Ask HN: Is the Job Market Actually Bad?
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iidontwantthis about 5 hours ago 98 comments
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I’m not trying to brag, I am just genuinely confused. I got laid off recently and I had a new job within a week because I constantly get contacted by recruiters both through LinkedIn and directly by email. I’ve never sent an application to anyone and I’ve had dozens of interviews in the past year while I was looking for a new job before getting laid off.
I would have had a new one earlier except I was aiming for fully remote and a big raise, and I failed their correspondingly difficult evaluations. Never got ghosted, never had to deal with AI, never had to fill out an application. I took a local, in office offer that I would have ignored if I were still employed.
Currently I’m waiting for a final decision from another fully remote company and I’m in midstage with 2 more.
I’m not a super genius engineer, and I don’t have any fancy companies on my resume. How unusual is this experience?
Discussion (98 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
He looked for a job for 13 months. One of the top 3 smartest people I’ve ever known looked for seven months and had to take a big step back in his career, despite having Amazon and Home Depot on his resume.
Both of them said that even getting an interview was almost impossibly hard.
These are people in different parts of the county, and in different industries.
I think we have a serious problem on our hands with employment that’s probably not getting better any time soon.
Unless I have a referral, it’s such a low probability exercise it’s not worth it for me.
Whenever I see “100+ candidates have applied” on LinkedIn, I just ignore the job posting.
- I’m only applying with climate tech companies
- I’m trying to transition back to engineering after a detour into product
- I’m trying to pivot into more hardware-focused roles
Most companies I apply to don’t respond at all, and I’ve had about 6 phone screens, two technical interviews, and one “we’d love to hire you once we get the funding for this position sometime in June”.
So from my perspective, the job market is awful, but YMMV.
P.S. if you’re working on any clean energy related software, I’d be a great addition to your team — https://matthewgerring.com
In my experience HW companies are rarely interested software engineers from other, non-related domains unless they’re hiring a team to do web interface or something.
If you're getting recruiters continually its probably less about your qualification (not to downplay them, I'm sure they're lovely) and more about being on a handful of company's candidate and talent banks.
Everyone hates resumes, and being involved in any process a company can pay to bypass them is a huge advantage.
- it's not as bad as it was in the last several months
- it's still very hard to get noticed, get interviews, etc there's so much noise on both sides that personal references are much more important than front door applications. This was always the case but much more now
- there were previously a lot of jobs for low agency people who were good at doing what they were told and meeting specs, AI is taking these as if you are willing to spend hours per week writing specs and checking results then tokens are better bang for buck than freelance devs now
- approximately all the demand now is for directly AI related plays and even people who get them don't feel secure because the whole industry feels so unstable and bubbly, but there's no money in anything not AI now
Candidate-wise, everyone is slinging ChatGPT'd resumes left and right, which just leads to an arms race where the other side has to use LLMs to filter them, which just makes the situation even worse. The bar for "senior software engineer" is insanely low right now (and no, Leetcode doesn't count - I'm talking more pragmatic skills like being able to use a *nix terminal).
Employer-wise, everyone wants a unicorn that will lick their ass but isn't willing to pay (in either money or benefits) well for said service. Then they complain that "nobody wants to work anymore" or that there are no good candidates. Well, it's just that the good ones don't even bother applying.
As a result, lucky, good actors on either side find themselves via networking, while the less lucky ones are left to swim in a sea of trash.
Maybe you're just lucky.
I've had mixed results overall. Primarily looking at senior+ TPM, TPGM, SI roles. My network is hard to leverage due to being remote for so long. Lots of cold applications. 25% of applications got recruiter responses within a day, 25% within a week, 50% blocked at ATS, ghosted, or hiring being re-evaluated. Not as many direct recruiter outreaches as I've received in the past.
From the JD side, salaries seem to be more stratified and requirements, even for lower roles, seems to be higher than before. I've seen quite a few requests for 10+ years experience for mid-level PGM roles. In loose convos with friends, everyone wants a big name on a resume but no longer will pay a premium to get it.
No degree seems to be a bigger gate now than it was the last time I was searching. Being a generalist also seems to be more of a risk but I'm sure that's at least partly a fault in my own framing. I do not play the LinkedIn game well. My major contributions have been either inside a company (internally-focused, hard to share publicly or company-specific), mildly popular open source dev work (>100 stars), or things actually used everywhere but no one cares because it's not "real" dev work (created puppetlabs-firewall module, 10M+ downloads, adopted as part of Puppet Enterprise, used globally, no one cares). Without a strong public profile in a specific direction, I've been told I read as too hard to quantify.
Overall, it seems "bad" in that everyone is battling uncertainty about where things are going and being more vigilant to avoid the wrong hire. Credentials and resume pedigree seem to matter more than ever and roles are much more vertically aligned than I've seen them in the past. If you're good, with some amount of credentials, and a lot of vertical ownership then you'll probably be fine though it might take longer. If you're a generalist who's hard to pin down, you might be in for some pain.
The Bay Area hiring market is extremely hot right now. Most of my peers who have been laid off and people I have laid off landed on their feet within weeks with Base+Bonus being comparable to big tech and some startups giving all-cash TC comparable to Netflix during it's peak.
Why do you say this? Is this coming from personal experience, or anecdotally?
To anyone considering quitting, search first.
How would the companies ever know?
Also, I totally wish I could afford to be a stay at home parent. I'm sure you made the right choice with those 6 years!
At the top you said you had a new job after a week, then why are you waiting on a second and continuing interviewing with two other companies.
If the employer wants an employee they can feel proud of, well, that's a service too, and one they can purchase with money, if they choose.
It’s on the employer to retain talent.
They certainly think the same about you. We could all be gone with no severance by tonight if they felt like it. We owe them nothing.
Mid-market saas seems to be getting crushed at the moment for different reasons.
Startups and the AI shops can't hire fast enough, but also seem to be looking at different candidate profiles.
If you do not think this is true, then ask yourself whether the company is attempting to use AI. THAT IS WHAT THEY WANT AND VALUE. The safer and easier you are as hire the better you will be.
So yes. You were probably hired because you are not a super genius and because you don't have a fancy company name. Not despite it, but because of it.
The question I have is why do I now think many corporations are "too stupid to succeed"? I know they will not fail, but the panicky rush for the supposed safety of AI is stunning.
You see the same offer by the same company for months! with the same generic reject (seriously I think no even check the resume or whatever!).
Then, a lot of fake I-am-a-AI "companies and middleman and such things.
Ironically, I have been contacted more by somebody looking here in hn than in all the job boards!
My friends have told me that here in LA there are positions but many want you to move or commute excessively far, and there's real wage suppression going on. Also, many of the positions are "unicorn" roles, where they want someone with very niche experience. It's an employer's market for them.
I do see a lot of resumes that are really bad, though. Other people need a lot of help communicating during interviews. Some people go through their careers getting jobs during easy times where hiring managers will overlook a lot of things and be willing to take a chance on candidates with not so great resumes or communication skills that need help. That all stops in a job market like this where hiring managers aren’t going to waste their time on anything other than the 5-10 best applicants they get.
There’s a lot of cope material out there that shifts all of the blame to the companies: Stories about “ghost jobs” or beliefs about nepotism or “you dodged a bullet” comfort when someone doesn’t get hired. With half of the people I talk to getting them to accept that they need to improve how they’re applying and interviewing instead of blaming external factors is most of the battle. For the other half it can be things like focusing too narrowly (only FAANG, only remote, only a big title, only a compensation number they got 3 years ago during COVID and now they don’t want anything less) or some times just poor luck.
If I had stayed for job hunting, I would be unemployed IMO.
How much are you getting paid?
Going into the office is important too, are you in sf?
As you move up in comp, the market actually gets more difficult, not just because the market is more competitive but because some companies won’t even interview qualified engineers with FAANG on their resume because they don’t believe they can afford them.
So I can understand why you might have an easier time compared to other engs.
For my self, I was making over 300k, took a job (remote) at a little over 200, and now struggling to get that much and considering jobs at 170-180. I think the job market sucks, those jobs paying 300+ would normally respond to me aren't.
If you're looking at 200k/yr roles in SF that are in person and looking closer to 996 than not - plenty seem to be hiring and trying to recruit. Downside? You have to be in SF 6 days/week and it's shit pay for the region. (You will likely have to do roommates because $200k/yr is borderline for a decent apartment in SF now due to 20% yoy price hikes)
- AI (as in: stupid AI wrappers "disrupting" shit)
- FinTech
- Gambling
- AI in FinTech
That's about 99% of jobs advertised. No idea how hard it's to get hired, but even jobs on offer are shitty.
I have 5 years experience including two at an F500 and two as a tech lead on my current team.
In 2022, with less than 2 years experience, i had competing offers all over 100k within a month of starting to apply places.
I've been applying off-and-on for a full year, consistently for a month.
Sure seems pretty bleak to me
Fortunately, I am still employed, but I am looking.
- CRUD generation by running through JIRA tickets and clearing backlogs seem to be replaced by agentic workflows. So if you were an extremely productive dev who would machete your way through CRUD and API integrations, agentic workflows do it better, faster and for cheaper. I can point CC, Codex (Cursor in progress) at design specifications and it can turn those into perfect Django apps with well written test cases like there's no tomorrow. It might not make sense for such a business to continue to hire humans to do the same work
- Tokens for frontier models over the API are really expensive. I am personally aware of some companies that have monthly high five figure token expenses and one company that has a monthly six five figure token expense.
It's still worth it because they are churning out code 24x7 vs a typical human's 8x5 if you're putting in the right workflows, guardrails in place - that's a 4x productivity gain.
You're getting done in a month, what a full quarter would require humans to do. However, the company still has to pay for that and unless they are signing up 4x more paying net new customers every month with 0 churn, engineers have to be let go to pay for those tokens.
Thats a fantastic question. Here's my take: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47917314 - would love your thoughts on it.
In short, I think you're asking a billion dollar question - how do we solve the verification, validation, and QA bottleneck?
The way I handle it for my personal projects is I invest tremendous time and effort into writing thorough test and validation suites.
I bet the next billion dollar companies will be those addressing this verification, validation, and QA bottleneck.
As someone who has made hiring and firing decisions at the Board level, the people who are the most severely affected were either (in no order):
1. Working remotely in North America but demanding Bay Area salaries without the chops to justify it.
2. Working in Western Europe (they complain more about stuff irrelevant to the business but shy away from business critical decision making when offered the opportunity, unlike their Czech, Polish, Romanian, and Bulgarian peers despite us paying €90k-150k TCs across the EU, and Warsaw+Prague becoming Berlin level expensive).
3. Bootcamp grads who never fixed skills issues (foundational knowledge is foundational for a reason).
4. Getting paid Bay Area or Seattle salaries while living in LCOL regions like RTP. The whole point of a Cary office was inshoring - the talent was meh but if we needed a cheap QA engineer or move ops for a stagnant part of our business in 2019 we'd move that job and BU there. They didn't realize they were viewed as at the bottom of the totem pole skills wise.
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So long as you keep your skills sharp, have foundational computer science and engineering knowledge, and live in the primary tech hubs globally, it's a pretty good market.
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Edit: can't reply
> What, in your opinion are the “foundational” CS skills the #3 people are missing
If you've survived this long, I think you will be fine. But I'd recommend anyone from a bootcamp to take an OS course comparable to CS61 [0], an algos course comparable to CS170 [1], and a programming language design course comparable to CS421 [2].
There is foundational design and architectural patterns and knowledge that are taught in OS, Programming Language Design, and Algos classes that cannot be taught in a bootcamp.
My recommendation for people in your shoes is to do GATech's OMSCS or UPenn's online MCIT to learn some of the foundational stuff you were never introduced to at a bootcamp.
[0] - https://cs61.seas.harvard.edu/site/2025/
[1] - https://cs170.org/
[2] - https://cs421-sp26-web.pages.dev/
I do try to continually improve my skill set, refresh on design patterns, etc. I’m currently employed and have been for the last six years. I don’t really know if I fall in category 3 or not.
What, in your opinion are the “foundational” CS skills the #3 people are missing?
I'd more guess it is that there is a severe income tax advantage, B2B contracts are also easier in eastern Europe.
We want opinionated engineers. But we want engineers who will respond to a slack message after 5pm during a P1 escalation.
> I'd more guess it is that there is a severe income tax advantage
Somewhat but not enough to move the needle because depending on the local government, they are matching cross-EU subsidizes.
> older people from those countries are good at keeping their head down in soviet style work configurations
Other way around. The Western European employees want a heads down and no input but high paying job.
CEE peers will push back and be opinionated but also try to think from a business outcomes perspective.
> soviet style work configurations
Which ironically is closer to German business and work culture instead of in Eastern Europe.
Edit: can't reply
> Of course if you pay someone 135k vs 70k real income
Salaries at the 75th percentile and above for SWEs are kept constant across Europe.
Heck, the companies for which I am a board member as well as companies at I have previously been management or line-level engineers all pay in the €130K-€170K TC range in Germany as well as across the CEE.
This is waaaaaay above TC for the average European in tech and we know it.
It sucks but the reality is the talent density in Western Europe is weaker than in the CEE, and it is mindset driven.
A German SWE wants a 9-5. A Czech SWE wants to build the next JetBrains.
We want to hire or fund the latter, not the former.
Then you're going to have to pay, aren't you.
In western Europe you'd just have to specify the availability requirements and they'd do it there as well. You'd just have to pay for it.
Edit: If you pay someone 150k€ in Germany what they see after-tax is just not that much. They are going to compare this with the 9-5 IGM position (when it is available...). Why not just admit that you don't want to pay equivalent wages for accessing the western european market?
And yet he’s still among us. Pathetic lmao.
Who are you mate? You think you’re someone special? Hahahahh
Additionally, diaspora engineers whose parents are growing old are starting to move back to the old country to be close with them.
He's moving back close to where I stay.
Many others from the big labs are moving back to their core EE field into stuff like optical networks for data centers and so on by the way. That is a lot of the attrition.