In my experience, tech employment is incredibly bimodal right now. Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever, but an "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position.
Contrary to what many say, I don't think it's simple as seniors are getting hired and juniors aren't. Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone. The people getting pushed out are the intermediates and seniors who aren't high performers.
I generally tend to interview every year to see what's out there in the world (sometimes I find something worth switching for, other times not). I'm not even looking very hard but have had 4 interviews in the last month.
Personally I think it's a bit more nuanced than senior vs junior (though it is very hard for juniors right now). What I've seen a lot of hunger for is people with a track record of getting their hands dirty and getting things solved. I'm very much a "builder" type dev that has more fun going from 0-v1 than maintaining and expanding scalable, large systems.
From the early start of the last tech boom through the post-pandemic hiring craze I increasingly saw demand for people who where in the latter category and fit nicely in a box. The ability to "do what you must to get this shipped" was less in demand. People cared much more about leetcode performance than an impressive portfolio.
Now reminds me a lot of 2008 in terms of the job market and what companies are looking for. 2008-2012 a strong portfolio of projects was the signal most people looked for. Back then being an OSS dev was a big plus (I found it not infrequently to be a liability in the last decade, better to study leetcode than actually build something).
Honestly, a lot of senior devs lose this ability over time. They get comfortable with the idea that as a very senior hire you don't have to do all that annoying stuff anymore. But the teams I see hiring are really focused on staying lean and getting engineers how are comfortable wearing multiple hats and working hard to get things shipped.
> I'm very much a "builder" type dev that has more fun going from 0-v1 than maintaining and expanding scalable, large systems.
Maintaining and expanding is more challenging, which is why I’ve grown to prefer that. Greenfield and then leaving is too easy, you don’t learn the actually valuable lessons. As experience shows that projects won’t stay in the nice greenfield world, building them can feel like doing illusory work — you know the real challenges are yet to come.
> I'm not even looking very hard but have had 4 interviews in the last month.
How many offers did you receive? Companies have also adopted your strategy: interviewing candidates "to see what's out there" - there's a job I interviewed for that's still open after 10 months.
When I was in corporate I'd talk about cover your ass mode and get'er done mode. And while realistically I know both are necessary, I was always annoyed at the need to have a cya mode. I get a bit of schadenfreude from the thougt of the market being harder for the people who don't seem to have a get'er done mode, and a bit of his at the thought it might be because there's less concern over whom to bother if something needs to be fixed later.
>I generally tend to interview every year to see what's out there in the world (sometimes I find something worth switching for, other times not). I'm not even looking very hard but have had 4 interviews in the last month.
The Pick-Up Artist's Guide to Tech Interviewing, you should be writing.
The first 100 subscribers get a 50% off discount the month of March, you should be announcing on LinkedIn and Tiktok, and making passive income.
The rest of us experienced people with proven track records have to learn algorithms on the weekends despite having white hair.
> Honestly, a lot of senior devs lose this ability over time. They get comfortable with the idea that as a very senior hire you don't have to do all that annoying stuff anymore.
A few years ago, when interest rates were 0% and companies were hiring at an unsustainable rate, I got a lot of criticism for cautioning engineers against non-coding roles. I talked to a lot of people who dreamed of moving into pure architect roles where they advised teams of more junior engineers about what to build, but didn't get involved with building or operating anything.
I haven't kept up with everyone but a lot of the people I know who went that route are struggling now. The work is good until a company decides to operate with leaner teams and keeps the people committing code. The real difficulties start when they have to interview at other companies after not writing much code for 3 years. I'm in a big Slack for career development where it's common for "Architect" and "Principal Engineer" titled people to be venting about how they can't get past the first round of interviews (before coding challenges!) because they're trying to sell themselves as architects without realizing that companies want hands-on builders now.
> I'm not even looking very hard but have had 4 interviews in the last month.
Did you get any offers yet? It seems the issue is not lack of interviews but lack of offers. Many companies are looking for a goldilocks candidate and are happy to pass on anything that doesn't match their ideal candidate
I, too, am able to get interviews. The last time I made a serious search was in 2022-23, and companies were clearly eager to hire at competitive rates. This past fall, they were not. My salary requirements stopped at least two interview processes when the question was raised. In other cases it was not clear that the company was serious about moving forward with hiring for the position at all. A three month search ultimately came up dry, which is fine because I'm currently employed, but I do not think the hiring landscape is promising at all right now.
In your experience, what’s the best way to increase signal? I feel as though a lot of devs struggle with the initial process of getting past screening, drawing attention to projects, etc.
I don’t see this reality in the style of interview being performed at all.
Everyone has seemingly adopted the FAANG playbook for interviewing that doesn’t really select for people who like getting their hands dirty and building. These kinds of interviews are compliance interviews: they’re for people who will put in the work to just pass the test.
There are so many interviews I’ve been in where if I don’t write the perfect solution on the first try, I’ll get failed on the interview. More than ever, I’m seeing interviewers interrupt me during systems or coding interviews before I have a chance to dig in. I’ve always seen a little bit of this, but it seems like the bar is tightening, not on skill, but on your ability to regurgitate the exact solution the interviewer has in mind.
In the past I’ve always cold applied places and only occasionally leaned on relationships. Now I’m only doing the latter. Interviewees are asked to risk asymmetrically compared to employers.
>I generally tend to interview every year to see what's out there in the world (sometimes I find something worth switching for, other times not). I'm not even looking very hard but have had 4 interviews in the last month.
You've been interviewing forever. You're the well practiced pickup artist of job searching. Of course you'll be getting the call backs over the other 1000 applicants who don't have the same experience level applying. You "just know" how to read between the lines and tailor a resume, whip up a cover letter, etc whereas they're making mistakes.
Agreed on the bimodal, but I don't think this is junior vs. senior - I think it's just competence being rooted out.
The majority of engineers, in my hiring experience, failed very simple tests pre-AI. In a world where anyone can code, they're no better than previously non-technical people. The CS degree is no longer protection.
The gap between average and the best engineers now, though, is even higher. The best engineers can visualize the whole architecture in their head, and describe exactly what they want to an AI - their productivity is multiplied, and they rarely get slowed down.
While this could be done by junior or senior, I think junior usually has the slight advantage in being more AI-native and knowing how to effectively prompt and work with AI, though not always.
I see it the opposite way actually with respect to the CS degree. If you earned your CS degree (or any degree) before 2022 or so, the value of that degree is going to grow and grow and grow until the last few people who had to learn before AI are dying out like the last COBOL developers
AI has fundamentally broken the education system in a way that will take decades for it to fully recover. Even if we figure out how to operate with AI properly in an educational setting in such a way that learners actually still learn, the damage from years of unqualified people earning degrees and then entering academia is going to reverberate through the next 50 years as those folks go on to teach...
> The best engineers can visualize the whole architecture in their head, and describe exactly what they want to an AI
I think this must be part of it. I see so many posts about people burning a thousand dollars in AI credits building a small app, and I have no idea why. I use the $20 Claude plan and I rarely run out of usage, and I make all kinds of things. I just describe what I want, do a few back-and-forths of writing out the architecture, and Claude does it.
I think the folks burning thousands of dollars of credits are unable to describe what they want.
> While this could be done by junior or senior, I think junior usually has the slight advantage in being more AI-native and knowing how to effectively prompt and work with AI, though not always.
But juniors don't (usually) have the knowledge to assess if what the AI has produced is ok or not. I agree that anybody (junior or senior) can produce something with AI, the key question is whether the same person has the skills to asses (e.g., to ask the right questions) that the produced output is what's needed.
In my experience, junior + AI is just a waste of money (tokens) and a nightmare to take accountability for.
I was skeptical but I'm really starting to see the productivity benefits now.
I very much follow the pattern of having the whole architecture in my head and describe it to the AI which generates the appropriate code. So now the bottlenecks are all process related: availability of people to review my PRs, security sign offs on new development, waiting on CI builds and deployments, stakeholder validation, etc. etc.
> The majority of engineers, in my hiring experience, failed very simple tests pre-AI
Did you consider tech whiteboard / leetcode interviews are unnatural stressful environments ? Have you gone through a mid/difficult technical appraisal yourself lately ? Try it out just to get an idea how it feels on the other side...
I agree that what you're describing is the required skillset now. But two things I've been unsure of are what that looks like in terms of hiring to test for it, and for how long this remains a moat at all.
So much of tech hiring cargo culting has been built up around leetcode and other coding problems, puzzles, and more. We all pay lip service to systems thinking and architecture, but I question if even those are testing the correct things for the modern era.
And then what happens in a year when the models can handle that as well?
Largely agree, with a bit of clarification. Junior devs can indeed prompt better than some of the old timers, but the blast radius of their inexperienced decisions is much higher. High competence senior devs who embrace the new tools are gonna crush it relative to juniors.
Makes sense. You just reminded me of the article "Why Can’t Programmers... Program?" [1].
Before gen AI, I used to give candidates at my company a quick one-hour remote screening test with a couple of random "FizzBuzz"-style questions. I would usually paraphrase the question so a simple Google search would not immediately surface the answer, and 80% of candidates failed at coding a working solution, which was very much in line with the article. Post gen AI, that test effectively dropped to a 0% failure rate, so we changed our selection process.
> The best engineers can visualize the whole architecture in their head, and describe exactly what they want to an AI
I'd go a step further and say the engineers who, unprompted, discover requirements and discuss their own designs with others have an even better time. You need to effectively communicate your thoughts to coding agents, but perhaps more crucially you need to fit your ever-growing backyard of responsibilities into the larger picture. Being that bridge requires a great level of confidence and clear-headedness and will be increasingly valued.
This stupid industry doesn't have the wherewithal to actually make a good credential and training process like medicine and law, and instead lets everyone come up with their own process to vet people. We could even do it as an apprenticeship model, not like that hasn't served humanity throughout the ages.
I should have a credential I have to maintain every few years, one or two interviews, and that should get me a job.
I have found in the last 3 months that there are two clear tiers of developers in the company I work at, the ones that can code with AI and the ones that can't, and the ones that can't are all going to be unemployed in 6 months.
We have a lot of people where if you gave them clear requirements, they could knock out features and they were useful for that, but I have an army of agents that can do that now for pennies. We don't need that any more. We need people who have product vision and systems design and software engineering skills. I literally don't even care if they can code with any competency.
Btw, if you think that copying and pasting a jira ticket into claude is a skill that people are going to pay you for, that is also wrong. You need to not just be able to use AI to code, you need to be able to do it _at scale_. You need to be able to manage and orchestrate fleets of ai agents writing code.
Someone who jumps higher than expected when the boss demands it?
Someone who works 996 in the office?
Or someone who knows what they’re doing?
I think this is bigger than any individual. It’s just a matter of time before you’re let go. There’s no loyalty from companies at all. Not when they’re seeing higher than expected profits and are still cutting huge percentages of staff every year. There’s no strategy or preference to it. I don’t think this has to do with how you or I perform on the job.
Most people I’ve talked to lately who are still employed are watching out for their job to get cut.
> The retreat challenged the narrative that AI eliminates the need for junior developers. Juniors are more profitable than they have ever been. AI tools get them past the awkward initial net-negative phase faster. They serve as a call option on future productivity. And they are better at AI tools than senior engineers, having never developed the habits and assumptions that slow adoption.
> The real concern is mid-level engineers who came up during the decade-long hiring boom and may not have developed the fundamentals needed to thrive in the new environment. This population represents the bulk of the industry by volume, and retraining them is genuinely difficult. The retreat discussed whether apprenticeship models, rotation programs and lifelong learning structures could address this gap, but acknowledged that no organization has solved it yet.
Thanks for sharing this is the first I’ve seen this. I wish they had expanded on exactly what mid-level might be missing rather then just saying “fundamentals” and “practical intuition”
They're just as capable of typing prompts into AI, but what they don't have is good judgement of what good work/code looks like, so what's the point of asking a junior engineer to do something vs asking the LLM directly?
Because a lot of stuff doesn't need to be good it needs to be done.
Nobody is gonna lose money because some script that generates yaml for the build process every hour nested three loops instead of two. Intern, AI, junior dev, junior dev telling an intern how to use AI, doesn't matter. If it works for the week it'll work for the decade. If someone needs to pick it apart and fix something in a year it'll either take no time because they know enough to do it easily or it'll be a good low stakes learning exercise for a junior.
Everyone wants to think their stuff is important but 99.9% of code is low stakes support code either in applications or in infrastructure around them.
Juniors from non target schools are getting pushed out since the skill floor is too high.
I graduated 9 months ago. In that time I've merged more PRs than anyone else, reduced mean time to merge by 20% on a project with 300 developers with an automated code review tool, and in the past week vibe coded an entire Kubernetes cluster that can remotely execute our builds (working on making it more reliable before putting it into prod).
None of this matters.
The companies/teams like OpenAI or Google Deepmind that are allegedly hiring these super juniors at huge salaries only do so from target schools like Waterloo or MIT. If you don't work at a top company your compensation package is the same as ever. I am not getting promoted faster, my bonus went from 9% to 14% and I got a few thousand in spot bonuses.
From my perspective, this field is turning into finance or law, where the risk of a bad hire due to the heightened skill floor is so high that if you DIDN'T go to a target school you're not getting a top job no matter how good you are. Like how Yale goes to Big Law at $250k while non T14 gets $90k doing insurance defence and there's no movement between the categories. 20-30% of my classmates are still unemployed.
We cannot get around this by interviewing well because anyone can cheat on interviews with AI, so they don't even give interviews or coding assessments to my school. We cannot get around this with better projects because anyone can release a vibe coded library.
It appears the only thing that matters is pedigree of education because 4 years of in person exams from a top school aren't easy to fake.
Can I ask what you and others that posts things like this here -"What are you actually developing?"
People are posting about pull requests, use of AIs, yada yada. But they never tell us what they are trying to produce. Surely this should be the first thing in the post:
- I am developing an X
- I use an LLM to write some of the code for it ... etc.
- I have these ... testing problems
- I have these problems with the VCS/build system ...
Otherwise it is all generalised, well "stuff". And maybe, dare I say it, slop.
I mean you don’t need your first job go to top of the top companies. Your first job is to get you into the industry then you can flourish.
How many juniors OpenAI GDM are going to hire in a year, probably double digits at max, the chances are super slim and they are by nature are allowed to be as picky as they should be.
That being said, I do agree this industry is turning into finance/law, but that won’t last long either. I genuinely can’t foresee what if when AGI/ASI is really here, it should start giving human ideas to better itself, and there will be no incentive to hire any human for a large sum anymore, maybe a single digit individuals on earth perhaps
I’m not sure it is just that, I don’t even see positions listed where I would like to work. For salary ranges, I see lower upper limits than my second best offer three n half years ago. Considering the high inflation, that’s crazy.
I would not mind switching but 1. I don’t see interesting positions 2. they don’t pay well, and only 3. they might not even want me.
It might also be just my niche, but finding a good position feels completely impossible for me.
I am doing cross platform mobile development and I’m wondering how I could transition into backend development or I started even considering the decentralized finance…
Yeah, I don't know if I'd call myself competent (I'm late intermediate/early senior. So the worst of the curve here). But there's a difference between "interviews have gotten a lot harder now" and "I can't even get a response back". It's far, far more in the latter.
My resume isn't bad on paper either. It's not FAANG coded, but it's decent experience.
> In my experience, tech employment is incredibly bimodal right now. Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever, but an "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position.
This is the K-shaped economy playing out. Its a signal that the american middle class is hollowing out. Bad, very bad.
> and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone
Wouldn't the assumption be the opposite, in that AI is magnifying the decision making of the engineer and so you get more payback by having the senior drive the AI?
I've found this to be true so far, junior engineers with AI can be super productive but they can also cause a lot of damage (more outages than ever) and AI amplifies the sometimes poorly designed code they can generate.
I suspect a lot of it best practices will be enforcing best practices via agents.md/claude.md to create a more constrained environment.
Being able to clearly describe a problem and work with the AI to design a solution, prioritise what to put the AI to work on, set up good harnesses so the quality of the output is kept high, figure out what parallelises well and what’s going to set off agents that are stepping on each others toes… all of this needs experience and judgement and delegation and project organisation skills.
AI is supercharging tech leads. Beginners might be able to skill up faster, but they’re not getting the same results.
For a good senior, yes you get massive returns, which is why those good seniors are in incredibly high demand right now.
For average to low-performing intermediates/seniors... there's not much difference in output between them and a good junior at this point. Claude really raised the skill floor for software development.
Juniors really aren't just as capable with AI as anyone. Knowing how to unambiguously describe correctly what you want isn't something a junior can do, nor is understanding if what the ai produces is good or bad.
> Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone.
While I could buy that hiring managers believe this, it's not actually true.
The gulf between the quality of what a sr developer can do with these tools and what a jr can do is huge. They simply don't know what they don't know and effective prompting requires effective spec writing.
A rando jr vibe coder can churn out code like there's no tomorrow, but that doesn't mean it's actually right.
While I agree with what you said. In personal experience I have noticed the software design / architecture is becoming irrelevant for lot of enterprises (including mine of course). So design nowadays is about API design Input/Output/Error handling. And architecture is about Cloud/Kubernetes/APM , deployment and monitoring etc. Code now does not need much design. Things like performance, isolation, extensibility etc as those are now higher level concerns not part of code itself.
This is also where micro services pattern fits in well because individual unit is so small no design needed.
> Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone.
Seniors have much more advantage right now in using AI than Juniors. Seniors get to lean in on their experience in checking AI results. Juniors rely on the AI's experience instead, which isn't as useful.
This matches what I've seen too. Though I'd add another dimension: soft skills. In my experience, job searching has always been easier for people who communicate well regardless of their technical level. And soft skills might be what's making some people more resilient to this market shift specifically
That has always been true (not that I’m saying you don’t know that, I’m using your comment as a jumping off point) in this industry. I am a good developer, but I’m a very good teacher and leader, and soft skills are why I’ve had the career I’ve had over the past two decades.
> Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone.
That is pretty context sensitive. You're correct that there's no real deep AI use expertise broadly understood to exist at this point (unless you're Steve Yegge?), but if people think they can toss out the engineers with experience in the systems that have been around a while, with junior developers "guiding" changes — that's likely a good way for a business to fall on its sword.
I wonder if that is just a correction of the rampant hiring that took place just before this employment “crash?” - if it is as you say that its intermediates and non high performers then does that make it a good thing as well.
Truth is, when I was part of larger orgs/enterprise I definitely saw some folks who were dead weight, and I don’t mean to be harsh, a few of these knew they weren’t contributing and were being malicious in that sense.
Similarly, I wonder how many high performers now are taking multiple jobs thanks to remote work and exposing the mid to low performers. Like some kind of developer hypergamy taking place.
I'm seeing a lot of specialization. For the past 11 years I've marketed myself as a frontend engineer. I got laid off last year and the job search was largely similar to my previous job search 4 years prior.
I've been looking again this year and the landscape has changed drastically. Specialization is the name of the game, I have a good amount of experience working with Growth initiatives and I've been getting good responses from roles that are looking for either Growth or Design engineers, roles that were not as prevalent years ago.
> In my experience, tech employment is incredibly bimodal right now. Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever, but an "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position.
That sounds good for many of us (and don’t we all like to think we’re top candidates here on HN…) but is there any data to back this up? Or it just anecdata (not to dismiss anecdata, still useful info).
I'm not a Senior, but I'm not a Junior either. The market has no place for people like me. I've killed myself for almost two years and can't secure a position. It's incredibly disheartening. I have a family to feed. I need to be able to work.
> "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position.
As was foretold in the Tyler Cowen's eponymous 2013 book "Average Is Over".
In it he argued that the modern economy will undergo a permanent shift where "average" performance no longer guarantees a stable, middle-class life.
He predicted that the economy will split into two distinct classes: a high-earning elite (roughly 10–15% of the population) who thrive by collaborating with technology, and a larger group (85–90%) facing stagnant wages and fewer opportunities.
AI summary of the other key points of that book:
The "Man + Machine" Advantage: Success will belong to those who can effectively use smart machines. Cowen uses Freestyle Chess (teams of humans and computers) as an analogy, noting that human intuition combined with machine processing power consistently outperforms either working alone.
The Power of Conscientiousness: In a world of abundant information, the scarcest and most valuable traits will be self-motivation, discipline, and the ability to focus.
Hyper-Meritocracy: Advanced data and machine intelligence make it easier for employers to measure an individual's exact economic value. This leads to extreme salary inequality as top performers are identified and rewarded more precisely.
A New Social Contract: Cowen predicts a future where individuals must be more self-reliant. He suggests society will move toward lower-cost living models for the non-elite, featuring cheaper housing and "bread and circuses" in the form of low-cost digital entertainment and online education.
EDIT: Notice how we're basically already here: Netflix is cheap, YT is free, Khan Academy and MIT OCW is free, Coursera/Udemy/etc. are cheap.
Stagnant vs. Dynamic Sectors: The economic divide is worsened by "low accountability" sectors like education and healthcare, where productivity is hard to measure and costs continue to rise, unlike tech-driven sectors that see rapid gains.
> Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever
I haven't found that to be true. Unless by "top candidates" you mean people working at actual AI companies such as Alphabet/Meta/OpenAI/Anthropic. If you're an AI-user and not an AI scientist it's bad out there, even for senior+ developers who previously worked in "FAANG".
Relating it to performance is just silly. Most companies barely understand the performance of their employees much less candidates. The market has shrunk but not catastrophically so. Most people haven't been majorly affected but that doesn't mean they're automatically the most deserving or best performing.
People with experience and/or credentials desired by companies in areas of growth (i.e. AI) are always in high demand
Apparently it is over a third affected in my domain. Which is crazy. Pretty much everyone in my immediate band has been hit at some point. That that weren't were usually around 5-8 above me. So basically a different generational band altogether.
Yes, this has been my experience. I'd consider myself average at best. I worked in the industry for almost 7 years before being laid off. I can't find anything at the moment and have resorted to moving back in with my parents.
It's pretty depressing. I'd take just about anything at the moment. I understand desperation going into a job interview isn't ideal either.
You can be a great unblocker, team lead, and work well within cross cutting areas and with interdepartmental stake holders, have a history of strong technical performance.
and yet its nebulous if that means you're a high performer or not to those hiring. It seems I'm seeing 'culture fit' as a common reason people aren't getting hired again. That was out of vogue for a good while.
This is probably the dumbest take I've heard of.
They're the most likely to make mistakes with AI because they don't know the pitfalls of what they're doing.
> Contrary to what many say, I don't think it's simple as seniors are getting hired and juniors aren't. Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone.
Tell me about all the junior developers you've hired (it's none)
The chart in the tweet represents year-on-year growth. Based on these figures alone the actual number of people employed in tech is still really high, and the numbers can't just go up forever.
Also this only captures 6 industries, which is a narrow view of what would define "tech" these days.
Not to say that the job market isn't tough but this graph is a very narrow view
> The chart in the tweet represents year-on-year growth.
Can’t believe how many people are commenting without looking at what the chart means. We’ve lost 50k jobs last two years after decades of adding 100k+ every year including the pandemic highs of 300k+ per year. Total employment remains way above 2000s, 2008 and 2020 unlike the title suggests.
The health of the market is not a function of the total number of jobs alone, it's a function of the number of jobs and the number of people to fill them.
The number of total jobs going up year after year meant that there were increasing numbers of candidates, new people entering the field. If the job growth stops, then there still we be candidates coming in. There will also be the new hires from the last decade moving into increasingly senior roles, and there won't be space for them (unless you devalue the meaning of "senior" even more).
So the year over year change matters a lot. If it plateaus, or even declines slightly, it's more than enough to make a terrible market.
YoY change in jobs is still probably not the best way to visualize overall market health. As you say, you also have to take into account the number of people of fill the jobs. To me it seems like the least misleading statistics would be a graph showing unemployment and underemployment % over time. I'd probably also toss in graphs of length of unemployment period as well as various median wage percentiles (quintiles or deciles maybe) over time.
How’s it compare to 2000 though? Tech was ascendant in 2008 so not surprised to hear it didn’t do too badly then and in 2020 while people panicked tech again had a much easier time keeping people on remotely.
In Portland, there was a time in 2000-2002 where Nike and Intel had contract offers out to SW developers for $12/hour, and were getting slammed with applications.
I started my career at $14/hr in 1999, was at $19/hr in 2000, and switched to salary at $55k by 2001. I spent 15 years in corp IT running software teams... total comp got way better when I entered the big tech industry in 2015.
Remember that the 2000 numbers are also out of a much smaller pool and the graph uses absolute numbers. So even if they were the same numbers in 2000 as 2020 it would have been a much, much larger percentage of all jobs.
I was working in 2000 in Atlanta GA at boring old enterprises companies with 4 years of experience back then. If you were working for/targeting profitable non tech companies, the world was your oyster.
I was working at a company that printed bills for utility companies and had offers from banks, insurance companies etc. The world didn’t stop buying Coca Cola, flying Delta or stop buying stuff from Home Depot because of the dot com crash
For the last 2 years I can't even get an interview despited having 14 years of experience and being up to date with development trends, libraries, languages, AI tooling, etc.
I don't think the market is flooded with new devs as many state, I think we are in a deep silent crisis
I've been able to get something like 25 interviews in 2 months despite having long gaps on my resume and nothing especially impressive to my name. So I suspect you might be going about this wrong. I haven't gotten an offer yet, that's another story, but getting the interviews hasn't been hard. Applying in NYC/SF, senior-only.
I don't know. The company I work at is inviting candidates for interviews, and we have to make compromises because we can't get the exact profiles we are looking for. Something about your comment does not add up to me.
Locality. People want to work close to where they live and not all places are bustling with all kind of activity. I suspect you're hybrid or on site only, right?
Sometimes it looks like the longer you're looking for a job, the harder it gets for some reason. That's unintuitive for me, as you should be getting more confident in interviews etc
IMO it’s just depression for tech. Back then 33% of total employment got gutted, which is probably better than tech today or in a few years when big techs start AI gut.
A big problem we have is a the sheer volume of AI slop resumes, fake applicants and people trying to cheat on interviews. We had to close a req for SWE because we had so many “people” (read: automated applicants) clogging up the pipeline. You effectively need a referral
To some recruiters, there's this sweet spot between 5 and 10 years experience where the applicant good / independent enough to hit the ground running, not too expensive, and still young enough to put up with company bullshit.
Not dismissing that it’s a tough market for some but folks also need to learn how to read a chart. It shows a slight decline following a massive expansion.
The primary thing going on in the market right now is a lot of companies simply over-hired during the post Covid boom and they’re correcting for that.
I just can't get over how short and intense the period between 2021 and 2023 was. There was SO much hype, such stupendous hiring, in such a compressed timeframe. Within the span of like 9 weeks it went from full steam ahead to completely seized.
At the same time, the economy at large didn't seem to change very much.
Anecdotally seeing this play out in SF right now. We're hiring for our fintech startup and getting 500+ applications per role, many from people at companies I would've assumed were stable. A year ago we struggled to get anyone to even look at us. The talent pool is incredible but man it feels weird benefiting from other people's misfortune.
Yeah but like... area under the curve. All of those jobs and more were added very recently, 2020-2022. It's a major retreat from that growth, but the trend since, say, 2008 or 2010 or 2018 is still positive growth. 2020-2022 was just a huge shift due to a very weird Covid/ZIRP market.
I have PayPal, Amazon, LinkedIn, <<mid size company>>, <<mid size company2>>, <<startup>> as a manager on my resume. I didn't get a call back after applying for two weeks.
I got 4 or 5 standard rejections.
I have non-English name so that definitely hurts. I have AP EAD which is a stage between H1B and Green Card and I still require sponsorship. It's complicated but I can't just switch to EAD right away.
It's not just engineers. It's managers and experienced people as well. Don't believe top comment that it is bimodal. Unless you are supertar (99.99%) it becoming hard to get noticed. I thought of going back to IC role but it is hard to pick up and do leetcode all over again. It is extremely hard with a special needs kids at home.
I had managerial* position I ghosted because they had Leetcode literally written on the agenda.
* - managerial is replaced with Lead. Lead is expected to be hands-on as well as have serious managerial experience. Since it's easier to lie about managerial experience, you have people lying into these roles and becoming terrible managers.
I’ve never really found there to be all that much of a market for specifically c++ developers. If you do decide to look for work more seriously I wouldn’t be too hung up on language, if you can code in one you can pretty much code in all of them, and I’ve never hired a developer for specific language skill outside of a few rare cases it’s something really specific we are trying to fix (e.g erlang or something), even then it wouldn’t be a complete showstopper.
YMMV but that’s coming from a guy who writes in at least 3 languages at current $dayjob.
Greater Boston area here. I've worked in C++ roles at two companies over the past three years and both times we were desperate for competent C++ developers. Similar trends for both companies: we had positions open for ~six months, interviewing many candidates, and being disappointed at their quality. We eventually filled the positions (about a half-dozen in total) but it was not easy. My current company, but different team, still has a quite a few recs out for C++ devs.
TL;DR - at least in my little bubble, the C++ systems engineer market has been consistently hiring people, though good engineers are hard to find.
I don't recall any recession with respect to tech in 2020. It was a hiring frenzy.
Any commentary about tech jobs that does not include the interest rate environment and the massive over hiring that occurred between 2019 and 2022 is borderline dishonest.
Look at federal data of SWE job postings and look at the federal funds rate for the same period. Jobs is giant mountain peaking in ‘22. Interest rate is zero for the pandemic and then spikes right when SWE jobs start to collapse.
Tech hiring is all downstream of interest rates. AI has had almost no impact, at least not yet. (Block layoffs were not AI, look at their stock, they basically can only succeed as a financial company when money is free, very misleading and a convenient excuse for terrible management to now say they need to be “AI native”)
Those are raw numbers. I would look instead at the job changes over total employment numbers. I don't have the numbers but I would wager we have many more people working in tech today (overall) than we did in 2008.
Also, that spike in 21/22 really did a number on people's expectations. The one constant in this industry is its cyclical nature.
Maybe I'm reading the graph wrong, but the decrease comes after years on continuous growth, so total employment numbers in tech should still be absolutely massive, compared to 18 years ago?
If it continues, then yes it could be bad, but so far it seems like a correction for over-hiring in 2021 - 2023. Seems a little weird to be focusing on a decline in 2024 - 2026, without addressing the large increase right in the years before.
There's a lot of dynamics where it's the short-term numbers that matter. If you're a developer who needs a new job after your spouse got transferred to LA or something, it does you no good that the absolute numbers are massive, nor that a different person looking for a job 3 years ago would have found it uncommonly easy.
I had no idea I was in such an exclusive group back in 2000. Everyone I knew was a software engineer or in tech one way or another so I suppose I got a warped sense that I belonged to a larger group.
Remember it's the first derivative. The title and chart suggested at first that there are fewer tech jobs vs the start, but really it must be way more.
I still kinda want to see this going back to 2000. That must be the biggest tech crash by far. 2008 and 2020 were overall market crashes, but tech was booming.
Something needs to be done about these bots, it is getting eerie. Yesterday a bot created an account named 100xLLM the moment I responded to it to respond back with.
I'm looking for job (in Rust) now and is absurd how many positions are for training LLMS -in Rust!- (yeah, lets help the people that wanna put everyone out of jobs)
A look at the number of replies to "Who's Hiring?" each month over the past year or so compared to prior years made it loud and clear. Traditional tech has been in a recession for a couple of years, at least!
What that graph looks like to me is that there were a ton of marginal folks hired during COVID, and we're shedding a lot of those folks who probably shouldn't have been hired anyway.
Unfortunately... I want to mirror this sentiment. I interviewed a lot of candidates (and worked with many teammates) in my last few roles and I saw some pretty worrying trends...
I am in my 20s. At the moment I've got a part time job, but I am preparing myself for the worse. In the next few years I am planning to volunteer at farms through workaway. Maybe one day I can become self sustainable,tech and nutrition wise
also getting into plumbing, curious to see what others are doing in this regard.
If anyone saw that LinkedIn post about someone at Block resigning guilt of being offered a raise and retention after the layoffs, I'd say that is a signal that tech is heading down.
Most people would be thankful to have a secure well paying job in the post AI blow off; increasingly it's going to harder to differentiate yourself against anyone else using AI. That we have people still in the thick of AI that don't understand that is a strong signal that AI boom is still going to come take some jobs.
If you're in a software related role and AI isn't making you more productive, it's on YOU as a dev to figure things out quickly.
AI is coming for your job so you can either be an AI manager, or you can get managed out for AI.
caveat: This is my take as someone who used to do a lot of hand coding, and now regularly has a small team of AI doing anything that would have normally required mostly brute coding strength but not too much thought; that's facet'ed plots, refactoring libraries, improving pipeline efficiency, adding parallelization where possible, building presentations, adding test coverage.
A key thing in this graph is that it doesn't seem to correlate to the rise of code assistants. That is a (relatively) recent last year thing from my point of view. Yes, they were there before, but they hadn't really hit in a way that I think hiring decisions had shifted because of them. This is just tech laying off, not AI taking jobs.
Looking at the employment report that came out today, tech seems to be doing better then most sectors...
"Other professional, scientific, and technical services" grew month over month and year over year
"Information" took a hit, but the bulk of that was "Motion picture and sound recording industries"
"Computing infrastructure providers, data processing, web hosting, and related services" modestly shrunk, but "Web search portals, libraries, archives, and other information service" is the only area to grow under information.
This seems different then what the post says. They also said worse then 2008, but didn't post any information. I would imagine the total market was much smaller, so the while total jobs lost was probably smaller, percentage was probably larger. When I started in 2012, tech would take any with a science degree.
I don't understand the job titles being propose in the post, are the using different BLS data then me?
I have been getting automated emails from a slew of different recruiters now. Usually one or two per day. I believe they are LLM generated. However, I usually don’t respond.
The next step is for me to respond with an LLM. Maybe if my LLM is good enough it’ll convince their LLM to skip the interview and just offer me a job.
This chart shows that the rate of year-over-year, month-by-month change is worse than 2020.
But the number of tech jobs has grown by 12% since April of 2020 (2.34M vs. 2.63M). Heck, there are more tech jobs today than at the beginning of 2022 (2.61M), even.
Job market sucks, trend is bad, but post title is a misnomer for what this chart shows.
(Numbers based on a quick grab BLS.gov data of CES6054151101 (Custom Computer Programming Services) + CES5051800001 (Computing Infrastructure Providers, Data Processing & Web Hosting) + CES6054151201 (Computer Systems Design Services)---couldn't find other ones quickly and gave up :))
Counterpoint: I've been desperately trying to code myself out of a job for almost 4 decades now. I inevitably ended up (and keep ending up) getting more responsibilities instead.
So have all the great engineers I've been working with - there's a deep desire for growth past the things that you're currently good at.
The people worrying they might code themselves out of a job are in a different skill demographic. (Ironically, that means they won't be able to code themselves out of a job)
Are you saying you want to be laid off with a nice package as you’ve been with the same employer for a long time? Couple of options: have a nice conversation with your manager and make this clear. The signs are clear that major s/w layoffs will happen in the next couple of years. Other option is to ease off - your high salary and low output will put you in the dustbin list
> Counterpoint: I've been desperately trying to code myself out of a job for almost 4 decades now. I inevitably ended up (and keep ending up) getting more responsibilities instead.
What exactly do you mean by that? Do you mean you finished one project but your employer had another one for you, which you then were expected to work on instead of sitting idle? Or do you mean you coded yourself into a "promotion"?
My comment was just mocking the foolish selfless ethos of many software engineers, who don't look out for themselves and idealize giving to psychopathic organizations that will screw them the moment that's advantageous. Many software engineers have a pathological level of naivete and confusion about the role they really inhabit (e.g. righteously going on about buggy-whip makers).
Good to know it’s not just me. Sheesh. Are there signs that it’ll bounce back again?
I’ve been looking for work for nearly seven months. I can write low level systems code in C and C++ to web applications in Python and compilers in Haskell. I have tons of industry experience.
Yet most places I apply to ghost me or follow up a month later that the position has been filled.
Companies that have been lying off people claim they are seeing record profits.
It seems like we went from a relatively stable growth to just chaos.
I know people will say AI, but I don't think it's that. The whole "everyone should learn to code" bullshit of the last 15 years or so has created a lot of developers that frankly aren't very good, and then you mix in the massive overhiring of the pandemic, and what you're seeing is a hard correction. CEOs love to use "productivity improvements from AI" as a smokescreen and investor catnip but the research shows it's not having the effects claimed.
Blaming the employees is BS. A pretty large % of the people losing their jobs are also high performing excellent people. I feel like anyone who worked at one of these companies doing lay offs knows this.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that the people that got laid off were the ones that deserved it. Obviously politics, situational factors (wanting people back in the office), etc are a huge part (I myself am recently laid off and I don't think I deserved it!) What I was trying to drive at is developers have lost a lot of leverage and negotiation because there are too many people fighting for too few roles. Also I can't help but wonder if people have lost trust in developers because of the dilution of talent.
That being said, I don't think it's unfair to point out that creating a massive influx of new developers without jobs that provided good mentorship (most jobs are awful at mentoring junior developers) is going to have huge consequences that we're now dealing with. I think the "learn to code" thing was a massive mistake. Encourage the people that want to, sure, but don't try to pull people in that are only marginally interested in a paycheck.
Also wtf were we supposed to do? I graduated during the great recession. No one was hiring. Everyone from the president on down told us to learn to code. So we did.
The layoffs are not necessarily executed in a way that takes performance into account, but that doesn’t mean that the industry overall doesn’t have too many people for the amount of work that needs to be done.
If things continue to get worse I really worry how many people might give up on life entirely. A lot of people in this industry don’t have a whole lot else going on for them, myself included.
I grinded my 20s away trying to have a successful career and if that just gets pulled out from under me I’ve got absolutely nothing.
I know a very senior engineer who took their life the day after Trump was elected. He was unemployed for a while.
While I think a lot more was going on with him than being unemployed, I'm convinced AI hitting the scene had a bit to do with it. They were an older dev 50+.
There's still the hangover from free Covid money. I think the number one reason that it feels worse is that there's a LOT more people in the industry now than back in 2020. Much more competition than before.
Those of us who have been in the industry for 15-20 years we remember a time when tech was just a job.
In the mid 2010s, then most notably in late 2020 - 2021, you had people who had no interest in tech entering the industry because they saw it as an easy career to make decent money in.
It got pretty bad in the late 2010s, but it become almost comical in 2021 with people who took a two-week coding bootcamps suddenly landing 6 figure jobs. Some of these people were even working at multiple companies at the same time.
The optimist in me hopes this all shakes out with those people who had no interest in tech moving on to other things. These types of people were not only bad employees, they were also bad for the industry, and in my opinion responsible for culture shift from tech being a place dominating by "nerds" and "geeks" in the 90/00s to the modern "tech-bro" stereotype.
The realist in me though will continue to warn people the tech job they're working at today is likely their last. Between tech industry growth slowing, the excessive over production of tech talent and AI + SASS automating a lot of traditional software development work it's going to be exponentially harder to remain employed in tech in the coming years.
So much so you might as well find a relatively worse paid job if it means you don't have periods of months of unemployment every year.
>In the mid 2010s, then most notably in late 2020 - 2021, you had people who had no interest in tech entering the industry because they saw it as an easy career to make decent money in.
I remember it was even earlier than that, in the 90s when Bill Gates became the richest man in the world.
You're right about 6 month bootcamps leading to jobs in 2021 though! A true gold rush.
In fact in sectors like the game industry the pandemic resulted in a massive hiring boom. The layoffs only materialized after the pandemic was well and truly over.
Yeah, pandemic was good overall. Next generation of consoles looming, sales overall were up since people were forced inside, there were finally some loosening of dev kit practices to accommodate for the lack of offices to go into (I never would have imagined in 2015 having a dev kit in my home 5 years later) .Pretty much the only art medium to benefit from the times while cinema collapsed, Streaming services were running a defecit war where no one won except Netflix, and music stalled for a bit.
But as per usual, the bust hit just as hard as the boom. Multiple high profile failures in games and initiatives as a whole, Microsoft and Apple decided to stop bleeding money with their respective subscription deals, mobile gaming (from the advent of Genshin Imapct and co) became less an easy cash grab and more a 2nd wing of AAA development, investments dried up overnight for indies (unless 'AI').
on a personal level I was hired (by Microsoft, my first and only "big tech" job) in April 2020 and I am still working here... all these companies "over-hired" during the pandemic, and the term "covid hire" is even a thing..
I remember interviewing someone who got hired by Facebook, sat around for a few weeks for a team to open up while they went through onboarding / Junior training, then was let go.
COVID did weird things to the industry, that's for sure.
Overhiring implies that MSFT's headcount went down over this time. But that doesn't seem to be the case. They still hire a lot, just not in North America.
My friend who has worked for some big name companies is absolutely struggling to find work. So many interviews, 3rd, 4th round, and then they go with another candidate, or I can only assume someone internally and the listing never existed. It's killing me watching him struggle to find work.
What happens when AI gets so good that even "Juniors" can compete with "Seniors"? It's going to happen at SOME point. I think what will separate devs will be their creativity and ideas. Those that can think outside the box will be the ones getting hired. With that said, I sometimes feel like eventually the OFFICE MANAGER will be coding everything for their company lol.
Software will become cheaper to write and more software will be written. A senior will always outcompete a junior when it comes to logical thinking and a true understanding of IT. A programmer will always outcompete a non-programmer when it comes to using AI tools.
Bottom line, if programmers are fucked, so is just about anyone else.
The graph does a really poor job supporting the conclusion, most obviously because it only goes back to 2016, the peak of boom times, it doesn't go anywhere near 2008 so why does the caption talk about that? Just this same graph alone going back to 1990 would be super eye-opening.
The other thing is it's showing first derivative, not absolute numbers, which is a very questionable way to derive "worst employment situation" in a field that has been on world-changing boom over the last 50 years.
2008 wasn't that bad for tech and neither was 2020. 2020 in fact lead to the highest employment craziness in the tech field ever. It's no wonder that the entire industry has indigestion from so many workers hired.
Although the graph lists BLS data as the source, it's hard for me to find the specific datasets that back it up. It's March 2026 and the graph indicates it would encapsulate 2025. In fact, the "Software Development Job Postings on Indeed in the United States" indicate something different,
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1T60O
- Regional data available only, numerous national statistics are discontinued
- California region matches up, but places like Boston don't https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SMU25000005051320001
- Doesn't include January or February 2026 data, doesn't match up with graph in tweet
I wasn't able to find the following:
- Custom Computer Programming Services
There are numerous open questions in this analysis which I would need to be addressed before drawing any conclusions. My gut feeling would love to accept it at face value but I never trust my gut.
Purely anecdotal, but I'm a senior engineer with about 15 years of experience and a decently impressive resume. In the past, I almost always get to at least the interviewing stage, and have frequently received multiple offers at the same time. Recruiters used to spam me constantly.
I haven't heard from a recruiter in probably 6 months. I recently put my feelers out and applied to a handful of positions I was qualified for, and got rejection letters from all of them.
Try only including your last 2 positions, as most senior staff tend to scare insecure brogrammers. They probably still won't hire, but you will get more interviews.
There are also a lot of people posting fake jobs for feeding LLM datasets, running scams, and bidding down labor costs. =3
After reading many anecdotes of top school alumni struggling to even secure some interviews, I'm really curious about what opportunities available for median American freshgrads e.g. 3.0 GPA from T100-200 Unis.
I mean, didn't a ton of people get hired immediately after 2020 during the pandemic? Also,I don't remember the tech sector getting hit too hard during 2008 time period, it was mostly everyone else.
This industry is a race to the bottom and long overdue for a massive salary reset. There is no society on Earth where someone who codes JavaScript (poorly) should make more money than, say, a doctor. Yet here we are.
A lot of doctors are just pill prescribers. I can't tell you how many times I've been to useless doctors that don't help and give you a big fat bill on the way out the door.
This is the plot of the first derivative of employment. It shows a comparatively small but lasting dip after a massive, prolonged, and unwarranted boom between late 2020 and early 2024 that coincided with the dying breaths of ZIRP.
I have no idea about what's coming, but I wouldn't pay a whole lot of attention to people who are looking at the plots of a highly volatile and cyclic industry that goes through constant boom-and-bust cycles, and are trying to position this as proof that AI is or isn't having an impact.
Good. Too many useless people got into tech because any monkey can memorize LC and outperform the monkey who also memorized LC and now is part of the interview panel so they can show off to the other monkeys that he deserves more bananas.
Tech was and still is the easiest way to make 200k base salary, before even thinking about the stock.
We need a reset and anyone who can’t make it can go fill the jobs we need in construction, education, etc.
There's another post for it that went back to the early 90s. I've grabbed it at https://imgur.com/a/kB9CAKF though it's a smaller image (Imgur resizing).
Anyone else's inbox slammed with recruiters, more than it ever has been in the past? Feels like there's 10x the jobs available, but perhaps it's just that LLMs have automated a recruiter's job and they're letting the slop fly
What mediums are you using for recruiters to contact you? Do you have a linked-in or are you applying directly to recruiting companies? Are you active anywhere else?
Genuinely interested in how you're receiving so many recruitment emails. That used to be my go to way to hit the job market.
I'm not applying at all! Happy employed and not looking.
They're mailing me through linkedIn (i have a profile, and it's not set to looking and i'm completely inactive there), and or finding my email on the internet somehow and going direct.
It's bad, yeah, especially for folks on the job market (it me). Some statistics first, from my own job search logs:
* Since I hit the pavement in late January, I've tracked 100 job applications
* Of those 100, only 7 have turned into interviews
* Of those seven interviews, 3 turned into second-round
* ~50% of all applications never receive a response
* ~20% of rejections for any reason have the role re-posted within thirty days
* For rejections stating "higher quality applications", that role re-post rate is closer to 50%, suggesting ATS systems culling too many candidates to fill the role or ghost jobs
* Despite my state requiring salary requirements be posted in the JD, only around 70% of postings included what could be considered "reasonable" estimates
* 100% of interviews have been for local employers requiring 3+ days on-site
And now, some observations not captured in the data directly:
* Employers are trying to "under-title" folks; Senior roles want to hire former Leads, and Management roles want next-rung candidates for prior-rung titles (e.g., hiring what should be a Senior Manager for an entry-level management role)
* Employers are also trying to underpay workers by a large margin, especially folks coming from Big Tech ("We don't pay {SV_FIRM} money" while offering salaries below the local 50%ile for the role in question); they're blaming a "surplus of tech talent", which may or may not be true (I lack the data to prove either way)
* The two above points are in conflict, because rent/mortgages in these areas are so steep that even with major lifestyle changes to cut costs, these wages simply aren't survivable for local areas
* "Credential Creep" is back in force: Architect certs required for mid-level engineering roles, buzzwords prioritized over outcomes and achievements, and AI ATS' rejecting qualified candidates flat-out
* College Degrees are relevant again as a means of pruning candidates; fifteen years of experience is irrelevant for a lot of Senior roles if you don't have a BS or Masters, which wasn't the case even last year
* Industry-specialization is also back, even for roles where industry specialization is generally moot or easily picked up (e.g., Corporate IT stuff)
* A significant number (~75-85%) of roles explicitly reject H1B and other visa workers; not a problem for me (Citizen), but this is the worst possible time to be job hunting on a non-LPR status.
And now, my personal experiences:
* There's a very strong attitude of "you're being entitled" when it comes down to salary negotiations, even when you show your math for essentials - and share prior compensation history reflecting the cuts you've already taken since your Big Tech salary to "rejoin the market".
* Employers generally have no clue how expensive it is to live right now, especially in major metros; one such employer who balked at my comp floor genuinely had no clue the median rent was three and a half grand per month.
* Compensation seems particularly tilted towards working couples; as in, neither alone makes enough to survive, and employers assume you have a FTE spouse to shore up finances so they can pay you less
* Employers also don't seem to know what they actually want or need. Specialist Engineer roles (e.g., Cloud Engineer, Network Engineer) cite required experience and expertise with the full technology stack inclusive of ERP and HRIS nowadays, which is something that used to be handled by a specific team for the entirety of my career thus far, even in smaller (<1k) orgs. I've also seen Architect roles demanding Help Desk work, and Software Dev roles who want experience supporting Entra.
* AI does not feature in as many interviews as I would've thought. The few times it does, it's very much a "that's nice, but we're taking a wait and see approach" attitude
* There's a lot of eagerness to hire domestically again (I think even middle managers were tired of outsourcing or offshoring), but a lack of budget to afford domestic talent.
Ultimately, it's pretty bleak - but still better than last year, at least thus far (~300 apps, ~2 companies interviewed with, 1 offer in 2025). AI isn't the value-add I was sold on by career counselors and LinkedIn (huge surprise there /s), and there definitely seems to be the appetite to hire, but not the realism of what to expect or how much it'll cost. I very much view it as a sort of tug-of-war at the moment, between workers who did everything expected of them and have cut to the bone already, and employers who somehow think they can pay <50%ile wages while mandating 4-days on-site in a major metro for experienced talent.
If you're an employer looking to hire, I have some advice:
* Ditch the AI ATS or AI summaries and read resumes, especially if you're requiring local presence.
* Understand what you need (and what that will cost you) before posting the JD
* Understand the local cost of living, and budget accordingly (i.e., if your Senior Engineer can't afford median rent, they're not going to stick around when things improve)
* If you value loyalty and aren't paying TC to afford a median home in the area, then you don't actually value loyalty
* Don't pigeonhole yourself with hyper-specific candidates as a means of winnowing down applicants; that level of specialization will flee the second they get a better offer elsewhere
* Post salaries in the JD, required or not, so you don't waste your time with candidates whose expectations don't align with your budget
I'm early in my search, but compensation seems all over the place. From the recruiters I've talked to they've been pretty baffled too about compensation given the market. I know one place a recruiter called me about was looking for absolute unicorn talent (like 15 years of experience in multiple very different domains), but their salary was like 70k less than I made at my previous job and when I asked about titles they said it was "flat" and everyone was just a "software dev".
I don't want to sound like it's all a horror show though, I've had some interviews that have gone well with companies being sensible, so I think there's good stuff out there. But it's overall a rough market.
I'm also looking right now and a lot of that resonates with me. The posted salary ranges are often a complete joke as you noted. "The pay band for this role is $80,000-250,000 commensurate with experience and interview performance". Yeah OK buddy are you seriously trying to tell me you have multiple people with the exact same job title making salaries over $100k apart? Feels like they're just giving the finger to lawmakers through malicious compliance.
I've also run into the industry specialization roadblock a few times. Got turned down by a fintech company after multiple interview rounds because I did not have banking industry experience, for example. I guess I get it as a tie breaker but I've operated in a PCI compliant environment for years, seems like that should count as relevant experience? Also if you're going to dumpster candidates without banking experience why on earth did you waste several hours of your staff's time giving me tech screens?
Job hunting has always sucked. But it feels particularly busted at the moment. The process is miserable. If you've coasted to an easy hiring in the last year, you're either amazing (and hats off to you!) or got very lucky.
The salary ranges are complete jokes on either end: they're either malicious compliance like you pointed out, or completely out of touch with reality.
My example of that was when I applied for an Architect role (as I'm at that point in my upward career trajectory), and they asked me instead to apply for a Senior Admin role as they "didn't know what the Architect role would look like yet". I did, I included my comp target, and got the hard sell on why I was being unreasonable and should take {2016_PAY}/{$100k below SV_FIRM} instead. I mentioned my absolute floor was {$75k lower than SV_FIRM}/{$25k lower than my target}, ran him through my math (median rent for the area, on-site expectations, commute costs, food costs, insurance costs, 50/30/20 budgeting, etc), and pointed out that floor would only cover needs (50) and savings (20) with no fun money (30) whatsoever. Ultimately I withdrew my name entirely because the guy just wouldn't listen to me, and all but demanded I be grateful for his number in the current economy.
I suspect something similar is going on with another company that's seemingly ghosted me, after I stated I was targeting their upper boundary of their listed comp range - still $85k below {SV_FIRM}, but with growth potential towards Architect and Director-type IT roles. Even when I'm fine eating huge pay cuts for work (and falling off the homebuying ladder, as not even {SV_FIRM} paid house-purchasing money), the employers out there really do want perfect diamonds for the cost of Halloween Trinkets.
> Also if you're going to dumpster candidates without banking experience why on earth did you waste several hours of your staff's time giving me tech screens?
This is also something that's grinding my gears. Had an investment firm put me through six technical interviews with glowing recommendations every step of the way only for the seventh round (CIO) to put the kibosh on it without a reason and after showing up unprepared and disinterested. Also had companies say I lack financial discipline experience when I've literally built models, showback systems, budget forecasts, and cemented six-figures of monthly savings in prior roles; same with companies saying I "lack compliance experience" despite calling out running infra in highly regulated environments, performing compliance audits for clients, and uplifting infra to satisfy compliance regimes.
If I didn't know better, I'd say the entire HR process is just feeding shit into chatbots and letting them make hiring decisions. Nobody seems to actually care about the humans involved or the wider systems at play.
It's immensely frustrating, but I can only keep on keeping on until something changes. I don't need to win every application, I just need to win one.
What are people's plan Bs for when it goes tits up? I reckon I'd make a good electrician or something like that, but it's a real, grown up profession and I would have to get qualified.
We could arrive at the technical singularity and come up with 8000 IQ robots that can do things in a clean room but in the messy physical reality? I believe they will fail to catch up forever.
They will fail to deal with a stripped bolt head deep inside an engine bay that's been exposed to 40 years of road salt, that needs to be hit right with a 10lb hammer and a home made chisel until shit knocks loose, combined with cutting, welding, drilling, torching, tapping, impromptu redneck engineering, cursing, the use of 8 different kinds of penetrating lubricants, the acquisition of weird and highly model-year specific parts in a junkyard 500 miles away, realizing it's all wrong and doing it again.
Multiply the complexity by 100 times and that's what it's like to take on a classic car project.
Games are a weird sector. Long term I simply want to go it indie. Even if I doesn't pan out, it's some kind of passive income and I have something to show to that is fully "mine" (so no ambiguity about how much I really contributed at BigCo.).
Short term I'm freelancing and doing whatever else I can find to get by. Hoping for one more full time role before I start my self published ventures.
I'm an outsider, but VC looks like it's in a bad place right now. The returns have been pretty bad this decade, and AI companies are eating all the dollars so if you're not doing that it strikes me it'd be hard to get funding. And idk, if you already have an AI startup then you're hoping for the best, but if you were starting a business today I think that bubble looks like it has a lot of needles around it
As I previously mentioned, based on person experience assumptions around hiring have changed due to the Twitter layoffs, demands for FCF positivity, and WFH inadvertently justifying offshoring [0], not necessarily due to interest rate changes.
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As I also mentioned, the only way you can survive in American tech at this point is to:
1. Move to a Tier 1 tech hub like the Bay and NYC. If you get laid off, you will probably find another job in a couple of weeks due to the density of employers. Seattle used to be a good option, but WA's norms around noncompete clauses incentivize larger employers which reduces the ability for startups to truly scale.
2. Start coming into the office 2-3 days a week. It's harder to layoff someone you have had beers or coffee with. Worst case, they can refer you to their friends companies if you get laid off
3. Upskill technically. Learn the fundamentals of AI/ML and MLOPs. Agents are basically a semi-nondeterministic SaaS. Understanding how AI/ML works and understanding their benefits and pitfalls make you a much more valuable hire.
4. Upskill professionally. We're not hiring code monkeys for $200K-400K TC. We want Engineers who can communicate business problems into technical requirements. This means also understanding the industry your company is in, how to manage up to leadership, and what are the revenue drivers and cost centers of your employer. Learn how to make a business case for technical issues. If you cannot communicate why refactoring your codebase from Python to Golang would positively impact topline metrics, no one will prioritize it.
5. Live lean, save for a rainy day, and keep your family and friends close. If you're not in a financial position to say "f##k you" you will get f##ked, and strong relationships help you build the support system you need for independence.
The reality is the current set of layoffs and work stresses were the norm in the tech industry until 2015-22. We live in a competitive world and complaining on HN does nothing to help your material condition.
I don’t believe this is true. There are plenty of roles that are happy to hire remotely. Sure, there is an in person requirement for many job listings but Ive found EMs/companies to be very flexible if they need to hire talent.
For people that can’t/dont want to move to the “hubs”, just know that there is absolutely still a career path. I will say though that you need to have above average communication skills and proactively build relationships during in person off-sites.
There absolutely are remote first roles in the US, but the competition is also extremely intense. The median SWE and HNer wouldn't make the cut.
It also requires a level of maturity, clear thinking, self-starterness, and independence that is hard to come by without a proven track record and experience.
My advice is for the median/average SWE and HNer, not for the truly exceptional.
Spending a 7-10 years in a hub and then going remote first is the best path because you build the network you need to get referrals to vouch for you as a remote-first hire well as the track record needed to go remote-first.
I don't know if switching from a extreme partisan site to another extreme partisan site is the right solution just because of the need of login credentials. In any case, Twitter/X has been online almost 20 years. Bluesky still has to prove its staying power long term.
I get rejection for every single position that I apply to. Often I read literally a description of myself in job posting, and it's still "we decided to no move forward".
At the same time, I hire people and see that 8/10 candidates are just trash. Not in the sense they "are not aligned", or "emit wrong vibes", or other bs. They literally can't write a single line of code, on their own laptop, in their own IDE.
Because the hoards of people who can't find the ` or | or $ on their keyboard outnumber competent people 100:1. I had this exact experience too, so frustrating. Moved to a strictly referral model where I pay my SWEs $10k if a candidate they refer gets hired.
In my experience, tech employment is incredibly bimodal right now. Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever, but an "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position.
Contrary to what many say, I don't think it's simple as seniors are getting hired and juniors aren't. Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone. The people getting pushed out are the intermediates and seniors who aren't high performers.
I generally tend to interview every year to see what's out there in the world (sometimes I find something worth switching for, other times not). I'm not even looking very hard but have had 4 interviews in the last month.
Personally I think it's a bit more nuanced than senior vs junior (though it is very hard for juniors right now). What I've seen a lot of hunger for is people with a track record of getting their hands dirty and getting things solved. I'm very much a "builder" type dev that has more fun going from 0-v1 than maintaining and expanding scalable, large systems.
From the early start of the last tech boom through the post-pandemic hiring craze I increasingly saw demand for people who where in the latter category and fit nicely in a box. The ability to "do what you must to get this shipped" was less in demand. People cared much more about leetcode performance than an impressive portfolio.
Now reminds me a lot of 2008 in terms of the job market and what companies are looking for. 2008-2012 a strong portfolio of projects was the signal most people looked for. Back then being an OSS dev was a big plus (I found it not infrequently to be a liability in the last decade, better to study leetcode than actually build something).
Honestly, a lot of senior devs lose this ability over time. They get comfortable with the idea that as a very senior hire you don't have to do all that annoying stuff anymore. But the teams I see hiring are really focused on staying lean and getting engineers how are comfortable wearing multiple hats and working hard to get things shipped.
> I'm very much a "builder" type dev that has more fun going from 0-v1 than maintaining and expanding scalable, large systems.
Maintaining and expanding is more challenging, which is why I’ve grown to prefer that. Greenfield and then leaving is too easy, you don’t learn the actually valuable lessons. As experience shows that projects won’t stay in the nice greenfield world, building them can feel like doing illusory work — you know the real challenges are yet to come.
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> I'm not even looking very hard but have had 4 interviews in the last month.
How many offers did you receive? Companies have also adopted your strategy: interviewing candidates "to see what's out there" - there's a job I interviewed for that's still open after 10 months.
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When I was in corporate I'd talk about cover your ass mode and get'er done mode. And while realistically I know both are necessary, I was always annoyed at the need to have a cya mode. I get a bit of schadenfreude from the thougt of the market being harder for the people who don't seem to have a get'er done mode, and a bit of his at the thought it might be because there's less concern over whom to bother if something needs to be fixed later.
> I'm very much a "builder" type dev that has more fun going from 0-v1 than maintaining and expanding scalable, large systems.
Most prefer a greenfield project.
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>I generally tend to interview every year to see what's out there in the world (sometimes I find something worth switching for, other times not). I'm not even looking very hard but have had 4 interviews in the last month.
The Pick-Up Artist's Guide to Tech Interviewing, you should be writing.
The first 100 subscribers get a 50% off discount the month of March, you should be announcing on LinkedIn and Tiktok, and making passive income.
The rest of us experienced people with proven track records have to learn algorithms on the weekends despite having white hair.
Shipping is only hard when you have to deal with all the loose ends "builders" leave lying around.
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> Honestly, a lot of senior devs lose this ability over time. They get comfortable with the idea that as a very senior hire you don't have to do all that annoying stuff anymore.
A few years ago, when interest rates were 0% and companies were hiring at an unsustainable rate, I got a lot of criticism for cautioning engineers against non-coding roles. I talked to a lot of people who dreamed of moving into pure architect roles where they advised teams of more junior engineers about what to build, but didn't get involved with building or operating anything.
I haven't kept up with everyone but a lot of the people I know who went that route are struggling now. The work is good until a company decides to operate with leaner teams and keeps the people committing code. The real difficulties start when they have to interview at other companies after not writing much code for 3 years. I'm in a big Slack for career development where it's common for "Architect" and "Principal Engineer" titled people to be venting about how they can't get past the first round of interviews (before coding challenges!) because they're trying to sell themselves as architects without realizing that companies want hands-on builders now.
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> I'm not even looking very hard but have had 4 interviews in the last month.
Did you get any offers yet? It seems the issue is not lack of interviews but lack of offers. Many companies are looking for a goldilocks candidate and are happy to pass on anything that doesn't match their ideal candidate
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I, too, am able to get interviews. The last time I made a serious search was in 2022-23, and companies were clearly eager to hire at competitive rates. This past fall, they were not. My salary requirements stopped at least two interview processes when the question was raised. In other cases it was not clear that the company was serious about moving forward with hiring for the position at all. A three month search ultimately came up dry, which is fine because I'm currently employed, but I do not think the hiring landscape is promising at all right now.
In your experience, what’s the best way to increase signal? I feel as though a lot of devs struggle with the initial process of getting past screening, drawing attention to projects, etc.
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Interviews are easy, offers are hard.
I don’t see this reality in the style of interview being performed at all.
Everyone has seemingly adopted the FAANG playbook for interviewing that doesn’t really select for people who like getting their hands dirty and building. These kinds of interviews are compliance interviews: they’re for people who will put in the work to just pass the test.
There are so many interviews I’ve been in where if I don’t write the perfect solution on the first try, I’ll get failed on the interview. More than ever, I’m seeing interviewers interrupt me during systems or coding interviews before I have a chance to dig in. I’ve always seen a little bit of this, but it seems like the bar is tightening, not on skill, but on your ability to regurgitate the exact solution the interviewer has in mind.
In the past I’ve always cold applied places and only occasionally leaned on relationships. Now I’m only doing the latter. Interviewees are asked to risk asymmetrically compared to employers.
>I generally tend to interview every year to see what's out there in the world (sometimes I find something worth switching for, other times not). I'm not even looking very hard but have had 4 interviews in the last month.
You've been interviewing forever. You're the well practiced pickup artist of job searching. Of course you'll be getting the call backs over the other 1000 applicants who don't have the same experience level applying. You "just know" how to read between the lines and tailor a resume, whip up a cover letter, etc whereas they're making mistakes.
Hopefully it’s not too much like 2008 and we end up with another huge surge in unpaid internships
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Agreed on the bimodal, but I don't think this is junior vs. senior - I think it's just competence being rooted out.
The majority of engineers, in my hiring experience, failed very simple tests pre-AI. In a world where anyone can code, they're no better than previously non-technical people. The CS degree is no longer protection.
The gap between average and the best engineers now, though, is even higher. The best engineers can visualize the whole architecture in their head, and describe exactly what they want to an AI - their productivity is multiplied, and they rarely get slowed down.
While this could be done by junior or senior, I think junior usually has the slight advantage in being more AI-native and knowing how to effectively prompt and work with AI, though not always.
I see it the opposite way actually with respect to the CS degree. If you earned your CS degree (or any degree) before 2022 or so, the value of that degree is going to grow and grow and grow until the last few people who had to learn before AI are dying out like the last COBOL developers
AI has fundamentally broken the education system in a way that will take decades for it to fully recover. Even if we figure out how to operate with AI properly in an educational setting in such a way that learners actually still learn, the damage from years of unqualified people earning degrees and then entering academia is going to reverberate through the next 50 years as those folks go on to teach...
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> The best engineers can visualize the whole architecture in their head, and describe exactly what they want to an AI
I think this must be part of it. I see so many posts about people burning a thousand dollars in AI credits building a small app, and I have no idea why. I use the $20 Claude plan and I rarely run out of usage, and I make all kinds of things. I just describe what I want, do a few back-and-forths of writing out the architecture, and Claude does it.
I think the folks burning thousands of dollars of credits are unable to describe what they want.
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> While this could be done by junior or senior, I think junior usually has the slight advantage in being more AI-native and knowing how to effectively prompt and work with AI, though not always.
But juniors don't (usually) have the knowledge to assess if what the AI has produced is ok or not. I agree that anybody (junior or senior) can produce something with AI, the key question is whether the same person has the skills to asses (e.g., to ask the right questions) that the produced output is what's needed. In my experience, junior + AI is just a waste of money (tokens) and a nightmare to take accountability for.
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I was skeptical but I'm really starting to see the productivity benefits now.
I very much follow the pattern of having the whole architecture in my head and describe it to the AI which generates the appropriate code. So now the bottlenecks are all process related: availability of people to review my PRs, security sign offs on new development, waiting on CI builds and deployments, stakeholder validation, etc. etc.
> The majority of engineers, in my hiring experience, failed very simple tests pre-AI
Did you consider tech whiteboard / leetcode interviews are unnatural stressful environments ? Have you gone through a mid/difficult technical appraisal yourself lately ? Try it out just to get an idea how it feels on the other side...
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I agree that what you're describing is the required skillset now. But two things I've been unsure of are what that looks like in terms of hiring to test for it, and for how long this remains a moat at all.
So much of tech hiring cargo culting has been built up around leetcode and other coding problems, puzzles, and more. We all pay lip service to systems thinking and architecture, but I question if even those are testing the correct things for the modern era.
And then what happens in a year when the models can handle that as well?
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Largely agree, with a bit of clarification. Junior devs can indeed prompt better than some of the old timers, but the blast radius of their inexperienced decisions is much higher. High competence senior devs who embrace the new tools are gonna crush it relative to juniors.
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Makes sense. You just reminded me of the article "Why Can’t Programmers... Program?" [1].
Before gen AI, I used to give candidates at my company a quick one-hour remote screening test with a couple of random "FizzBuzz"-style questions. I would usually paraphrase the question so a simple Google search would not immediately surface the answer, and 80% of candidates failed at coding a working solution, which was very much in line with the article. Post gen AI, that test effectively dropped to a 0% failure rate, so we changed our selection process.
[1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/
> The best engineers can visualize the whole architecture in their head, and describe exactly what they want to an AI
I'd go a step further and say the engineers who, unprompted, discover requirements and discuss their own designs with others have an even better time. You need to effectively communicate your thoughts to coding agents, but perhaps more crucially you need to fit your ever-growing backyard of responsibilities into the larger picture. Being that bridge requires a great level of confidence and clear-headedness and will be increasingly valued.
This stupid industry doesn't have the wherewithal to actually make a good credential and training process like medicine and law, and instead lets everyone come up with their own process to vet people. We could even do it as an apprenticeship model, not like that hasn't served humanity throughout the ages.
I should have a credential I have to maintain every few years, one or two interviews, and that should get me a job.
Could you provide an example of your “very simple tests” ?
I have found in the last 3 months that there are two clear tiers of developers in the company I work at, the ones that can code with AI and the ones that can't, and the ones that can't are all going to be unemployed in 6 months.
We have a lot of people where if you gave them clear requirements, they could knock out features and they were useful for that, but I have an army of agents that can do that now for pennies. We don't need that any more. We need people who have product vision and systems design and software engineering skills. I literally don't even care if they can code with any competency.
Btw, if you think that copying and pasting a jira ticket into claude is a skill that people are going to pay you for, that is also wrong. You need to not just be able to use AI to code, you need to be able to do it _at scale_. You need to be able to manage and orchestrate fleets of ai agents writing code.
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What is a high performer?
Someone who jumps higher than expected when the boss demands it?
Someone who works 996 in the office?
Or someone who knows what they’re doing?
I think this is bigger than any individual. It’s just a matter of time before you’re let go. There’s no loyalty from companies at all. Not when they’re seeing higher than expected profits and are still cutting huge percentages of staff every year. There’s no strategy or preference to it. I don’t think this has to do with how you or I perform on the job.
Most people I’ve talked to lately who are still employed are watching out for their job to get cut.
That matches an observation made in that report from the recent Thoughtworks retreat: https://www.thoughtworks.com/content/dam/thoughtworks/docume...
> The retreat challenged the narrative that AI eliminates the need for junior developers. Juniors are more profitable than they have ever been. AI tools get them past the awkward initial net-negative phase faster. They serve as a call option on future productivity. And they are better at AI tools than senior engineers, having never developed the habits and assumptions that slow adoption.
> The real concern is mid-level engineers who came up during the decade-long hiring boom and may not have developed the fundamentals needed to thrive in the new environment. This population represents the bulk of the industry by volume, and retraining them is genuinely difficult. The retreat discussed whether apprenticeship models, rotation programs and lifelong learning structures could address this gap, but acknowledged that no organization has solved it yet.
Thanks for sharing this is the first I’ve seen this. I wish they had expanded on exactly what mid-level might be missing rather then just saying “fundamentals” and “practical intuition”
> they're just as capable as using AI as anyone
They're just as capable of typing prompts into AI, but what they don't have is good judgement of what good work/code looks like, so what's the point of asking a junior engineer to do something vs asking the LLM directly?
The junior engineer will become a senior. An llm wont. For now, anyway.
Because a lot of stuff doesn't need to be good it needs to be done.
Nobody is gonna lose money because some script that generates yaml for the build process every hour nested three loops instead of two. Intern, AI, junior dev, junior dev telling an intern how to use AI, doesn't matter. If it works for the week it'll work for the decade. If someone needs to pick it apart and fix something in a year it'll either take no time because they know enough to do it easily or it'll be a good low stakes learning exercise for a junior.
Everyone wants to think their stuff is important but 99.9% of code is low stakes support code either in applications or in infrastructure around them.
Juniors from non target schools are getting pushed out since the skill floor is too high.
I graduated 9 months ago. In that time I've merged more PRs than anyone else, reduced mean time to merge by 20% on a project with 300 developers with an automated code review tool, and in the past week vibe coded an entire Kubernetes cluster that can remotely execute our builds (working on making it more reliable before putting it into prod).
None of this matters.
The companies/teams like OpenAI or Google Deepmind that are allegedly hiring these super juniors at huge salaries only do so from target schools like Waterloo or MIT. If you don't work at a top company your compensation package is the same as ever. I am not getting promoted faster, my bonus went from 9% to 14% and I got a few thousand in spot bonuses.
From my perspective, this field is turning into finance or law, where the risk of a bad hire due to the heightened skill floor is so high that if you DIDN'T go to a target school you're not getting a top job no matter how good you are. Like how Yale goes to Big Law at $250k while non T14 gets $90k doing insurance defence and there's no movement between the categories. 20-30% of my classmates are still unemployed.
We cannot get around this by interviewing well because anyone can cheat on interviews with AI, so they don't even give interviews or coding assessments to my school. We cannot get around this with better projects because anyone can release a vibe coded library.
It appears the only thing that matters is pedigree of education because 4 years of in person exams from a top school aren't easy to fake.
Can I ask what you and others that posts things like this here -"What are you actually developing?"
People are posting about pull requests, use of AIs, yada yada. But they never tell us what they are trying to produce. Surely this should be the first thing in the post:
- I am developing an X
- I use an LLM to write some of the code for it ... etc.
- I have these ... testing problems
- I have these problems with the VCS/build system ...
Otherwise it is all generalised, well "stuff". And maybe, dare I say it, slop.
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I hate the credentialism. What a bummer of a place to end up.
I mean you don’t need your first job go to top of the top companies. Your first job is to get you into the industry then you can flourish.
How many juniors OpenAI GDM are going to hire in a year, probably double digits at max, the chances are super slim and they are by nature are allowed to be as picky as they should be.
That being said, I do agree this industry is turning into finance/law, but that won’t last long either. I genuinely can’t foresee what if when AGI/ASI is really here, it should start giving human ideas to better itself, and there will be no incentive to hire any human for a large sum anymore, maybe a single digit individuals on earth perhaps
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I’m not sure it is just that, I don’t even see positions listed where I would like to work. For salary ranges, I see lower upper limits than my second best offer three n half years ago. Considering the high inflation, that’s crazy.
I would not mind switching but 1. I don’t see interesting positions 2. they don’t pay well, and only 3. they might not even want me.
It might also be just my niche, but finding a good position feels completely impossible for me.
I am doing cross platform mobile development and I’m wondering how I could transition into backend development or I started even considering the decentralized finance…
> than my second best offer three n half years ago
3.5 years ago was peak ZIRP hiring craziness.
It wasn't a normal reference point.
Yeah, I don't know if I'd call myself competent (I'm late intermediate/early senior. So the worst of the curve here). But there's a difference between "interviews have gotten a lot harder now" and "I can't even get a response back". It's far, far more in the latter.
My resume isn't bad on paper either. It's not FAANG coded, but it's decent experience.
> In my experience, tech employment is incredibly bimodal right now. Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever, but an "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position.
This is the K-shaped economy playing out. Its a signal that the american middle class is hollowing out. Bad, very bad.
> and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone
Wouldn't the assumption be the opposite, in that AI is magnifying the decision making of the engineer and so you get more payback by having the senior drive the AI?
I've found this to be true so far, junior engineers with AI can be super productive but they can also cause a lot of damage (more outages than ever) and AI amplifies the sometimes poorly designed code they can generate.
I suspect a lot of it best practices will be enforcing best practices via agents.md/claude.md to create a more constrained environment.
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100% this. AI is automating the code generation.
Being able to clearly describe a problem and work with the AI to design a solution, prioritise what to put the AI to work on, set up good harnesses so the quality of the output is kept high, figure out what parallelises well and what’s going to set off agents that are stepping on each others toes… all of this needs experience and judgement and delegation and project organisation skills.
AI is supercharging tech leads. Beginners might be able to skill up faster, but they’re not getting the same results.
For a good senior, yes you get massive returns, which is why those good seniors are in incredibly high demand right now.
For average to low-performing intermediates/seniors... there's not much difference in output between them and a good junior at this point. Claude really raised the skill floor for software development.
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Yep. I've seen this personally. The ROI of a great engineer is bigger than ever.
Juniors really aren't just as capable with AI as anyone. Knowing how to unambiguously describe correctly what you want isn't something a junior can do, nor is understanding if what the ai produces is good or bad.
> Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone.
While I could buy that hiring managers believe this, it's not actually true.
The gulf between the quality of what a sr developer can do with these tools and what a jr can do is huge. They simply don't know what they don't know and effective prompting requires effective spec writing.
A rando jr vibe coder can churn out code like there's no tomorrow, but that doesn't mean it's actually right.
While I agree with what you said. In personal experience I have noticed the software design / architecture is becoming irrelevant for lot of enterprises (including mine of course). So design nowadays is about API design Input/Output/Error handling. And architecture is about Cloud/Kubernetes/APM , deployment and monitoring etc. Code now does not need much design. Things like performance, isolation, extensibility etc as those are now higher level concerns not part of code itself.
This is also where micro services pattern fits in well because individual unit is so small no design needed.
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> Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone.
Seniors have much more advantage right now in using AI than Juniors. Seniors get to lean in on their experience in checking AI results. Juniors rely on the AI's experience instead, which isn't as useful.
This matches what I've seen too. Though I'd add another dimension: soft skills. In my experience, job searching has always been easier for people who communicate well regardless of their technical level. And soft skills might be what's making some people more resilient to this market shift specifically
That has always been true (not that I’m saying you don’t know that, I’m using your comment as a jumping off point) in this industry. I am a good developer, but I’m a very good teacher and leader, and soft skills are why I’ve had the career I’ve had over the past two decades.
> Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone.
That is pretty context sensitive. You're correct that there's no real deep AI use expertise broadly understood to exist at this point (unless you're Steve Yegge?), but if people think they can toss out the engineers with experience in the systems that have been around a while, with junior developers "guiding" changes — that's likely a good way for a business to fall on its sword.
I wonder if that is just a correction of the rampant hiring that took place just before this employment “crash?” - if it is as you say that its intermediates and non high performers then does that make it a good thing as well.
Truth is, when I was part of larger orgs/enterprise I definitely saw some folks who were dead weight, and I don’t mean to be harsh, a few of these knew they weren’t contributing and were being malicious in that sense.
Similarly, I wonder how many high performers now are taking multiple jobs thanks to remote work and exposing the mid to low performers. Like some kind of developer hypergamy taking place.
Any reasoning/data or at least an anecoded behind this claim? No?
I'm seeing a lot of specialization. For the past 11 years I've marketed myself as a frontend engineer. I got laid off last year and the job search was largely similar to my previous job search 4 years prior.
I've been looking again this year and the landscape has changed drastically. Specialization is the name of the game, I have a good amount of experience working with Growth initiatives and I've been getting good responses from roles that are looking for either Growth or Design engineers, roles that were not as prevalent years ago.
> In my experience, tech employment is incredibly bimodal right now. Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever, but an "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position.
That sounds good for many of us (and don’t we all like to think we’re top candidates here on HN…) but is there any data to back this up? Or it just anecdata (not to dismiss anecdata, still useful info).
In my experience juniors are simply being replaced with intermediates and seniors who are willing to work for junior wages.
I'm not a Senior, but I'm not a Junior either. The market has no place for people like me. I've killed myself for almost two years and can't secure a position. It's incredibly disheartening. I have a family to feed. I need to be able to work.
> "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position.
As was foretold in the Tyler Cowen's eponymous 2013 book "Average Is Over".
In it he argued that the modern economy will undergo a permanent shift where "average" performance no longer guarantees a stable, middle-class life.
He predicted that the economy will split into two distinct classes: a high-earning elite (roughly 10–15% of the population) who thrive by collaborating with technology, and a larger group (85–90%) facing stagnant wages and fewer opportunities.
AI summary of the other key points of that book:
The "Man + Machine" Advantage: Success will belong to those who can effectively use smart machines. Cowen uses Freestyle Chess (teams of humans and computers) as an analogy, noting that human intuition combined with machine processing power consistently outperforms either working alone.
The Power of Conscientiousness: In a world of abundant information, the scarcest and most valuable traits will be self-motivation, discipline, and the ability to focus. Hyper-Meritocracy: Advanced data and machine intelligence make it easier for employers to measure an individual's exact economic value. This leads to extreme salary inequality as top performers are identified and rewarded more precisely.
A New Social Contract: Cowen predicts a future where individuals must be more self-reliant. He suggests society will move toward lower-cost living models for the non-elite, featuring cheaper housing and "bread and circuses" in the form of low-cost digital entertainment and online education.
EDIT: Notice how we're basically already here: Netflix is cheap, YT is free, Khan Academy and MIT OCW is free, Coursera/Udemy/etc. are cheap.
Stagnant vs. Dynamic Sectors: The economic divide is worsened by "low accountability" sectors like education and healthcare, where productivity is hard to measure and costs continue to rise, unlike tech-driven sectors that see rapid gains.
I don’t think that’s true
If intermediates were being pushed out they would just take junior roles to have something
Companies really don’t like hiring Juniors in general
As the kids say, AI makes everyone a 10x engineer. Who would you you want to 10x?
But it's measuring quantity, not quality.
https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html
What we really need is the -10X engineer ;)
Alas, his job would entirely consist of debloating the slop everyone else is pumping out "at inference speed".
https://steipete.me/posts/2025/shipping-at-inference-speed
someone: (actual data)
HN user: not in my experience!
> Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever
I haven't found that to be true. Unless by "top candidates" you mean people working at actual AI companies such as Alphabet/Meta/OpenAI/Anthropic. If you're an AI-user and not an AI scientist it's bad out there, even for senior+ developers who previously worked in "FAANG".
Relating it to performance is just silly. Most companies barely understand the performance of their employees much less candidates. The market has shrunk but not catastrophically so. Most people haven't been majorly affected but that doesn't mean they're automatically the most deserving or best performing.
People with experience and/or credentials desired by companies in areas of growth (i.e. AI) are always in high demand
> People with experience and/or credentials desired by companies in areas of growth (i.e. AI) are always in high demand
This is tautological.
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>Most people haven't been majorly affected
Apparently it is over a third affected in my domain. Which is crazy. Pretty much everyone in my immediate band has been hit at some point. That that weren't were usually around 5-8 above me. So basically a different generational band altogether.
Yes, this has been my experience. I'd consider myself average at best. I worked in the industry for almost 7 years before being laid off. I can't find anything at the moment and have resorted to moving back in with my parents.
It's pretty depressing. I'd take just about anything at the moment. I understand desperation going into a job interview isn't ideal either.
It feels like I'm in a hole.
High performer is so subjective too.
You can be a great unblocker, team lead, and work well within cross cutting areas and with interdepartmental stake holders, have a history of strong technical performance.
and yet its nebulous if that means you're a high performer or not to those hiring. It seems I'm seeing 'culture fit' as a common reason people aren't getting hired again. That was out of vogue for a good while.
In tech 'culture fit' is generally a dog whistle for ageism in my experience.
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Yep - the dual economy has moved into tech itself.
This has been my experience as well.
Happy to be on the high-end ^^.
> just as capable as using AI as anyone
This is probably the dumbest take I've heard of. They're the most likely to make mistakes with AI because they don't know the pitfalls of what they're doing.
> Contrary to what many say, I don't think it's simple as seniors are getting hired and juniors aren't. Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone.
Tell me about all the junior developers you've hired (it's none)
The chart in the tweet represents year-on-year growth. Based on these figures alone the actual number of people employed in tech is still really high, and the numbers can't just go up forever.
Also this only captures 6 industries, which is a narrow view of what would define "tech" these days.
Not to say that the job market isn't tough but this graph is a very narrow view
> The chart in the tweet represents year-on-year growth.
Can’t believe how many people are commenting without looking at what the chart means. We’ve lost 50k jobs last two years after decades of adding 100k+ every year including the pandemic highs of 300k+ per year. Total employment remains way above 2000s, 2008 and 2020 unlike the title suggests.
Thanks for pointing this out - title is extremely misleading. Total tech jobs is not lower than 2008 just because YoY is down.
General media, news, etc. gets this wrong all the time, see any commentary on inflation, GDP growth, rate of change in house prices, etc.
The chart shows devs still growing, and "Computer System Design SERVICES" getting hammered (most of the total loss).
I'm not even sure this chart tells the story of the title.
Is this WITCH companies?
Yes, but...
The health of the market is not a function of the total number of jobs alone, it's a function of the number of jobs and the number of people to fill them.
The number of total jobs going up year after year meant that there were increasing numbers of candidates, new people entering the field. If the job growth stops, then there still we be candidates coming in. There will also be the new hires from the last decade moving into increasingly senior roles, and there won't be space for them (unless you devalue the meaning of "senior" even more).
So the year over year change matters a lot. If it plateaus, or even declines slightly, it's more than enough to make a terrible market.
YoY change in jobs is still probably not the best way to visualize overall market health. As you say, you also have to take into account the number of people of fill the jobs. To me it seems like the least misleading statistics would be a graph showing unemployment and underemployment % over time. I'd probably also toss in graphs of length of unemployment period as well as various median wage percentiles (quintiles or deciles maybe) over time.
It shows growth or decline but it absolutely does not show what the title implies.
The chart shows the derivative of the thing people care about which is total cumulative change. The area under the curve shows cumulative change.
The post-COVID spike was also absolutely insane and much bigger than dotcom boom.
Asked Gemini quickly for 2000 and 2025 numbers.
Tech employees: 5.5m vs 9.9.
Software developers: 0.68m vs 3.2m.
Different ball game.
How’s it compare to 2000 though? Tech was ascendant in 2008 so not surprised to hear it didn’t do too badly then and in 2020 while people panicked tech again had a much easier time keeping people on remotely.
EDIT: posted below as well https://xcancel.com/JosephPolitano/status/202991636466461124...
There’s a longer term graph in the thread. We’ve got a long way to go before we hit 2000 numbers which is what I’d expected.
In Portland, there was a time in 2000-2002 where Nike and Intel had contract offers out to SW developers for $12/hour, and were getting slammed with applications.
In Atlanta in 2000, I was making $52K a year working for a medium size company that printed bills. By 2002 I was making $65K at the same company.
For context, I had my 2600 square foot 3.5/2 bedroom house built that year for $175K.
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The equivalent of about $20/hr today for those wondering
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I started my career at $14/hr in 1999, was at $19/hr in 2000, and switched to salary at $55k by 2001. I spent 15 years in corp IT running software teams... total comp got way better when I entered the big tech industry in 2015.
Remember that the 2000 numbers are also out of a much smaller pool and the graph uses absolute numbers. So even if they were the same numbers in 2000 as 2020 it would have been a much, much larger percentage of all jobs.
I was working in 2000 in Atlanta GA at boring old enterprises companies with 4 years of experience back then. If you were working for/targeting profitable non tech companies, the world was your oyster.
I was working at a company that printed bills for utility companies and had offers from banks, insurance companies etc. The world didn’t stop buying Coca Cola, flying Delta or stop buying stuff from Home Depot because of the dot com crash
For the last 2 years I can't even get an interview despited having 14 years of experience and being up to date with development trends, libraries, languages, AI tooling, etc.
I don't think the market is flooded with new devs as many state, I think we are in a deep silent crisis
I've been able to get something like 25 interviews in 2 months despite having long gaps on my resume and nothing especially impressive to my name. So I suspect you might be going about this wrong. I haven't gotten an offer yet, that's another story, but getting the interviews hasn't been hard. Applying in NYC/SF, senior-only.
I think another big change is the offer rate. I've had plenty of interviews in recent years but almost no offers.
So what do you attribute your success in getting interviews to? What are you doing right, or better than other people?
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Senior level is doing the heavy lifting here.
I don't know. The company I work at is inviting candidates for interviews, and we have to make compromises because we can't get the exact profiles we are looking for. Something about your comment does not add up to me.
Locality. People want to work close to where they live and not all places are bustling with all kind of activity. I suspect you're hybrid or on site only, right?
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Sometimes it looks like the longer you're looking for a job, the harder it gets for some reason. That's unintuitive for me, as you should be getting more confident in interviews etc
Companies take your unemployment length as a negative signal
"He's been unemployed for 13 months? Why doesn't anyone want to hire him? Must be something wrong with him"
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IMO it’s just depression for tech. Back then 33% of total employment got gutted, which is probably better than tech today or in a few years when big techs start AI gut.
Silent?
You guys keep trying to put a pillow over our face.
A big problem we have is a the sheer volume of AI slop resumes, fake applicants and people trying to cheat on interviews. We had to close a req for SWE because we had so many “people” (read: automated applicants) clogging up the pipeline. You effectively need a referral
To some recruiters, there's this sweet spot between 5 and 10 years experience where the applicant good / independent enough to hit the ground running, not too expensive, and still young enough to put up with company bullshit.
Wow, that stinks. Are you just doing freelance in the meantime?
Are you based in the U.S.?
EU/UK
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I don't think it's very silent?
Maybe people just have their fingers in their ears but this has been a problem for years now
Not dismissing that it’s a tough market for some but folks also need to learn how to read a chart. It shows a slight decline following a massive expansion.
The primary thing going on in the market right now is a lot of companies simply over-hired during the post Covid boom and they’re correcting for that.
I don't believe its over hiring I believe its offshoring. Blaming Covid after so many years doesn't make sense.
This has been pointed on HN about 50 times but the headlines keep coming.
Things look crazy around 2022 in hindsight.
Looked crazy at the time too!
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I just can't get over how short and intense the period between 2021 and 2023 was. There was SO much hype, such stupendous hiring, in such a compressed timeframe. Within the span of like 9 weeks it went from full steam ahead to completely seized.
At the same time, the economy at large didn't seem to change very much.
Why did this happen?
Near zero interest rates + COVID remote work + PPP loans = Booming economy
What is happening now is the unwinding of the above. Now its:
Higher rates + AI + too many SWEs (bootcamps and over-hiring) = Busting economy
I think what we are in right now is more the norm and the post covid boom was an exception.
And also the section 174 change too, which suddenly increased the tax bill for any companies doing software development.
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Anecdotally seeing this play out in SF right now. We're hiring for our fintech startup and getting 500+ applications per role, many from people at companies I would've assumed were stable. A year ago we struggled to get anyone to even look at us. The talent pool is incredible but man it feels weird benefiting from other people's misfortune.
Yeah but like... area under the curve. All of those jobs and more were added very recently, 2020-2022. It's a major retreat from that growth, but the trend since, say, 2008 or 2010 or 2018 is still positive growth. 2020-2022 was just a huge shift due to a very weird Covid/ZIRP market.
I have PayPal, Amazon, LinkedIn, <<mid size company>>, <<mid size company2>>, <<startup>> as a manager on my resume. I didn't get a call back after applying for two weeks.
I got 4 or 5 standard rejections.
I have non-English name so that definitely hurts. I have AP EAD which is a stage between H1B and Green Card and I still require sponsorship. It's complicated but I can't just switch to EAD right away.
It's not just engineers. It's managers and experienced people as well. Don't believe top comment that it is bimodal. Unless you are supertar (99.99%) it becoming hard to get noticed. I thought of going back to IC role but it is hard to pick up and do leetcode all over again. It is extremely hard with a special needs kids at home.
Any suggestions or recommendations for me?
I understand this a lot.
I had managerial* position I ghosted because they had Leetcode literally written on the agenda.
* - managerial is replaced with Lead. Lead is expected to be hands-on as well as have serious managerial experience. Since it's easier to lie about managerial experience, you have people lying into these roles and becoming terrible managers.
People constantly tell me "oh you're a dev it's easy to find work"
I'm a c++ dev, with excellent senior tests, but low experience, and no degree in France. 3 years without a job.
I yearn for a new pandemic.
Fortunately, I learned how to live without a job, found other things to do and how to live a life. Welfare is generous, and I have good savings.
Honestly I don't really want to work in software anymore. If there is a job offer and recruiters are calling me, I answer and I accept.
But I'm not applying to all positions I can see and I won't run after them.
I’ve never really found there to be all that much of a market for specifically c++ developers. If you do decide to look for work more seriously I wouldn’t be too hung up on language, if you can code in one you can pretty much code in all of them, and I’ve never hired a developer for specific language skill outside of a few rare cases it’s something really specific we are trying to fix (e.g erlang or something), even then it wouldn’t be a complete showstopper.
YMMV but that’s coming from a guy who writes in at least 3 languages at current $dayjob.
> Fortunately, I learned how to live without a job, found other things to do and how to live a life. Welfare is generous
Oh to be French
Greater Boston area here. I've worked in C++ roles at two companies over the past three years and both times we were desperate for competent C++ developers. Similar trends for both companies: we had positions open for ~six months, interviewing many candidates, and being disappointed at their quality. We eventually filled the positions (about a half-dozen in total) but it was not easy. My current company, but different team, still has a quite a few recs out for C++ devs.
TL;DR - at least in my little bubble, the C++ systems engineer market has been consistently hiring people, though good engineers are hard to find.
Hm what about the Citadel rebuttal that showed growth?
https://www.citadelsecurities.com/news-and-insights/2026-glo...
Yeah, I was thinking the same. It seems like you can get data for whatever argument you want to support
Biggest thing hurting folks is RTO. Unless you live in a large metro, tech jobs are slim/none.
That’s how it was before the pandemic.. Is it unusual that the jobs are where the people are?
Doesn't seem necessarily a contradiction. Job posting growth logically happens before effective job growth.
I've heard other people say, situation has greatly improved over the past year, esp. 6 months.
How many of those are real jobs?
I don't recall any recession with respect to tech in 2020. It was a hiring frenzy.
Any commentary about tech jobs that does not include the interest rate environment and the massive over hiring that occurred between 2019 and 2022 is borderline dishonest.
Look at federal data of SWE job postings and look at the federal funds rate for the same period. Jobs is giant mountain peaking in ‘22. Interest rate is zero for the pandemic and then spikes right when SWE jobs start to collapse.
Tech hiring is all downstream of interest rates. AI has had almost no impact, at least not yet. (Block layoffs were not AI, look at their stock, they basically can only succeed as a financial company when money is free, very misleading and a convenient excuse for terrible management to now say they need to be “AI native”)
Those are raw numbers. I would look instead at the job changes over total employment numbers. I don't have the numbers but I would wager we have many more people working in tech today (overall) than we did in 2008.
Also, that spike in 21/22 really did a number on people's expectations. The one constant in this industry is its cyclical nature.
Maybe I'm reading the graph wrong, but the decrease comes after years on continuous growth, so total employment numbers in tech should still be absolutely massive, compared to 18 years ago?
If it continues, then yes it could be bad, but so far it seems like a correction for over-hiring in 2021 - 2023. Seems a little weird to be focusing on a decline in 2024 - 2026, without addressing the large increase right in the years before.
There's a lot of dynamics where it's the short-term numbers that matter. If you're a developer who needs a new job after your spouse got transferred to LA or something, it does you no good that the absolute numbers are massive, nor that a different person looking for a job 3 years ago would have found it uncommonly easy.
Asked Gemini quickly for 2000 and 2025 numbers (US).
Tech employees: 5.5m vs 9.9.
Software developers: 0.68m vs 3.2m.
Different ball game.
>Software developers: 0.68m vs 3.2m.
I had no idea I was in such an exclusive group back in 2000. Everyone I knew was a software engineer or in tech one way or another so I suppose I got a warped sense that I belonged to a larger group.
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> Software developers: 0.68m vs 3.2m.
Wow. Just wow.
Remember it's the first derivative. The title and chart suggested at first that there are fewer tech jobs vs the start, but really it must be way more.
I still kinda want to see this going back to 2000. That must be the biggest tech crash by far. 2008 and 2020 were overall market crashes, but tech was booming.
Interesting, this shows growth in open positions: https://www.trueup.io/job-trend
True but there is also a massive proliferation of ghost jobs. Dirty secret for a bunch of Series A places
Something needs to be done about these bots, it is getting eerie. Yesterday a bot created an account named 100xLLM the moment I responded to it to respond back with.
I'm looking for job (in Rust) now and is absurd how many positions are for training LLMS -in Rust!- (yeah, lets help the people that wanna put everyone out of jobs)
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I see everyone say this but what is the point of making a fake job opening? Are companies just doing that to see if a unicorn applies?
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I've been lucky enough to stay employed, but eating a massive pay cut hurts. I have no realistic hope of getting back to my peak salary anytime soon .
Jobs are now significantly more demanding too, do more and make less.
A look at the number of replies to "Who's Hiring?" each month over the past year or so compared to prior years made it loud and clear. Traditional tech has been in a recession for a couple of years, at least!
Indeed, things really changed in late 2022 / early 2023. https://www.hnhiringtrends.com/
It’s also worth noting that the economy and job market as a whole is in a recession.
https://xcancel.com/JosephPolitano/status/202991636466461124...
What that graph looks like to me is that there were a ton of marginal folks hired during COVID, and we're shedding a lot of those folks who probably shouldn't have been hired anyway.
Unfortunately... I want to mirror this sentiment. I interviewed a lot of candidates (and worked with many teammates) in my last few roles and I saw some pretty worrying trends...
I mean COVID was 5 years ago and many companies have had multiple rounds of layoff since then, how long will we keep calling it covid shedding
I am in my 20s. At the moment I've got a part time job, but I am preparing myself for the worse. In the next few years I am planning to volunteer at farms through workaway. Maybe one day I can become self sustainable,tech and nutrition wise
also getting into plumbing, curious to see what others are doing in this regard.
If anyone saw that LinkedIn post about someone at Block resigning guilt of being offered a raise and retention after the layoffs, I'd say that is a signal that tech is heading down.
Most people would be thankful to have a secure well paying job in the post AI blow off; increasingly it's going to harder to differentiate yourself against anyone else using AI. That we have people still in the thick of AI that don't understand that is a strong signal that AI boom is still going to come take some jobs.
If you're in a software related role and AI isn't making you more productive, it's on YOU as a dev to figure things out quickly.
AI is coming for your job so you can either be an AI manager, or you can get managed out for AI.
caveat: This is my take as someone who used to do a lot of hand coding, and now regularly has a small team of AI doing anything that would have normally required mostly brute coding strength but not too much thought; that's facet'ed plots, refactoring libraries, improving pipeline efficiency, adding parallelization where possible, building presentations, adding test coverage.
mmhmm. That's a lot of me me me. Are you reviewing others' work who produce the same output as you?
It sure looks like during the ZIRP era, tech substantially overhired. Post-ZIRP companies are correcting that (but under the guise of AI).
To save some a search: Zero Interest-Rate Policy
A key thing in this graph is that it doesn't seem to correlate to the rise of code assistants. That is a (relatively) recent last year thing from my point of view. Yes, they were there before, but they hadn't really hit in a way that I think hiring decisions had shifted because of them. This is just tech laying off, not AI taking jobs.
Looking at the employment report that came out today, tech seems to be doing better then most sectors...
"Other professional, scientific, and technical services" grew month over month and year over year
"Information" took a hit, but the bulk of that was "Motion picture and sound recording industries"
"Computing infrastructure providers, data processing, web hosting, and related services" modestly shrunk, but "Web search portals, libraries, archives, and other information service" is the only area to grow under information.
This seems different then what the post says. They also said worse then 2008, but didn't post any information. I would imagine the total market was much smaller, so the while total jobs lost was probably smaller, percentage was probably larger. When I started in 2012, tech would take any with a science degree.
I don't understand the job titles being propose in the post, are the using different BLS data then me?
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf
"Web search portals, libraries, archives, and other information service"
It's a weird employment category that includes both Google SWEs and your local librarian.
I have been getting automated emails from a slew of different recruiters now. Usually one or two per day. I believe they are LLM generated. However, I usually don’t respond.
The next step is for me to respond with an LLM. Maybe if my LLM is good enough it’ll convince their LLM to skip the interview and just offer me a job.
This has a misleading title.
This chart shows that the rate of year-over-year, month-by-month change is worse than 2020.
But the number of tech jobs has grown by 12% since April of 2020 (2.34M vs. 2.63M). Heck, there are more tech jobs today than at the beginning of 2022 (2.61M), even.
Job market sucks, trend is bad, but post title is a misnomer for what this chart shows.
(Numbers based on a quick grab BLS.gov data of CES6054151101 (Custom Computer Programming Services) + CES5051800001 (Computing Infrastructure Providers, Data Processing & Web Hosting) + CES6054151201 (Computer Systems Design Services)---couldn't find other ones quickly and gave up :))
The ideal software engineer will code himself out of a job and be happy about it.
Be that ideal. The shareholders are counting on you!
But LLMs are already doing this for us supposedly...
> But LLMs are already doing this for us supposedly...
Exactly my point. Encourage LLM adoption, faster, faster. Be excited about your homeless future, software engineers!
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Counterpoint: I've been desperately trying to code myself out of a job for almost 4 decades now. I inevitably ended up (and keep ending up) getting more responsibilities instead.
So have all the great engineers I've been working with - there's a deep desire for growth past the things that you're currently good at.
The people worrying they might code themselves out of a job are in a different skill demographic. (Ironically, that means they won't be able to code themselves out of a job)
Are you saying you want to be laid off with a nice package as you’ve been with the same employer for a long time? Couple of options: have a nice conversation with your manager and make this clear. The signs are clear that major s/w layoffs will happen in the next couple of years. Other option is to ease off - your high salary and low output will put you in the dustbin list
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> Counterpoint: I've been desperately trying to code myself out of a job for almost 4 decades now. I inevitably ended up (and keep ending up) getting more responsibilities instead.
What exactly do you mean by that? Do you mean you finished one project but your employer had another one for you, which you then were expected to work on instead of sitting idle? Or do you mean you coded yourself into a "promotion"?
My comment was just mocking the foolish selfless ethos of many software engineers, who don't look out for themselves and idealize giving to psychopathic organizations that will screw them the moment that's advantageous. Many software engineers have a pathological level of naivete and confusion about the role they really inhabit (e.g. righteously going on about buggy-whip makers).
Funny how the dip started years before we had meaningful AI codegen.
Could speculate this is likely to be a shift in what gets funded and invested in.
That's because it's a macroecon dip, and the effect of AI on hiring has been greatly pre-empted as excuse
Yes, it's not that the company is doing badly, we're right sizing because of AI!
Good to know it’s not just me. Sheesh. Are there signs that it’ll bounce back again?
I’ve been looking for work for nearly seven months. I can write low level systems code in C and C++ to web applications in Python and compilers in Haskell. I have tons of industry experience.
Yet most places I apply to ghost me or follow up a month later that the position has been filled.
Companies that have been lying off people claim they are seeing record profits.
It seems like we went from a relatively stable growth to just chaos.
Misleading title. The change in tech employment is worse, but actual tech employment remains high thanks to the massive 2021-2023 hiring spree.
I know people will say AI, but I don't think it's that. The whole "everyone should learn to code" bullshit of the last 15 years or so has created a lot of developers that frankly aren't very good, and then you mix in the massive overhiring of the pandemic, and what you're seeing is a hard correction. CEOs love to use "productivity improvements from AI" as a smokescreen and investor catnip but the research shows it's not having the effects claimed.
Blaming the employees is BS. A pretty large % of the people losing their jobs are also high performing excellent people. I feel like anyone who worked at one of these companies doing lay offs knows this.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that the people that got laid off were the ones that deserved it. Obviously politics, situational factors (wanting people back in the office), etc are a huge part (I myself am recently laid off and I don't think I deserved it!) What I was trying to drive at is developers have lost a lot of leverage and negotiation because there are too many people fighting for too few roles. Also I can't help but wonder if people have lost trust in developers because of the dilution of talent.
That being said, I don't think it's unfair to point out that creating a massive influx of new developers without jobs that provided good mentorship (most jobs are awful at mentoring junior developers) is going to have huge consequences that we're now dealing with. I think the "learn to code" thing was a massive mistake. Encourage the people that want to, sure, but don't try to pull people in that are only marginally interested in a paycheck.
Also wtf were we supposed to do? I graduated during the great recession. No one was hiring. Everyone from the president on down told us to learn to code. So we did.
The layoffs are not necessarily executed in a way that takes performance into account, but that doesn’t mean that the industry overall doesn’t have too many people for the amount of work that needs to be done.
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If things continue to get worse I really worry how many people might give up on life entirely. A lot of people in this industry don’t have a whole lot else going on for them, myself included.
I grinded my 20s away trying to have a successful career and if that just gets pulled out from under me I’ve got absolutely nothing.
I know a very senior engineer who took their life the day after Trump was elected. He was unemployed for a while.
While I think a lot more was going on with him than being unemployed, I'm convinced AI hitting the scene had a bit to do with it. They were an older dev 50+.
And AI will just shut out people just starting their careers
Too bad I guess.
There's still the hangover from free Covid money. I think the number one reason that it feels worse is that there's a LOT more people in the industry now than back in 2020. Much more competition than before.
Yup. Amazon doubled their workforce through the pandemic. I think a lot of tech companies are still cutting fat from those days.
Those of us who have been in the industry for 15-20 years we remember a time when tech was just a job.
In the mid 2010s, then most notably in late 2020 - 2021, you had people who had no interest in tech entering the industry because they saw it as an easy career to make decent money in.
It got pretty bad in the late 2010s, but it become almost comical in 2021 with people who took a two-week coding bootcamps suddenly landing 6 figure jobs. Some of these people were even working at multiple companies at the same time.
The optimist in me hopes this all shakes out with those people who had no interest in tech moving on to other things. These types of people were not only bad employees, they were also bad for the industry, and in my opinion responsible for culture shift from tech being a place dominating by "nerds" and "geeks" in the 90/00s to the modern "tech-bro" stereotype.
The realist in me though will continue to warn people the tech job they're working at today is likely their last. Between tech industry growth slowing, the excessive over production of tech talent and AI + SASS automating a lot of traditional software development work it's going to be exponentially harder to remain employed in tech in the coming years.
So much so you might as well find a relatively worse paid job if it means you don't have periods of months of unemployment every year.
>In the mid 2010s, then most notably in late 2020 - 2021, you had people who had no interest in tech entering the industry because they saw it as an easy career to make decent money in.
I remember it was even earlier than that, in the 90s when Bill Gates became the richest man in the world.
You're right about 6 month bootcamps leading to jobs in 2021 though! A true gold rush.
Headline is misleading.
Should be something like tech employment rate of growth is lower than it was in 2008 or 2020.
There are many many more tech workers than at either of those points.
the 2020 ‘recession’ wasn’t really bad for tech employment at all
In fact in sectors like the game industry the pandemic resulted in a massive hiring boom. The layoffs only materialized after the pandemic was well and truly over.
Yeah, pandemic was good overall. Next generation of consoles looming, sales overall were up since people were forced inside, there were finally some loosening of dev kit practices to accommodate for the lack of offices to go into (I never would have imagined in 2015 having a dev kit in my home 5 years later) .Pretty much the only art medium to benefit from the times while cinema collapsed, Streaming services were running a defecit war where no one won except Netflix, and music stalled for a bit.
But as per usual, the bust hit just as hard as the boom. Multiple high profile failures in games and initiatives as a whole, Microsoft and Apple decided to stop bleeding money with their respective subscription deals, mobile gaming (from the advent of Genshin Imapct and co) became less an easy cash grab and more a 2nd wing of AAA development, investments dried up overnight for indies (unless 'AI').
And the headcount, of course: https://variety.com/2026/gaming/news/one-third-video-game-wo...
I think 2001 and 2002 were worse than 2000. I was lucky to find a job in 2002 after graduating. There were hiring freezes and layoffs everywhere.
on a personal level I was hired (by Microsoft, my first and only "big tech" job) in April 2020 and I am still working here... all these companies "over-hired" during the pandemic, and the term "covid hire" is even a thing..
I remember interviewing someone who got hired by Facebook, sat around for a few weeks for a team to open up while they went through onboarding / Junior training, then was let go.
COVID did weird things to the industry, that's for sure.
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Overhiring implies that MSFT's headcount went down over this time. But that doesn't seem to be the case. They still hire a lot, just not in North America.
My friend who has worked for some big name companies is absolutely struggling to find work. So many interviews, 3rd, 4th round, and then they go with another candidate, or I can only assume someone internally and the listing never existed. It's killing me watching him struggle to find work.
As an employer it’s very very hard to actually discern who did CS as a prestige degree vs people who are actually into it.
Signal v noise ratio so much higher in hardware, nobody performatively studies mechanical engineering to make $60k in ohio.
Tech hiring is bad, for sure, but the the graph does not make a clear picture.
What is software publishers category? As it seems it’s picking up while Computer system design is the largest negative impact.
I would appreciate if there was a better chart explaining sort of roles and locations that had the largest impact
What happens when AI gets so good that even "Juniors" can compete with "Seniors"? It's going to happen at SOME point. I think what will separate devs will be their creativity and ideas. Those that can think outside the box will be the ones getting hired. With that said, I sometimes feel like eventually the OFFICE MANAGER will be coding everything for their company lol.
Software will become cheaper to write and more software will be written. A senior will always outcompete a junior when it comes to logical thinking and a true understanding of IT. A programmer will always outcompete a non-programmer when it comes to using AI tools.
Bottom line, if programmers are fucked, so is just about anyone else.
The graph does a really poor job supporting the conclusion, most obviously because it only goes back to 2016, the peak of boom times, it doesn't go anywhere near 2008 so why does the caption talk about that? Just this same graph alone going back to 1990 would be super eye-opening.
The other thing is it's showing first derivative, not absolute numbers, which is a very questionable way to derive "worst employment situation" in a field that has been on world-changing boom over the last 50 years.
Theres a zoomed out version immediately below that tweet.
https://x.com/JosephPolitano/status/2029916369056079975
Ah, I can't see that because I'm not logged into Twitter. Doesn't quite pack the same punch does it?
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I've had my suspicions - this seems way worse than anything I remember before. I think right now is worse than the 2000 dot-com bust, too.
I don't really agree, i am making more money now than ever.
2008 wasn't that bad for tech and neither was 2020. 2020 in fact lead to the highest employment craziness in the tech field ever. It's no wonder that the entire industry has indigestion from so many workers hired.
Nota bene: these aren't "tech" jobs, these are "laptop job" over-hired email people. Not real people.
Although the graph lists BLS data as the source, it's hard for me to find the specific datasets that back it up. It's March 2026 and the graph indicates it would encapsulate 2025. In fact, the "Software Development Job Postings on Indeed in the United States" indicate something different, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1T60O
I was able to find the following:
- Software Publishers https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SMU06000005051320001
- Computing Infrastructure Providers https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES5051800001
- Computer Systems Design https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES6054150001
- Web Search Portals https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES5051900001
- Streaming Services https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SMU06000005051620001
I wasn't able to find the following: - Custom Computer Programming Services
There are numerous open questions in this analysis which I would need to be addressed before drawing any conclusions. My gut feeling would love to accept it at face value but I never trust my gut.
There are different types of engineers, those who don't engage with product and have soft skills will feel the burn
Purely anecdotal, but I'm a senior engineer with about 15 years of experience and a decently impressive resume. In the past, I almost always get to at least the interviewing stage, and have frequently received multiple offers at the same time. Recruiters used to spam me constantly.
I haven't heard from a recruiter in probably 6 months. I recently put my feelers out and applied to a handful of positions I was qualified for, and got rejection letters from all of them.
Try only including your last 2 positions, as most senior staff tend to scare insecure brogrammers. They probably still won't hire, but you will get more interviews.
There are also a lot of people posting fake jobs for feeding LLM datasets, running scams, and bidding down labor costs. =3
After reading many anecdotes of top school alumni struggling to even secure some interviews, I'm really curious about what opportunities available for median American freshgrads e.g. 3.0 GPA from T100-200 Unis.
So much for that golden age.
Seems like my co is shedding US jobs and moving them to Taiwan, and paying up to 75% less in salary.
I can't even get an interview.
The most recent one few months ago and I passed it with great score, top 5% of candidates etc but that wasn't enough to get me hired.
Terrible market, i'm at my wits end to even how to approach this.
I mean, didn't a ton of people get hired immediately after 2020 during the pandemic? Also,I don't remember the tech sector getting hit too hard during 2008 time period, it was mostly everyone else.
This industry is a race to the bottom and long overdue for a massive salary reset. There is no society on Earth where someone who codes JavaScript (poorly) should make more money than, say, a doctor. Yet here we are.
A lot of doctors are just pill prescribers. I can't tell you how many times I've been to useless doctors that don't help and give you a big fat bill on the way out the door.
How much do you think doctors make?
Some make less than new grads at AMZN with 0 YOE.
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This is the plot of the first derivative of employment. It shows a comparatively small but lasting dip after a massive, prolonged, and unwarranted boom between late 2020 and early 2024 that coincided with the dying breaths of ZIRP.
I have no idea about what's coming, but I wouldn't pay a whole lot of attention to people who are looking at the plots of a highly volatile and cyclic industry that goes through constant boom-and-bust cycles, and are trying to position this as proof that AI is or isn't having an impact.
Well I pay a lot of attention to the fact that there's much much tepid responses to applications I put out. Something something irrational markets.
Good. Too many useless people got into tech because any monkey can memorize LC and outperform the monkey who also memorized LC and now is part of the interview panel so they can show off to the other monkeys that he deserves more bananas.
Tech was and still is the easiest way to make 200k base salary, before even thinking about the stock.
We need a reset and anyone who can’t make it can go fill the jobs we need in construction, education, etc.
This is YoY change. It's impossible to read. And it only goes back to 2016.
There's another post for it that went back to the early 90s. I've grabbed it at https://imgur.com/a/kB9CAKF though it's a smaller image (Imgur resizing).
Did we ever leave the 2020 recession?
Anyone else's inbox slammed with recruiters, more than it ever has been in the past? Feels like there's 10x the jobs available, but perhaps it's just that LLMs have automated a recruiter's job and they're letting the slop fly
Mine is too. Absolutely no outreach from the major players however. Mostly AI startups with a few larger/older SaaS startups sprinkled in.
No, but it used to be.
What mediums are you using for recruiters to contact you? Do you have a linked-in or are you applying directly to recruiting companies? Are you active anywhere else?
Genuinely interested in how you're receiving so many recruitment emails. That used to be my go to way to hit the job market.
I'm not applying at all! Happy employed and not looking. They're mailing me through linkedIn (i have a profile, and it's not set to looking and i'm completely inactive there), and or finding my email on the internet somehow and going direct.
Nope its totally dead
Depends on your geo. If you're in the Bay, NYC, and maybe a few other hubs hiring remains strong.
The "inshoring" hubs like RTP and Denver or those hubs that are dominated by a handful of oversized companies like Seattle are the worst impacted.
Mine is, but it’s AI generated slop from gmail addresses, for some kind of scam
Don't worry, it will go up again! Just keep at it!
That's cute. 2001 and 1993 have entered the chat.
Seems like a tough market for those nuking their prod db with an ai agent
It's bad, yeah, especially for folks on the job market (it me). Some statistics first, from my own job search logs:
* Since I hit the pavement in late January, I've tracked 100 job applications
* Of those 100, only 7 have turned into interviews
* Of those seven interviews, 3 turned into second-round
* ~50% of all applications never receive a response
* ~20% of rejections for any reason have the role re-posted within thirty days
* For rejections stating "higher quality applications", that role re-post rate is closer to 50%, suggesting ATS systems culling too many candidates to fill the role or ghost jobs
* Despite my state requiring salary requirements be posted in the JD, only around 70% of postings included what could be considered "reasonable" estimates
* 100% of interviews have been for local employers requiring 3+ days on-site
And now, some observations not captured in the data directly:
* Employers are trying to "under-title" folks; Senior roles want to hire former Leads, and Management roles want next-rung candidates for prior-rung titles (e.g., hiring what should be a Senior Manager for an entry-level management role)
* Employers are also trying to underpay workers by a large margin, especially folks coming from Big Tech ("We don't pay {SV_FIRM} money" while offering salaries below the local 50%ile for the role in question); they're blaming a "surplus of tech talent", which may or may not be true (I lack the data to prove either way)
* The two above points are in conflict, because rent/mortgages in these areas are so steep that even with major lifestyle changes to cut costs, these wages simply aren't survivable for local areas
* "Credential Creep" is back in force: Architect certs required for mid-level engineering roles, buzzwords prioritized over outcomes and achievements, and AI ATS' rejecting qualified candidates flat-out
* College Degrees are relevant again as a means of pruning candidates; fifteen years of experience is irrelevant for a lot of Senior roles if you don't have a BS or Masters, which wasn't the case even last year
* Industry-specialization is also back, even for roles where industry specialization is generally moot or easily picked up (e.g., Corporate IT stuff)
* A significant number (~75-85%) of roles explicitly reject H1B and other visa workers; not a problem for me (Citizen), but this is the worst possible time to be job hunting on a non-LPR status.
And now, my personal experiences:
* There's a very strong attitude of "you're being entitled" when it comes down to salary negotiations, even when you show your math for essentials - and share prior compensation history reflecting the cuts you've already taken since your Big Tech salary to "rejoin the market".
* Employers generally have no clue how expensive it is to live right now, especially in major metros; one such employer who balked at my comp floor genuinely had no clue the median rent was three and a half grand per month.
* Compensation seems particularly tilted towards working couples; as in, neither alone makes enough to survive, and employers assume you have a FTE spouse to shore up finances so they can pay you less
* Employers also don't seem to know what they actually want or need. Specialist Engineer roles (e.g., Cloud Engineer, Network Engineer) cite required experience and expertise with the full technology stack inclusive of ERP and HRIS nowadays, which is something that used to be handled by a specific team for the entirety of my career thus far, even in smaller (<1k) orgs. I've also seen Architect roles demanding Help Desk work, and Software Dev roles who want experience supporting Entra.
* AI does not feature in as many interviews as I would've thought. The few times it does, it's very much a "that's nice, but we're taking a wait and see approach" attitude
* There's a lot of eagerness to hire domestically again (I think even middle managers were tired of outsourcing or offshoring), but a lack of budget to afford domestic talent.
Ultimately, it's pretty bleak - but still better than last year, at least thus far (~300 apps, ~2 companies interviewed with, 1 offer in 2025). AI isn't the value-add I was sold on by career counselors and LinkedIn (huge surprise there /s), and there definitely seems to be the appetite to hire, but not the realism of what to expect or how much it'll cost. I very much view it as a sort of tug-of-war at the moment, between workers who did everything expected of them and have cut to the bone already, and employers who somehow think they can pay <50%ile wages while mandating 4-days on-site in a major metro for experienced talent.
If you're an employer looking to hire, I have some advice:
* Ditch the AI ATS or AI summaries and read resumes, especially if you're requiring local presence.
* Understand what you need (and what that will cost you) before posting the JD
* Understand the local cost of living, and budget accordingly (i.e., if your Senior Engineer can't afford median rent, they're not going to stick around when things improve)
* If you value loyalty and aren't paying TC to afford a median home in the area, then you don't actually value loyalty
* Don't pigeonhole yourself with hyper-specific candidates as a means of winnowing down applicants; that level of specialization will flee the second they get a better offer elsewhere
* Post salaries in the JD, required or not, so you don't waste your time with candidates whose expectations don't align with your budget
I'm early in my search, but compensation seems all over the place. From the recruiters I've talked to they've been pretty baffled too about compensation given the market. I know one place a recruiter called me about was looking for absolute unicorn talent (like 15 years of experience in multiple very different domains), but their salary was like 70k less than I made at my previous job and when I asked about titles they said it was "flat" and everyone was just a "software dev".
I don't want to sound like it's all a horror show though, I've had some interviews that have gone well with companies being sensible, so I think there's good stuff out there. But it's overall a rough market.
I'm also looking right now and a lot of that resonates with me. The posted salary ranges are often a complete joke as you noted. "The pay band for this role is $80,000-250,000 commensurate with experience and interview performance". Yeah OK buddy are you seriously trying to tell me you have multiple people with the exact same job title making salaries over $100k apart? Feels like they're just giving the finger to lawmakers through malicious compliance.
I've also run into the industry specialization roadblock a few times. Got turned down by a fintech company after multiple interview rounds because I did not have banking industry experience, for example. I guess I get it as a tie breaker but I've operated in a PCI compliant environment for years, seems like that should count as relevant experience? Also if you're going to dumpster candidates without banking experience why on earth did you waste several hours of your staff's time giving me tech screens?
Job hunting has always sucked. But it feels particularly busted at the moment. The process is miserable. If you've coasted to an easy hiring in the last year, you're either amazing (and hats off to you!) or got very lucky.
The salary ranges are complete jokes on either end: they're either malicious compliance like you pointed out, or completely out of touch with reality.
My example of that was when I applied for an Architect role (as I'm at that point in my upward career trajectory), and they asked me instead to apply for a Senior Admin role as they "didn't know what the Architect role would look like yet". I did, I included my comp target, and got the hard sell on why I was being unreasonable and should take {2016_PAY}/{$100k below SV_FIRM} instead. I mentioned my absolute floor was {$75k lower than SV_FIRM}/{$25k lower than my target}, ran him through my math (median rent for the area, on-site expectations, commute costs, food costs, insurance costs, 50/30/20 budgeting, etc), and pointed out that floor would only cover needs (50) and savings (20) with no fun money (30) whatsoever. Ultimately I withdrew my name entirely because the guy just wouldn't listen to me, and all but demanded I be grateful for his number in the current economy.
I suspect something similar is going on with another company that's seemingly ghosted me, after I stated I was targeting their upper boundary of their listed comp range - still $85k below {SV_FIRM}, but with growth potential towards Architect and Director-type IT roles. Even when I'm fine eating huge pay cuts for work (and falling off the homebuying ladder, as not even {SV_FIRM} paid house-purchasing money), the employers out there really do want perfect diamonds for the cost of Halloween Trinkets.
> Also if you're going to dumpster candidates without banking experience why on earth did you waste several hours of your staff's time giving me tech screens?
This is also something that's grinding my gears. Had an investment firm put me through six technical interviews with glowing recommendations every step of the way only for the seventh round (CIO) to put the kibosh on it without a reason and after showing up unprepared and disinterested. Also had companies say I lack financial discipline experience when I've literally built models, showback systems, budget forecasts, and cemented six-figures of monthly savings in prior roles; same with companies saying I "lack compliance experience" despite calling out running infra in highly regulated environments, performing compliance audits for clients, and uplifting infra to satisfy compliance regimes.
If I didn't know better, I'd say the entire HR process is just feeding shit into chatbots and letting them make hiring decisions. Nobody seems to actually care about the humans involved or the wider systems at play.
It's immensely frustrating, but I can only keep on keeping on until something changes. I don't need to win every application, I just need to win one.
What are people's plan Bs for when it goes tits up? I reckon I'd make a good electrician or something like that, but it's a real, grown up profession and I would have to get qualified.
Repairing classic cars.
We could arrive at the technical singularity and come up with 8000 IQ robots that can do things in a clean room but in the messy physical reality? I believe they will fail to catch up forever.
They will fail to deal with a stripped bolt head deep inside an engine bay that's been exposed to 40 years of road salt, that needs to be hit right with a 10lb hammer and a home made chisel until shit knocks loose, combined with cutting, welding, drilling, torching, tapping, impromptu redneck engineering, cursing, the use of 8 different kinds of penetrating lubricants, the acquisition of weird and highly model-year specific parts in a junkyard 500 miles away, realizing it's all wrong and doing it again.
Multiply the complexity by 100 times and that's what it's like to take on a classic car project.
Why don't those developers just learn to mine coal?
I think that's a very good plan FWIW. I'm going to consider cabinetry which I predict will be a semi-retirement in terms of income
That's funny, I'm also thinking about Electrician.
Games are a weird sector. Long term I simply want to go it indie. Even if I doesn't pan out, it's some kind of passive income and I have something to show to that is fully "mine" (so no ambiguity about how much I really contributed at BigCo.).
Short term I'm freelancing and doing whatever else I can find to get by. Hoping for one more full time role before I start my self published ventures.
Yet, no-one here is talking about building a start up. Which is the actual answer.
I'm an outsider, but VC looks like it's in a bad place right now. The returns have been pretty bad this decade, and AI companies are eating all the dollars so if you're not doing that it strikes me it'd be hard to get funding. And idk, if you already have an AI startup then you're hoping for the best, but if you were starting a business today I think that bubble looks like it has a lot of needles around it
As I previously mentioned, based on person experience assumptions around hiring have changed due to the Twitter layoffs, demands for FCF positivity, and WFH inadvertently justifying offshoring [0], not necessarily due to interest rate changes.
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As I also mentioned, the only way you can survive in American tech at this point is to:
1. Move to a Tier 1 tech hub like the Bay and NYC. If you get laid off, you will probably find another job in a couple of weeks due to the density of employers. Seattle used to be a good option, but WA's norms around noncompete clauses incentivize larger employers which reduces the ability for startups to truly scale.
2. Start coming into the office 2-3 days a week. It's harder to layoff someone you have had beers or coffee with. Worst case, they can refer you to their friends companies if you get laid off
3. Upskill technically. Learn the fundamentals of AI/ML and MLOPs. Agents are basically a semi-nondeterministic SaaS. Understanding how AI/ML works and understanding their benefits and pitfalls make you a much more valuable hire.
4. Upskill professionally. We're not hiring code monkeys for $200K-400K TC. We want Engineers who can communicate business problems into technical requirements. This means also understanding the industry your company is in, how to manage up to leadership, and what are the revenue drivers and cost centers of your employer. Learn how to make a business case for technical issues. If you cannot communicate why refactoring your codebase from Python to Golang would positively impact topline metrics, no one will prioritize it.
5. Live lean, save for a rainy day, and keep your family and friends close. If you're not in a financial position to say "f##k you" you will get f##ked, and strong relationships help you build the support system you need for independence. The reality is the current set of layoffs and work stresses were the norm in the tech industry until 2015-22. We live in a competitive world and complaining on HN does nothing to help your material condition.
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47174561
I don’t believe this is true. There are plenty of roles that are happy to hire remotely. Sure, there is an in person requirement for many job listings but Ive found EMs/companies to be very flexible if they need to hire talent.
For people that can’t/dont want to move to the “hubs”, just know that there is absolutely still a career path. I will say though that you need to have above average communication skills and proactively build relationships during in person off-sites.
Nope, the number of remote roles are drastically reducing. If your are a sw dev/mgr, you’ll need to be at least hybrid to your company’s ‘tech center’
There absolutely are remote first roles in the US, but the competition is also extremely intense. The median SWE and HNer wouldn't make the cut.
It also requires a level of maturity, clear thinking, self-starterness, and independence that is hard to come by without a proven track record and experience.
My advice is for the median/average SWE and HNer, not for the truly exceptional.
Spending a 7-10 years in a hub and then going remote first is the best path because you build the network you need to get referrals to vouch for you as a remote-first hire well as the track record needed to go remote-first.
Wait until all that AI generated code hits production on safety devices and they need to explain it in court.
Wait until the fallout of all that AI code hitting produciton
Here's the same post on Bluesky for those who prefer that platform: https://bsky.app/profile/josephpolitano.bsky.social/post/3mg...
Thank you! Could HN switch the links? bsky doesn't require a login to view replies. bsky is just a superior viewing experience.
If viewing replies is the goal, it looks like bsky has 2 replies and the twitter link has 45 replies. Do with that information what you will.
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I don't know if switching from a extreme partisan site to another extreme partisan site is the right solution just because of the need of login credentials. In any case, Twitter/X has been online almost 20 years. Bluesky still has to prove its staying power long term.
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Are there real positions these days?
I get rejection for every single position that I apply to. Often I read literally a description of myself in job posting, and it's still "we decided to no move forward".
At the same time, I hire people and see that 8/10 candidates are just trash. Not in the sense they "are not aligned", or "emit wrong vibes", or other bs. They literally can't write a single line of code, on their own laptop, in their own IDE.
Make it make sense.
It’s bananas how many utterly crap candidates we get at the moment too.
One low point was an interview with a guy who connected with his current work laptop and couldn’t find the $ key on it for a basic scripting question.
I can’t make it make sense either.
Because the hoards of people who can't find the ` or | or $ on their keyboard outnumber competent people 100:1. I had this exact experience too, so frustrating. Moved to a strictly referral model where I pay my SWEs $10k if a candidate they refer gets hired.
We had a guy interview for a senior C++ position that hadn't used Git before and had no idea what a "merge" was.
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yes, ha ha ha... yes