but I do want to offer some hope during these times where a lot of what you see on the web is doomer posts.
From Google: The Jevons paradox occurs when technological improvements increase the efficiency of a resource, but the resulting drop in cost causes demand to rise so much that total consumption of that resource increases rather than decreases.
The message being, it may seem now that because the friction for creating software is so minimal now that there will be no need for software engineers in the future. But historically when friction has been reduced, we have seen an increase in demand that outweighs the efficiency gain, increasing total consumption. I believe that software won't be an exception to this millennia-old pattern.
While what "software engineering" may look like might change, I still believe strongly that people who understand software will actually be in higher demand than ever in the future.
To paraphrase Keynes, in the future we are all dead. His friend is suffering now, not in some theoretical far off future where the magic market had been blessed by the invisible hand.
Most software is not price elastic so Jevon's Paradox will not matter
So much pre-employment screening and automated filtering. Getting to the interview stage is like having your paper refereed instead of desk rejected.
Cold applications are very difficult, especially because of the sheer volume of applicants.
Unless I have a referral, it’s such a low probability exercise it’s not worth it for me.
Whenever I see “100+ candidates have applied” on LinkedIn, I just ignore the job posting.
HR, particularly recruitment, was one of the biggest hit departments when the blood-letting started at Meta in 2022. The hiring freeze that followed didn't help.
if he was responsible for Home Depot's app, I can understand why it took him so long to find another job.
When was he looking and when did he get the job?
Two different friends…
First spent most of 2025 looking.
Second started last week
My current job search has been the longest and most difficult of my career (5 months so far). Caveats:
- I’m only applying with climate tech companies
- I’m trying to transition back to engineering after a detour into product
- I’m trying to pivot into more hardware-focused roles
Most companies I apply to don’t respond at all, and I’ve had about 6 phone screens, two technical interviews, and one “we’d love to hire you once we get the funding for this position sometime in June”.
So from my perspective, the job market is awful, but YMMV.
P.S. if you’re working on any clean energy related software, I’d be a great addition to your team — https://matthewgerring.com
Having just been on the job market, my experience was that career pivots are much harder now. I initially intended to transition to a neighboring field after an education break - but none of the companies in that field would speak to me. At most I had a recruiter call with one who decided to reject. To complete this transition I had been planning on a massive pay cut.
When I focused on areas I had some more credible experience in, I got significantly better engagement and eventually found a very narrow niche where I had substantial success.
I think we're partially adjusting to a world where employers expect a very narrow experience match to their role. Employers are also paying a premium within that narrow match.
Companies are primarily hiring on the spot market and paying through the nose for it.
To be fair, in the best of climates that is still searching in a niche market with an attempt to do something new with an engineering experience gap
How was your detour into product? What kind of skills/instincts you developed being in product? I always imagined it being kind of freeing -- leaving behind engineering implementation details and thinking more in terms of the final results.
A lot more of my time was spent fighting to keep the resources I needed to execute my roadmap than I liked. I spent waaaaay too much time explaining why my product area, which covered business critical data and internal processes, was worth funding to an audience that didn’t understand what I did, and by extension, did not really understand their own business.
When it’s ideation from customer interviews with a designer and an engineering manager, it’s fantastic. I like solving problems and I don’t really care about the specific technical approach, so that’s where I want to be. However I will happily write the code (or review it, or just wrote specs or whatever it is we do now since December 2025) if there’s no one else around to do it.
Be sure to talk with and apply at https://charmindustrial.com/ I dont have an in / network I can share with you, but Peter was a great person to work for :)
can you talk about the art installation section of your resume? it sounds really cool. how did you get into this niche and found projects? and is this kind of work not suitable as full-time freelance work?
Started with attending Burning Man starting about 12 years ago. Got jealous of my friends who were doing “real” engineering on these kinds of projects, and started volunteering, applying for and winning art grants, meeting other artists, and climbing the skill ladder.
If you attended Burning Man in 2019, Climate Week in SF in 2023, or Verge in San Jose in 2024, you may have seen my project Awful’s Gas & Snack. I also worked on the Love Blocks and the Jacks at the Conservatory of Flowers in SF (among many other projects).
I now run a small art fabrication business that just barely makes my studio rent most of the time, and is currently supplementing unemployment to pay my bills. It’s really, really hard to turn this kind of work into a livelihood, but it’s happening by necessity because I have no other work right now.
It’s also given me legitimate hardware experience — I’ve written code from scratch in Arduino and written modifications and extensions to WLED, and built custom controllers, remote sensor devices, and power systems (solar and batteries, relevant to the clean energy field). But I don’t quite know how to present this work as “legitimate”, even the stuff I’ve done as a full-fledged professional (like the work I did at Urban Putt San Jose, which you should definitely go see, it’s fun!)
Good luck, brother.
I suspect the third criteria might be the hardest.
In my experience HW companies are rarely interested software engineers from other, non-related domains unless they’re hiring a team to do web interface or something.
It's primarily a discovery problem, on both sides of the market.
Candidate-wise, everyone is slinging ChatGPT'd resumes left and right, which just leads to an arms race where the other side has to use LLMs to filter them, which just makes the situation even worse. The bar for "senior software engineer" is insanely low right now (and no, Leetcode doesn't count - I'm talking more pragmatic skills like being able to use a *nix terminal).
Employer-wise, everyone wants a unicorn that will lick their ass but isn't willing to pay (in either money or benefits) well for said service. Then they complain that "nobody wants to work anymore" or that there are no good candidates. Well, it's just that the good ones don't even bother applying.
As a result, lucky, good actors on either side find themselves via networking, while the less lucky ones are left to swim in a sea of trash.
> Candidate-wise, everyone is slinging ChatGPT'd resumes left and right, which just leads to an arms race where the other side has to use LLMs to filter them, which just makes the situation even worse.
Everyone had to start doing that to get through the often dumb-as-a-brick ATS system filtering that became farcical - I remember applying for one position that was around building care and management systems for pregnant mothers - EHR, practice management, claims benefits, etc., all of which I had over a decade of experience in. "Name something that might stand you out from the crowd." "In addition to all this I've also delivered 12 babies as a paramedic". Twenty minutes later "we are looking for candidates whose experiences and skill sets are more closely aligned with the role we are looking to fill". That was my push to realize "I need to do something to ATS optimize my resume and plan otherwise I'll be unemployed for months."
> Employer-wise, everyone wants a unicorn that will lick their ass but isn't willing to pay
"Principal Product Manager. Must have 10-15 years experience, much of it in healthcare domain, including leadership and team ownership. Salary range: $90-130K".
Yup.
Wait, you mean there are senior software engineers who don't know how to use a *nix terminal? I've been using them since I was like 16 or so.
You can 100% work your way to a senior position without ever leaving windows. The people who are like that just don't tend to be hanging out on platforms like HN.
I am, although I have used nix occasionally.
In Europe C# fills the role of Java.
You're just in an American echo chamber.
Now the number of senior C# engineers in Europe who couldn't fix a broken deploy on IIS or SSL cert problem on a windows server? That is rather high in the windows field too.
To be clear, this was developing software running on *nix environments, and they were all using Mac (or WSL) and the usual open-source *nix dev tools. This is not a case of developers purely targeting Microsoft environments (indeed it would be excusable in that case).
i was hiring for a senior devops role a few years ago. part of the interview was ssh into a machine and debug some web server configs we purposely broke. step one was email an ssh public key to me. now, i dont remember the command cause i do it so rarely, i dont expect them to, but for a senior role we expect you can google this, its not supposed to be hard. the number of people that could not generate an ssh key was crazy. i had people emailing me their current company private key. and if we did spend half the interview on the key, they never could pass the trivial part of how we broke it, which effictively just required reading the log file.
They know that it's a magic box into which you paste whatever incantation is in the README.md or spoonfed to you by an LLM, but otherwise have no mental model of how it works. Hell, they didn't even have the reflex of pressing "arrow up" to correct a mistyped command. And don't get me started on the lack of mastery of their tools - whether Docker, package managers or other tools they use daily.
(and speaking of LLMs, those can actually be a wonderful teaching aid - but they don't seem to be bothered by their lack of knowledge and so don't even try to take advantage of them)
I bet the guys are good at Leetcode though, or whatever bullshit interview process that hired them. This is in a Western European company that has adopted all the "best practices" possible, and places high importance on career progression, and these are considered senior SWEs on track to become engineering managers.
@noprocrasted - thank you for your 100% spot on comments. +1. And you summarised it so well that I hope they will be remembered by job seekers of today.
I have 2-3 years of professional software experience. I've been unemployed for 4 years, barely able to get a response from employers, let alone interviews, let alone a job. My response rate (even just a rejection email) from applying to jobs has gone from an average of ~35% down to an average of ~18%. Numbers wise, the job market is very frustrating for me.
I apply everywhere in the US, and at this point I consider it a success if I get a rejection email, since that's getting pretty rare. The only recruiters who reach out to me are very clearly shotgun recruiters who have not read my resume and bring positions which are obviously looking for a different type of applicant.
I know I can do the work. Half of my friends work in software or software adjacent roles. I'm at least as capable as them, and, based on how much they have to complain about them, more capable than some of their coworkers.
So, I don't know what the issue is. Clearly I'm not good at marketing myself, but what exactly to change, I'm not sure. I know the 4 year gap looks awful to recruiters, but it's not getting any smaller and I didn't choose it willingly. At this point I'm just mindlessly sending out more resumes, because I don't know what else to do.
Lie and ChatGPT your resume to hell. Use those interview cheating tools to pass the bullshit interviews that will be thrown at you.
Your competition is doing it, there is no reason for you not to.
Wisepilled response. The state of hiring is completely broken. I started a new position recently and what they told me the position was like vs what I saw/learned after I started were two completely different things. It's like managers don't even know what their own team does.
No one knows anything and no one cares.
I'm surprised no one here talked about the junior side of the market yet. It's underrepresented on HN, but I would have still expected to see something. I'll share what I subjectively gathered from this job market.
Senior devs, people with many years of experience, people who have had the chance to funnel themselves into something specialized are doing okay. It's still not as good as it once was, many still find themselves out of a job and unable to find another one without having to settle for worse conditions or a lower wage, but the squeeze isn't nearly as bad on them.
For juniors and new grads, it's a bloodbath. The best people I know are sending hundreds of tailored job applications to try and get just about anything, and it's still almost impossible. Rates of applications to interviews are probably <1% for most people. Internships still help, but it's not as much of a difference as it once was. Everyone is desperate, and people are lowering their standards as far as they'll go, but employers are still not budging.
Basically, it seems like the sides of the job market are diverging. People who are already in are usually still in. You're either doing great or living through the most hopeless and soul-crushing time of your professional life, with a small portion of outliers in either group.
I have about 3 yoe and agree my friends who’ve gotten laid off took 6months to a year to get a new job and new graduated are taking about the same even longer.
What’s interesting to me is what this looks like in 10 years when the lack of junior engineers and smaller amount of cs grads come to fruition
On the freelance side it's not much better. People who used to hire me back on project after project as a contractor aren't doing that anymore. I don't get replies stating what gaps in my skillset they're concerned about despite them asking me to tell them, I don't get information sent as to what the project entails, most of the time nobody even gets past the bidding process because they never update any contractors bidding on it.
It's been about a year since I've had a big project, and my attempts to slide out of freelancer work and into the mines are all getting shafted. The longer I go without a big project, the more toxic my work history appears. At the same time, I can't find any big projects because either the ones who sent out the contract don't know the skillset needed or just don't post anything externally anymore.
I'm on the very tiny side where projects pay $200 to $300 on completion and take a day or two from acceptance to submission, not triple digit salaries for months long rewrites. The smaller you go the worse it gets.
Candidate discovery is absolutely miserable right now. For a lot of people standing out is their resume and their LinkedIn page and the processes that exist just plain aren't getting the right eyes on those.
If you're getting recruiters continually its probably less about your qualification (not to downplay them, I'm sure they're lovely) and more about being on a handful of company's candidate and talent banks.
Everyone hates resumes, and being involved in any process a company can pay to bypass them is a huge advantage.
You can also tell how garbage a pipeline ATS screening and other such shit is by the sheer number of positions you see that are advertised for four to six weeks, go off-market only to re-appear 2-3 months later.
You know what's even more exhausting for an employer than having to invest energy into the top of your hiring funnel? Having to redo it every few months because an ATS filtered much of the cream off the top and sent you keyword stuffers to choose between.
Those are the "visa applicants ghost jobs".
Yes, and also the "we're not actually hiring, but we're leaving the listing up anyway incase we get an application from some rockstar/unicorn/whatever candidate" ghost jobs
I'm not even seeing them taken down for a few weeks. I've been seeing the same job postings for years now from companies who don't even reply.
Have to be honest, I do sometimes wonder how many of those might be cases of literal liars/scammers getting the roles thanks to heavily puffed up CVs and lots of AI usage, only for said companies to end up needing to lay them off again when they realise their claimed skills don't match reality.
I feel like someone has to be getting past these systems, and I get the feeling it's not the people these companies want to be hiring.
And some of the frustration there is I suspect then that some of those companies don't want to then return to their final round participants to see if they're still available because they're hit with a duality of "we don't want to admit we passed you over for a BS artist" and "well, if they haven't found something yet, were they really a final round person for us?" (not saying that's a valid perspective or not, but I could absolutely see it happening).
From my non objective, not looking but I try to stay as informed as possible across South Africa, Europe, US perspective and regularly talk to people on both sides and ask them directly
- it's not as bad as it was in the last several months
- it's still very hard to get noticed, get interviews, etc there's so much noise on both sides that personal references are much more important than front door applications. This was always the case but much more now
- there were previously a lot of jobs for low agency people who were good at doing what they were told and meeting specs, AI is taking these as if you are willing to spend hours per week writing specs and checking results then tokens are better bang for buck than freelance devs now
- approximately all the demand now is for directly AI related plays and even people who get them don't feel secure because the whole industry feels so unstable and bubbly, but there's no money in anything not AI now
> it's not as bad as it was in the last several months
I think this needs to be caveated by the fact that the job market is seasonal. The beginning of the year is usually the best part for jobs since departments have shiny new budgets, with a boost again around March-April as people quit after getting their bonuses triggering of another set of churn.
This matches my experience as well as a sr. Ruby/Python engineer (NE USA based)
The market was pretty barren in late 2025, but wasn't too terrible in Jan 2026 and I progressed nicely through two interview processes. Got an offer from one. Made it to the final round with the other but timeframes did quite not align.
I was curious about this aspect. Lot of companies have fiscal years (and, presumably, budgets) that do not start at the same time as the calendar year.I'll bite: 15.5 years tech experience across SRE, SWE, PM, PGM, & strategic initiatives-adjacent things. Last roles was Director/Principal level. Last projects were driving hundreds of millions of dollars worth of portfolio acquisition integrations (successfully) at a $5B public company. NYC metro area but I've been remote for 13 years. No degree, self-taught, first real tech role acquired when I was recruited after hacking a company back in 2010. Laid off in Feb, though garden leave ran through April.
I've had mixed results overall. Primarily looking at senior+ TPM, TPGM, SI roles. My network is hard to leverage due to being remote for so long. Lots of cold applications. 25% of applications got recruiter responses within a day, 25% within a week, 50% blocked at ATS, ghosted, or hiring being re-evaluated. Not as many direct recruiter outreaches as I've received in the past.
From the JD side, salaries seem to be more stratified and requirements, even for lower roles, seems to be higher than before. I've seen quite a few requests for 10+ years experience for mid-level PGM roles. In loose convos with friends, everyone wants a big name on a resume but no longer will pay a premium to get it.
No degree seems to be a bigger gate now than it was the last time I was searching. Being a generalist also seems to be more of a risk but I'm sure that's at least partly a fault in my own framing. I do not play the LinkedIn game well. My major contributions have been either inside a company (internally-focused, hard to share publicly or company-specific), mildly popular open source dev work (>100 stars), or things actually used everywhere but no one cares because it's not "real" dev work (created puppetlabs-firewall module, 10M+ downloads, adopted as part of Puppet Enterprise, used globally, no one cares). Without a strong public profile in a specific direction, I've been told I read as too hard to quantify.
Overall, it seems "bad" in that everyone is battling uncertainty about where things are going and being more vigilant to avoid the wrong hire. Credentials and resume pedigree seem to matter more than ever and roles are much more vertically aligned than I've seen them in the past. If you're good, with some amount of credentials, and a lot of vertical ownership then you'll probably be fine though it might take longer. If you're a generalist who's hard to pin down, you might be in for some pain.
I did have one surprise rejection during a screening call due to the fact that I had 4 years of compsci but no degree. I don't recall that happening before in ~30 years. I don't believe it was listed as a hard requirement, else I wouldn't have applied.
My (small sample size) experience was that the "nice to have" lists of keyword soup got larger, but companies remained pretty flexible about them. Probably because for most roles, LLMs can help developers paper over these experience gaps.ie - React shops were cool with my recent Vue experience as a substitute, since I was primarily a backend guy anyway
Not rejecting your experiences, just adding to the anecdata
There's no monolithic "Job Market", so specific details matter. I have not been tracking details too closely but here are two things I am tracking:
- CRUD generation by running through JIRA tickets and clearing backlogs seem to be replaced by agentic workflows. So if you were an extremely productive dev who would machete your way through CRUD and API integrations, agentic workflows do it better, faster and for cheaper. I can point CC, Codex (Cursor in progress) at design specifications and it can turn those into perfect Django apps with well written test cases like there's no tomorrow. It might not make sense for such a business to continue to hire humans to do the same work
- Tokens for frontier models over the API are really expensive. I am personally aware of some companies that have monthly high five figure token expenses and one company that has a monthly six five figure token expense.
It's still worth it because they are churning out code 24x7 vs a typical human's 8x5 if you're putting in the right workflows, guardrails in place - that's a 4x productivity gain.
You're getting done in a month, what a full quarter would require humans to do. However, the company still has to pay for that and unless they are signing up 4x more paying net new customers every month with 0 churn, engineers have to be let go to pay for those tokens.
But how do they scale the reviewing of the agentic output? Or they just blindly trust it and worst case scenario they get to write a sob story on HN about how Claude has deleted the production db?
> But how do they scale the reviewing of the agentic output? Or they just blindly trust it and worst case scenario they get to write a sob story on HN about how Claude has deleted the production db?
Thats a fantastic question. Here's my take: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47917314 - would love your thoughts on it.
In short, I think you're asking a billion dollar question - how do we solve the verification, validation, and QA bottleneck?
The way I handle it for my personal projects is I invest tremendous time and effort into writing thorough test and validation suites.
I bet the next billion dollar companies will be those addressing this verification, validation, and QA bottleneck.
A company can operate aimlessly for a long time and carry along due to inertia and/or monopoly position. So chances are nobody (competent) is reviewing it.
Have the agents review their own output, obviously. What could go wrong
Having a decent linkedin profile, and getting regular contacts by recruiters on linkedin is the way.
Those recruiters tend to be internal recruiters working directly for the company, which I find less pushy/annoying to deal with, and they tend to be already somewhat keen on you by the time they contact you, because they have already decided you are an appealing candidate. They'll generally fast-track you to an interview, not make you fill in some long ATS application form, keep in contact regularly, etc. - it is a much better experience than cold "applying" via an ATS / workday portal and having that go into a black hole.
I'd say, if you're not regularly getting recruiters contacting you on linkedin every week, your profile isn't very good and you should fix it until you do.
It amuses me a bit when people complain about linkedin post in the newsfeed being lame (which they are), or reminiscing about the old days when people would have their email addresses next to loud warnings saying "do not contact me if you are a recruiter!!!".
It turns out, the only thing worse than being contacted by recruiters is not being contacted by recruiters. It only takes a second to respond with a polite "no thanks, not looking right now, maybe another time!", and it is far easier to start engaging with a steady stream of regular contacts than trying to create that stream when you need it.
Hiring is now by filter. Corporations do not try to hire good people, they just avoid hiring questionable people. In other words they are looking for the lowest common denominator.
If you do not think this is true, then ask yourself whether the company is attempting to use AI. THAT IS WHAT THEY WANT AND VALUE. The safer and easier you are as hire the better you will be.
So yes. You were probably hired because you are not a super genius and because you don't have a fancy company name. Not despite it, but because of it.
The question I have is why do I now think many corporations are "too stupid to succeed"? I know they will not fail, but the panicky rush for the supposed safety of AI is stunning.
Totally depends on where you are and your past experience. Being in the US puts you at a huge advantage compared to just about anywhere.
Maybe you're just lucky.
Depends how you look at it. In tech its probably a lot easier get a job in most of e.g. Eastern Europe, of course unless you are at the top even (where the competition is higher) even adjusted by CoL salaries are much lower.
I have been wondering if my LinkedIn just happens to hit all of the right content somehow. I've been afraid to post or change anything just in case I upset some secret balance!
I get a ton of hits too on linkedin if you want to compare or contrast ever
Do you mind sharing how does your LinkedIn look like? Do you regularly post? I'd really like to know this as im struggling with this.
Wife is a lead motion designer, ex Bumble etc. 6+ months of no job results in NYC. Not sure what's going on honestly, all very slow. Any tips welcome :)
I've been looking for 4 months and only had one phone screen from HR. Cybersecurity in Raleigh, my last employer was MAG 7. My particular problem is I took off 6 years to be a stay-at-home parent.
Email in my bio, I’m in the triangle and would love to connect. I know some cyber folks who I can link you up with.
People like you are wonderful!
:) just trying to share a little kindness!
Can't you simply fill that gap on your resume with something made up? "Self employed", "freelancer", "stealth startup", "confidential employer" etc.
How would the companies ever know?
They'd presumably ask for more details and/or references, at which point you would be hopelessly enmeshed in a web of lies of your own making.
They will run a background check listing all your past jobs, with the exact title you had, and start-end dates.
Hard to verify self-employment
Are you involved in DefCon? There's probably a local chapter that would help you get in touch with the right people.
Also, I totally wish I could afford to be a stay at home parent. I'm sure you made the right choice with those 6 years!
I was able to get 2 offers last year after a 4 year break (distributed systems), but it was difficult to get thru front doors, references make a bigger difference nowadays.
I took a position 1 level down from previous to pay the bills. Am now interviewing for positions 2 above since I’m already performing at that level and my current company is too bureaucratic to bump me quick enough.
Having them reach out to you is key. Most job postings get thousands of applicants. I don’t think it’s possible to screen them. I just waded through the first 20 till I found someone who would work and hired him. I most certainly could have done better if I wanted to do a lot of filter and screen legwork. When they reach out you’re skipping the hardest 13mo of the job search.
To anyone considering quitting, search first.
I took your point to be "hirers would rather that job seekers contact them directly than look through resumes", but then your example is one where no one contacted you and you hired without looking through many resumes anyway. That doesn't really prove your point, and makes it sound like advice for people who don't much care who they hire.
Anyway, if people start to follow the advice of reaching out directly, that channel will become exactly as clogged as the job postings.
They meant hirers contacting future employees.
> I just waded through the first 20 till I found someone who would work and hired him.
You get lucky, sometimes. But I also watch that - that mostly leads to "hire someone, can them within 3 months, recycle that job ad". I've seen companies who have taken the same position on and off their Careers page 3+ times a year (for the same req, to be clear, not company growth).
> Currently I’m waiting for a final decision from another fully remote company and I’m in midstage with 2 more.
At the top you said you had a new job after a week, then why are you waiting on a second and continuing interviewing with two other companies.
Yes I took a not ideal job while I continue interviewing for better ones.
[flagged]
The employee's goal here isn't to make the employer feel proud, it's to exchange their services for money.
If the employer wants an employee they can feel proud of, well, that's a service too, and one they can purchase with money, if they choose.
Judging by the OPs comments, the employer could easily retain them if they offered them remote and a bit more comp.
It’s on the employer to retain talent.
I'm sure the company is only doing what's best for the employees. How ungrateful of them.
I tried paying my mortgage in pride, unfortunately the bank did not accept it.
Manager spotted.
Good thing I don't work just for their benefit.
Fuck My employer, and yours, and theirs
They certainly think the same about you. We could all be gone with no severance by tonight if they felt like it. We owe them nothing.
Are you for real? Employees owe employers nothing more than their labor for their last paycheck.
There is a lot of "spam" jobs.
You see the same offer by the same company for months! with the same generic reject (seriously I think no even check the resume or whatever!).
Then, a lot of fake I-am-a-AI "companies and middleman and such things.
Ironically, I have been contacted more by somebody looking here in hn than in all the job boards!
I think Wellfound (f/k/a AngelList) is doing this.
The jobs advertised on there are real...
I'd been on the job market four months. Every day I did the rounds: Levels, Wellfound, YC/jobs, Glassdoor, Indeed, LinkedIn.
It is what it is, as a crappy jobs market.
Wellfound? I didn't ever hear from anything from their job ads.
And I'm pretty certain that whatever Wellfound/AngelList was, it has become a company that just markets resume writing services, resume review services, all sorts of other services that draw in your money somehow.
Why do I say that?
120+ applications on Wellfound since then. Crickets. Absolutely nothing.
One day I got an email, "Your profile has been viewed!". Weird, never seen an email like that from Wellfound. Indeed, "You have 1 profile view in the last 90 days".
Huh. 120+ applications, 120+ times me answering filling out Wellfound's content questions on "why you would be a good fit for this role", "tell us about x and y and z", no interviews, no contact, only ONE company has ever even viewed my profile (and for what it's worth, it's not a company that has any positions open).
Well, maybe my answers suck, you say. Maybe my resume isn't as impressive as I think it is.
But similar answers and the same resume get me fairly steady hits on every other site I mentioned, I've got to multiple final rounds, I've been explicitly told I was hirable, I was just the number two, I was "in the top three".
And to be clear, many of the companies I see on WF are advertising on other sites too.
My suspicion? WF does take job listings, but they also harvest them from other sites - the job is real, but there's no-one from the employer reviewing the applications to their "phantom" job... and meanwhile all people like me are doing are providing content for WF to harvest and train models for their AI-driven resume writing and review service and other products.
My AI video interview? Viewed... zero times.
Huh.
I have spoken to a couple of founders in the last few months and what I keep hearing isn't "we're not hiring" but "we're hiring fewer juniors and being pickier about the ones we take." The bar for what a screen actually tests for moved a lot in the last 18 months and most companies haven't caught up. Its like everyone has so much to absorb before they can decide who to pick. Most down-selected candidates have gone through 5-6 rounds of interview in their selection process.
I'm kinda looking at jobs available (Europe):
- AI (as in: stupid AI wrappers "disrupting" shit)
- FinTech
- Gambling
- AI in FinTech
That's about 99% of jobs advertised. No idea how hard it's to get hired, but even jobs on offer are shitty.
Is this specifically for software development ? Are you just looking at large companies or also medium sized stuff that may hire in house but not be super well known ?
Software development. Looking just at a filtered search for "backend/fullstack"
And it’s been like this since ~2023
Most people on Earth would trade up to your idea of a shitty job.
I don't succumb to statements of performative moral superiority.
(I do succumb to feelings of hunger, so I might end up at one of those shitty jobs anyway)
Right, that was basically my point.
Reminds me of back a few years browsing job boards and the only people posting jobs were blockchain companies for some reason.
Ragebait. Haven't been contacted by a single recruiter in years. The only time is someone trying to sell me their shitty interview course/grad school program.
And yet, there are other people prepared to say they continue to be contacted by recruiters currently.
I'm contacted by recruiters not constantly, but steadily. But they all want me to accept a pay cut of about 50% for a contract role of 3-6 months half way across the country.
I get one a week minimum, hundreds per year. I don’t follow up often enough to know whether they are real and separate etc though.
Appreciate the anecdote and your other comments on HN. But I strongly suspect you are incredibly atypical based on your background and previous work experience in ways that would tremendously down weight the probability that any part of your experience with recruiters would apply to even above average engineers.
Thanks for posting this, it has made me reflect. I think that’s a fair point.
Yup totally organic.
This is anecdotal and purely vibes based so YMMV but my view is that it’s a lot worse looking if you’re restricting yourself to just Big Tech like all of the programming subreddits do. There’s tons of companies outside that sphere who need engineers, but too many programmers thing it’s MAANG or bust.
I am sure the smaller companies are inundated with applications too and have to be very choosy, with high rejection rates.
I think geography and industry will have a large influence on the job market.
I get contacted by recruiters for remote (USA) jobs in all kinds of industries, mostly not ones that I have any experience in.
Those are scams.
My multiple rounds of interviews beg to differ.
Yeah definitely this. I work in silicon verification and there's strong demand, weak supply and easy to get a job. My impression is it's very different in e.g. web frontend dev.
Nearly 10 years of experience at Microsoft, I've been looking for a remote position for almost a year.
Even just finding appropriate openings has been next to impossible. Every company seems to be looking for either a generalist (lots of full-stack) or a senior in an exact specialized bucket and stack. My role at Microsoft was a sort of specialized databases/compilers/functional programming hybrid, but without clear buzzwords no one seems interested. What was once a frequent stream of corporate recruiter messages dried up a little over a year ago too.
My suspicion is that things are a lot better for non-remote positions in the usual hubs.
Personally, i have stopped trying and retired about 9-10 months ago. There's nothing there, i think the whole thing is dead.
it was running on fumes for almost a decade, now we are really at the end times...
Time to pivot
retired?
Yes just pulled the plug. Now mostly travelling and meeting people (not even drinking, because Ozempic totally killed all the joy of doing it).
Have you tried freelancing? Curious if that has seen an uptick or fall.
When I was laid off as a senior fullstack developer I received a few calls and interviews. There was one time when I received two competing offers with prestigious companies but both required relocation.
My learning about JavaScript employment is that, for the most part, it’s permanently a beginner’s area of software. If you have done that kind of work forever you have some hard choices to make: pretend to be an expert at really beginner things or wait a really long time for extremely rare opportunities to open. So I don’t do that work anymore. My 6 months of unemployment was largely self inflicted.
My other learning about software employment is that when you enter management your technical skills in a given language matter so much less. Other generalized factors become more important like strong communication skills, multitasking endurance, soft skills, a wide distribution of technical knowledge your developers won’t have.
It's K shaped, like the economy.
Not sure why you are being downvoted. This is my experience as well. If you have experience at FAANG doing “foundational work” (read: datacenter engineering, core software infrastructure, multi zone computing, point of presence management) you are still in high demand. Many of the people I know in such areas are going to the big hyperscalers to build the infrastructure to run AI inference. There are not a lot of people who have experience doing this stuff and that domain is in very high demand.
I created this post because my experience is the complete opposite.
The logically consistent explanation for both your experience and my experience is that you are on the other side of the K as people who are in demand and I am on the same side of the K as people in demand.
My guess is that one of the following applies: 1. You do not live silicon valley 2. You do not work at a FAANG 3. You have not built foundational infrastructure
I think if all three of the above are true, you are in demand to build AI hyperscalers. The trillions of dollars going into datacenters has to be built and managed by humans.
I have nothing to do with any of those points.
Do you know how to break into such fields, for someone having experience operating on-prem infra at a smaller scale?
Unfortunately no. I made the jump in 2022 from doing on-prem at a small company to doing on-prem at a hyperscaler when software engineers were very in demand and got placed in an organization which does physical datacenter design and core software infrastructure (software defined networking, service discovery, host management, datacenter failovers).
Back in 2022 you could make the moves, but I think now it is very hard to make the jump.
Part of the issue with building and running very large on-prem infrastructure is that you can only get experience by doing it. It not like you can run thousands of racks in multiple datacenters as a personal side project.
You didn't give a lot of info
How much are you getting paid?
Going into the office is important too, are you in sf?
I'm not in SF. I'm making mid $100k and interviewing for remote jobs in the $170k+ range.
OK shitty job market means different things to different people.
For my self, I was making over 300k, took a job (remote) at a little over 200, and now struggling to get that much and considering jobs at 170-180. I think the job market sucks, those jobs paying 300+ would normally respond to me aren't.
I don't even know what I would do with that much money. Maybe have 4 or 5 kids.
Retire earlier?
Honestly in a high COL city in the US, having 4-5 kids would be doable on $300k TC but it wouldn't be easy to give them more than a middle class lifestyle at best.
Elsewhere in the US in smaller towns, I could see it being much more feasible.
I am in an MCOL and raising 2 currently on about half of that.
Yeah, this is my current read on the market. If you're looking for typical $400k senior software eng role at a public tech company - you're going to be having a really hard time. Meta closed many roles and is laying off 8000. The rest of the public tech market seems to be following similar.
If you're looking at 200k/yr roles in SF that are in person and looking closer to 996 than not - plenty seem to be hiring and trying to recruit. Downside? You have to be in SF 6 days/week and it's shit pay for the region. (You will likely have to do roommates because $200k/yr is borderline for a decent apartment in SF now due to 20% yoy price hikes)
I say the following not to brag but to offer up some more perspective for you: you’re comp is in the lower-mid range of the market. Comp was there for remote, startup eng positions back in 2017.
As you move up in comp, the market actually gets more difficult, not just because the market is more competitive but because some companies won’t even interview qualified engineers with FAANG on their resume because they don’t believe they can afford them.
So I can understand why you might have an easier time compared to other engs.
What did you do to start getting traction for senior positions? You were struggling in the beginning of the year.
I've never had a problem getting contacted. I've done some self reflection, and practice and now I'm much better able to communicate technically. It also helped that my last project before I was laid off was pretty wide reaching and impressive and being able to talk about that has made things a lot easier. I still haven't gotten a job I want, so I don't have a lot to offer you, but I'm getting better at interviewing.
Remote is the big variable.
I am currently employed, remote but not in IT. I have been applying for various jobs the last 6 months because there isn't much growth left for me at my current company. I am a really strong candidate for what I am applying for. If I apply to a local company, I get contacted almost immediately. If I apply for a remote job it is crickets.
I think for remote, you are going to have to be recruited or have a strong network tie because that is the only way to filter the volume of applications. Cold applying is just a waste of your time and energy.
Finding crappy jobs is easy. Finding a decent job is proving challenging.
Crappy I don't mean only job in bad companies, but sometimes job in good companies but a bad situation or project. For example one of my recent-ish experiences was in an excellent company but the project was pure firefighting, the people that knew the thing well were leaving, and the company policies were getting in the way of the project, so I got hired to "replace" people, this just sucked and in the end didn't work.
My company rarely laid off full-time employees, but we are mostly cutting contractors or cutting their contracts without extending their work. But every full-time employees seem worried.
From a different perspective: I do volunteer resume reviews and some coaching in a local group. Luck and timing play a role, of course.
I do see a lot of resumes that are really bad, though. Other people need a lot of help communicating during interviews. Some people go through their careers getting jobs during easy times where hiring managers will overlook a lot of things and be willing to take a chance on candidates with not so great resumes or communication skills that need help. That all stops in a job market like this where hiring managers aren’t going to waste their time on anything other than the 5-10 best applicants they get.
There’s a lot of cope material out there that shifts all of the blame to the companies: Stories about “ghost jobs” or beliefs about nepotism or “you dodged a bullet” comfort when someone doesn’t get hired. With half of the people I talk to getting them to accept that they need to improve how they’re applying and interviewing instead of blaming external factors is most of the battle. For the other half it can be things like focusing too narrowly (only FAANG, only remote, only a big title, only a compensation number they got 3 years ago during COVID and now they don’t want anything less) or some times just poor luck.
What sector/size are your offers? The "who is hiring" is shifting. Many large corps are now feeling a couple of squeezes from more expensive capital, to finding their footing in a quickly changing world, to over-hiring, to market pressures to "AI-ify" themselves (doubles as excuse to layoff caused by former three squeezes).
Mid-market saas seems to be getting crushed at the moment for different reasons.
Startups and the AI shops can't hire fast enough, but also seem to be looking at different candidate profiles.
This contract I took was out of town for me so I’ve been commuting 300km week on/week off. Smallish “college town” in Australia that used to provide steady IT work no longer does. I am older 50+ so I don’t know whether that is a factor.
I was using Seek.com to get jobs but it’s increasingly difficult to get past the fake jobs, the resume harvesting and the thousands of AI or overseas applications.
The only real solution seems to be referrals or recruiters.
From my perspective the job market here is brutal.
The economy is bad.
It's super super hard for companies first and foremost, forget employees for a second. The environment is extremely hostile to private industry right now
You we’re already a “warm” candidate.
Because in the last year you responded to Linkedin messages from Recruiters, this boosted your visibility in other recruiters’ searches.
That’s something I think every working person should do: if they get outreach from recruiters, respond to all messages. Maybe even jump on a call/interview.
> I constantly get contacted by recruiters
> I got laid off recently and I had a new job within a week
> Currently I’m waiting for a final decision from another fully remote company and I’m in midstage with 2 more.
> How unusual is this experience?
Yes, unusual. Most people aren't this active with their interviewing. You basically have a full deal pipeline.
i never have weirdness people describe like AI interviews etc
it IS easier to have built up a resume but each time im hired they joke my resume is shit...
this stuff can be really dynamic though as in you can be lucky to run into nice recruiter, live somewhere with more work available, etc. etc.
i dont think its in 1 state, good or bad. it has a lot of dependencies.
I saw this shitstorm brewing back in Jul 2025. Gave up on finding a job. Started 100% looking for cofounding (or at a minimum being a founding engineer in a startup). Networked like crazy. Landed exactly what I wanted. Cool startup, motivated people around me, money to burn on crazy projects.
If I had stayed for job hunting, I would be unemployed IMO.
hey, could you please share some tips with the "networking" part?
i'm also pivoting in this direction after attending too many sessions and networking, but getting it a point of employment does not seem a reality.
You have to go to conferences and meetups. Paid conferences are worth is most of the time IMO. I spent $500 for the most expensive one and it landed me a really good offer later.
Go to conferences and shake hands with people, try to be friendly and ask questions. Later check companies of people you've met for openings - and ask the guy you met, directly, to put a word in for you, pretty please.
Works really well.
Might vary depending on where you are and where you're applying to. I'm from the UK, spent a year and 500+ applications applying to remote or Gulf roles. Turned up nothing.
Its bad for people on the margins, which is a lot of people these days.
Yeah, I think so. It’s so bad that I pass 2nd and 3rd round interviews and when I email about it the recruiters email bounces alongside several cc’s that were on the thread.
There is a big impact on of the country also on the job market, please select it wisely for the remote job.
Recruiters are ghosting me if i won't reply to their LinkedIn messages same day. I've applied to 65 jobs in the last month and landed three phone screenings and zero interviews.
I have 5 years experience including two at an F500 and two as a tech lead on my current team.
In 2022, with less than 2 years experience, i had competing offers all over 100k within a month of starting to apply places.
I've been applying off-and-on for a full year, consistently for a month.
Sure seems pretty bleak to me
I've been in the industry almost 30 years and the job market we have now is the worst I've ever seen. This includes the dot com crash, great recession, and COVID times.
Fortunately, I am still employed, but I am looking.
Yeah I'm employed but once this project I'm on wraps up this year, I'll be asked to work on a project that violates my personal ethics.... So really hoping i can find something by the fall, we'll see
It isn't.
As someone who has made hiring and firing decisions at the Board level, the people who are the most severely affected were either (in no order):
1. Working remotely in North America but demanding Bay Area salaries without the chops to justify it.
2. Working in Western Europe (they complain more about stuff irrelevant to the business but shy away from business critical decision making when offered the opportunity, unlike their Czech, Polish, Romanian, and Bulgarian peers despite us paying €90k-150k TCs across the EU, and Warsaw+Prague becoming Berlin level expensive).
3. Bootcamp grads who never fixed skills issues (foundational knowledge is foundational for a reason).
4. Getting paid Bay Area or Seattle salaries while living in LCOL regions like RTP. The whole point of a Cary office was inshoring - the talent was meh but if we needed a cheap QA engineer or move ops for a stagnant part of our business in 2019 we'd move that job and BU there. They didn't realize they were viewed as at the bottom of the totem pole skills wise.
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So long as you keep your skills sharp, have foundational computer science and engineering knowledge, and live in the primary tech hubs globally, it's a pretty good market.
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> What, in your opinion are the “foundational” CS skills the #3 people are missing
If you've survived this long, I think you will be fine. But I'd recommend anyone from a bootcamp to take an OS course comparable to CS61 [0], an algos course comparable to CS170 [1], and a programming language design course comparable to CS421 [2].
There is foundational design and architectural patterns and knowledge that are taught in OS, Programming Language Design, and Algos classes that cannot be taught in a bootcamp.
My recommendation for people in your shoes is to do GATech's OMSCS or UPenn's online MCIT to learn some of the foundational stuff you were never introduced to at a bootcamp.
[0] - https://cs61.seas.harvard.edu/site/2025/
[1] - https://cs170.org/
[2] - https://cs421-sp26-web.pages.dev/
I feel so much disdain for workers coming from your words. I hope to never work for someone like you
He's a resident clown who thinks he's hot shit because he's "a VC". Doesn't understand he has no respect from anyone here, lmao.
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And you’re still on HN after posting you wanted your account deleted.
Who are you mate? You think you’re someone special? Hahahahh
He’s a bozo who said he would delete his account.
And yet he’s still among us. Pathetic lmao.
As someone maybe in group (2). What kind of stereotyping is this? And why do you want to have non-complaining worker drones? Maybe older people from those countries are good at keeping their head down in soviet style work configurations, but is this the kind of company you want to have?
I'd more guess it is that there is a severe income tax advantage, B2B contracts are also easier in eastern Europe.
> why do you want to have non-complaining worker drones
We want opinionated engineers. But we want engineers who will respond to a slack message after 5pm during a P1 escalation.
> I'd more guess it is that there is a severe income tax advantage
Somewhat but not enough to move the needle because depending on the local government, they are matching cross-EU subsidizes.
> older people from those countries are good at keeping their head down in soviet style work configurations
Other way around. The Western European employees want a heads down and no input but high paying job.
CEE peers will push back and be opinionated but also try to think from a business outcomes perspective.
> soviet style work configurations
Which ironically is closer to German business and work culture instead of in Eastern Europe.
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> Of course if you pay someone 135k vs 70k real income
Salaries at the 75th percentile and above for SWEs are kept constant across Europe.
Heck, the companies for which I am a board member as well as companies at I have previously been management or line-level engineers all pay in the €130K-€170K TC range in Germany as well as across the CEE.
This is waaaaaay above TC for the average European in tech and we know it.
It sucks but the reality is the talent density in Western Europe is weaker than in the CEE, and it is mindset driven.
A German SWE wants a 9-5. A Czech SWE wants to build the next JetBrains.
We want to hire or fund the latter, not the former.
It's idk 10% for B2B in Poland and more than 50% in western Europe. Of course if you pay someone 135k vs 70k real income the first person will put in more effort.
In western Europe you'd just have to specify the availability requirements and they'd do it there as well. You'd just have to pay for it.
Edit: If you pay someone 150k€ in Germany what they see after-tax is just not that much. They are going to compare this with the 9-5 IGM position (when it is available...). Why not just admit that you don't want to pay equivalent wages for accessing the western european market?
> If you pay someone 150k€ in Germany what they see after-tax is just not that much
For Germany this in not true, I have direct experience of this. Your income is really high at 150k€, even taking in account all taxes you pay if you’re self–employed (plus insurances, social security contributions, etc). You’re way above what you would get from the German market, unless you go into management.
The IGM 9-5 35 hour work-week 30+ holidays job pays nearly 100k€. Add the employer social contributions and it is 116k€. He wants good work ethic so I'd say at least 25% more work time, probably less holidays, say 20. The IGM job scaled for this would be already at 150k€. He wants availability at 5pm US time, that's (best-case) 23:00 here, so night-shift work. The IGM job would pay double for this or something (this is how you get air traffic controllers earning 150k€ here).
> Why not just admit that you don't want to pay equivalent wages for accessing the western european market?
Is it his responsibility? If some countries have a better tax policy, why should he not take advantage of it, and ultimately end up in a situation that benefits both the employee and his company?
Well, if he says that a solution for me would be to move to a country with better tax policy. If he says that it is some issue with western European work mentality, that won't help because my CV would show that I am western European.
> If he says that it is some issue with western European work mentality, that won't help because my CV would show that I am western European.
If you are actually talented, have a good work ethic, and the track record to show that then get a job that relocates you to London.
That is your only option if you want to stay in Western Europe as a SWE long term.
> get a job that relocates you to London
This is terrible advice. Source: been there, done that (worked my ass off to waste half my TC on taxes and the other half on cost of living). I ended up moving to a low-tax Eastern European country so I can actually feel like I'm being fairly compensated for said talent and work ethic.
I don't actually see how your advice improves the situation - the net disposable income you'll end up with is about the same you'll have from being lazy in Western Europe - except at the very least, some Western European countries are actually nice to live in. If you're gonna be poor anyway, may as well be poor in a nicer place.
>But we want engineers who will respond to a slack message after 5pm during a P1 escalation.
Then you're going to have to pay, aren't you.
We do. €130K-€170K TC is at the top of the range across ALL of Europe outside of HFT. Even London Investments Bankers don't make that much outside the 75th percentile and above.
Money ain't a problem, attitude is.
The Western Europeans with the right attitude either move to America (eg. I'm sponsoring the O-1 of 2 founders who are shifting from London to SF for that reason) or end up becoming leadership for American companies in Western Europe.
75th percentile pay doesn't go as far as it used to, tbh. I'm on about that in Western Europe and am looking for more as my costs have increased massively.
And even though I could easily move to London (modulo family) I wouldn't as the wages there are much worse for my specialty.
Honestly based on talking to friends and former colleagues I think you're probably underpaying for many Western European markets, TC of 200k is where it's at now.
I'll leave your attitude comments out as I don't have enough context to reply effectively.
"Am I the problem? No, it must be the employees"
Hey, care to share some company names if you're still hiring?
You're a Russian national (though I do recognize you appear to be opposed to the status quo back in Russia). Sadly it's too difficult to hire a Russian passport holder.
I’m a bootcamp grad (although it was an intense 5-night a week, year long bootcamp, not some 6-week build-a-demo class). I have a college degree but it’s in the arts.
I do try to continually improve my skill set, refresh on design patterns, etc. I’m currently employed and have been for the last six years. I don’t really know if I fall in category 3 or not.
What, in your opinion are the “foundational” CS skills the #3 people are missing?
Translation: for almost everyone not living in a major tech hub, it's not a good market.
I.e. "for most people..."
lol you might work for my company re: point 4
Naw, I would never work there unless I was given Jeetu or Ammar's job.
That said, you seem like someone who actually has the calibre to be hired at a good Security, DevTools, or Infra company.
This is my throwaway, but my two cents to you is to leave asap and try to find a way to work at a company that values OS and kernel level knowledge (probably GCP atm), but that would require relocating to the Bay or NYC.
Why do you even hire in Europe when the smartest people are in the Bay Area?
In some subindustries within tech (eg. Cybersecurity), the best engineering talent is now in Eastern Europe, Israel, and India and not the Bay.
Additionally, diaspora engineers whose parents are growing old are starting to move back to the old country to be close with them.
I see you read the srinivas narayan article :P
He's moving back close to where I stay.
Many others from the big labs are moving back to their core EE field into stuff like optical networks for data centers and so on by the way. That is a lot of the attrition.
> I see you read the srinivas narayan article
Nope.
At his level and position I doubt that is actually the primary reason simply because at his level, a way would have been found to retain him despite family issues (eg. opening an OpenAI tech office in Bangalore, Hyderabad, or Chennai or make him GM for OpenAI in India). Something else is going on with Srinivas' departure - either pushed out by Fidji or planning on starting his own thing.
That said, in my peer group I would say around 25-35% of people left for the family reason - especially after how COVID was handled in India. At one point, Google leadership was offering to match MTV salaries for engineers and PMs who Google wanted to retain but who decided to shift back to India to care for family during and slightly after the pandemic.
> Many others from the big labs are moving back to their core EE field into stuff like optical networks for data centers and so on by the way. That is a lot of the attrition.
My hunch is he is probably leaving to work on something like this or an adjacent space, but admitting as such would leave him open to litigation. That said, given his age I'd assume family decisions are also somewhat playing a role.
Ofc, some Indian diaspora types do leave for other reasons (eg. Sridhar Vembu and his divorce).
On the EE and optical side, diaspora founders are actually serious about leaving the US for Hyderabad simply because the Indian vintages of American deeptech funds plus the RDI are giving ridiculously competitive funding terms for startups in that space.
Why would it lead to litigation?
And yeah that makes sense on the returning from the bay part. Many of those people ended up being fodder for startups here to poach. Work with a few of them.
Most jobs don’t require the smartest people.
Why even post such an absurd comment?
I find it absurd how she generalized that Western Europe is complaining a lot and less pragmatic than whatever. The same for working remote but not having the chops like the 'Bay Area'. Could have been a serious question as well, why do you find it absurd?
I didn't see a reference to any of that in the question.
I'm mocking the unsupported declaration about "best people are in the Bay area."
ha! thanks
It’s only tough for people who want 400k plus TC and people straight out of college.
I'm doing OK, I can get phone screens / interviews at big tech. Can't manage to get any from AI labs.
My current company is highly abusive and is doing a bunch of saber rattling over layoffs and I'm honestly fed up at this point.
They want us to work 7 days a week and are like "ohh maybe we'll lay half the company off, we'll see". And all of the reorgs are making my life fucking hell. (It's a large company that's run by an asshole. Guess which one)
The hard part is just getting the time to prepare for interviews properly. I'm not even bothering interviewing at the more leetcode heavy companies right now.
Personally my experience has been kinda brutal, having been struggling to find a new job for a few months now. Interviews haven't been that rare all things considered, but as someone who's neurodivergent, it feels like the chances of me getting through one successfully is lower than ever now, especially when there are like 3-5 rounds of meetings and calls to get through.
I'd also say it's a mix of not having the best company experience in the world (even the larger ones I worked for didn't use cutting edge tech), not having enough war stories about times of adversity, and having to compete with both top tier engineers from FAANG companies and liars just using AI to make up everything.
But based on other people's experiences, it seems like some people get way luckier than others in this job market. I know people who've gotten a job in a week or two without any hassle and others who've been out of work for months or years now. One of my friends had probably the best luck I can imagine in that regard; they got laid off from one job and then a week later found a job in the same exactly industry doing the exact same thing at approximately the exact same salary range. They went from designing brochures and posters for medical companies at one company to designing brochures and posters for medical companies at a direct competitor.
But yeah, it seems like a very tough market right now, and one where success pretty much depends on the stars aligning in the right way.
Post your resume/credentials and university. Pointless to talk outside of that.
I agree that would be helpful but that's too much info for me.
Like many things in life, it's highly situational and individualized. If you have top credential from a top school, your prospects are going to be better than someone with worse credentials, all else equal. Or if your expectations are too highs , things may seem worse.
Were you at a big brand name company before you got laid off?
I was not.
Location probably matters, where are you?
Not a tech center, and I'm talking about USA-remote jobs exclusively.
your experience isn't rare.it's the silent majority.people who land quckily don't post about it.The ones who struggle are loud.
"Hundreds of interviews"is just ongiong price discovery.you were runing the experiment before it mattered. Declined a local offer to stay at your company?That'sjust knowing your leverage.Nothing special.
Good luck on the final round.
you must be neurotypical
"Bad" is relative. It can be more difficult in compressed markets where talent is either in surplus (read: SV, Dub, etc) or where there's a distinct lack of enterprises/startups/whatever providing the surface layer. Given some of the retraction of "warm feelings", esp. re: US contractors in other countries circa American imperialism these days, it can also have a chilling effect on localized markets. But, this is all highly influenced/mutable daily.
> It can be more difficult in compressed markets where talent is either in surplus (read: SV, Dub, etc)
The Bay Area hiring market is extremely hot right now. Most of my peers who have been laid off and people I have laid off landed on their feet within weeks with Base+Bonus being comparable to big tech and some startups giving all-cash TC comparable to Netflix during it's peak.
> Given some of the retraction of "warm feelings"
Why do you say this? Is this coming from personal experience, or anecdotally?
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I think in the past year it’s gotten better if you are already established. 2023 was the worst of it for me.
My experience mid-2024 was pretty much the same, and when I look now things do seem easier to find. The only caveat is the wider white collar market still seems pretty affected. I have a handful of friends in advertising who have been laid off and looking for more than six months.
My friends have told me that here in LA there are positions but many want you to move or commute excessively far, and there's real wage suppression going on. Also, many of the positions are "unicorn" roles, where they want someone with very niche experience. It's an employer's market for them.
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Yes, and going on 4+ decades, now :(
Wow lots of astroturfing going on here.