Ask HN: Is the Job Market Actually Bad?

I had a friend with plenty of experience in HR get laid off.

He looked for a job for 13 months. One of the top 3 smartest people I’ve ever known looked for seven months and had to take a big step back in his career, despite having Amazon and Home Depot on his resume.

Both of them said that even getting an interview was almost impossibly hard.

These are people in different parts of the county, and in different industries.

I think we have a serious problem on our hands with employment that’s probably not getting better any time soon.

My current job search has been the longest and most difficult of my career (5 months so far). Caveats:

- I’m only applying with climate tech companies

- I’m trying to transition back to engineering after a detour into product

- I’m trying to pivot into more hardware-focused roles

Most companies I apply to don’t respond at all, and I’ve had about 6 phone screens, two technical interviews, and one “we’d love to hire you once we get the funding for this position sometime in June”.

So from my perspective, the job market is awful, but YMMV.

P.S. if you’re working on any clean energy related software, I’d be a great addition to your team — https://matthewgerring.com

Candidate discovery is absolutely miserable right now. For a lot of people standing out is their resume and their LinkedIn page and the processes that exist just plain aren't getting the right eyes on those.

If you're getting recruiters continually its probably less about your qualification (not to downplay them, I'm sure they're lovely) and more about being on a handful of company's candidate and talent banks.

Everyone hates resumes, and being involved in any process a company can pay to bypass them is a huge advantage.

From my non objective, not looking but I try to stay as informed as possible across South Africa, Europe, US perspective and regularly talk to people on both sides and ask them directly

- it's not as bad as it was in the last several months

- it's still very hard to get noticed, get interviews, etc there's so much noise on both sides that personal references are much more important than front door applications. This was always the case but much more now

- there were previously a lot of jobs for low agency people who were good at doing what they were told and meeting specs, AI is taking these as if you are willing to spend hours per week writing specs and checking results then tokens are better bang for buck than freelance devs now

- approximately all the demand now is for directly AI related plays and even people who get them don't feel secure because the whole industry feels so unstable and bubbly, but there's no money in anything not AI now

It's primarily a discovery problem, on both sides of the market.

Candidate-wise, everyone is slinging ChatGPT'd resumes left and right, which just leads to an arms race where the other side has to use LLMs to filter them, which just makes the situation even worse. The bar for "senior software engineer" is insanely low right now (and no, Leetcode doesn't count - I'm talking more pragmatic skills like being able to use a *nix terminal).

Employer-wise, everyone wants a unicorn that will lick their ass but isn't willing to pay (in either money or benefits) well for said service. Then they complain that "nobody wants to work anymore" or that there are no good candidates. Well, it's just that the good ones don't even bother applying.

As a result, lucky, good actors on either side find themselves via networking, while the less lucky ones are left to swim in a sea of trash.

Wife is a lead motion designer, ex Bumble etc. 6+ months of no job results in NYC. Not sure what's going on honestly, all very slow. Any tips welcome :)

Totally depends on where you are and your past experience. Being in the US puts you at a huge advantage compared to just about anywhere.

Maybe you're just lucky.

I'll bite: 15.5 years tech experience across SRE, SWE, PM, PGM, & strategic initiatives-adjacent things. Last roles was Director/Principal level. Last projects were driving hundreds of millions of dollars worth of portfolio acquisition integrations (successfully) at a $5B public company. NYC metro area but I've been remote for 13 years. No degree, self-taught, first real tech role acquired when I was recruited after hacking a company back in 2010. Laid off in Feb, though garden leave ran through April.

I've had mixed results overall. Primarily looking at senior+ TPM, TPGM, SI roles. My network is hard to leverage due to being remote for so long. Lots of cold applications. 25% of applications got recruiter responses within a day, 25% within a week, 50% blocked at ATS, ghosted, or hiring being re-evaluated. Not as many direct recruiter outreaches as I've received in the past.

From the JD side, salaries seem to be more stratified and requirements, even for lower roles, seems to be higher than before. I've seen quite a few requests for 10+ years experience for mid-level PGM roles. In loose convos with friends, everyone wants a big name on a resume but no longer will pay a premium to get it.

No degree seems to be a bigger gate now than it was the last time I was searching. Being a generalist also seems to be more of a risk but I'm sure that's at least partly a fault in my own framing. I do not play the LinkedIn game well. My major contributions have been either inside a company (internally-focused, hard to share publicly or company-specific), mildly popular open source dev work (>100 stars), or things actually used everywhere but no one cares because it's not "real" dev work (created puppetlabs-firewall module, 10M+ downloads, adopted as part of Puppet Enterprise, used globally, no one cares). Without a strong public profile in a specific direction, I've been told I read as too hard to quantify.

Overall, it seems "bad" in that everyone is battling uncertainty about where things are going and being more vigilant to avoid the wrong hire. Credentials and resume pedigree seem to matter more than ever and roles are much more vertically aligned than I've seen them in the past. If you're good, with some amount of credentials, and a lot of vertical ownership then you'll probably be fine though it might take longer. If you're a generalist who's hard to pin down, you might be in for some pain.

"Bad" is relative. It can be more difficult in compressed markets where talent is either in surplus (read: SV, Dub, etc) or where there's a distinct lack of enterprises/startups/whatever providing the surface layer. Given some of the retraction of "warm feelings", esp. re: US contractors in other countries circa American imperialism these days, it can also have a chilling effect on localized markets. But, this is all highly influenced/mutable daily.

Having them reach out to you is key. Most job postings get thousands of applicants. I don’t think it’s possible to screen them. I just waded through the first 20 till I found someone who would work and hired him. I most certainly could have done better if I wanted to do a lot of filter and screen legwork. When they reach out you’re skipping the hardest 13mo of the job search.

To anyone considering quitting, search first.

I've been looking for 4 months and only had one phone screen from HR. Cybersecurity in Raleigh, my last employer was MAG 7. My particular problem is I took off 6 years to be a stay-at-home parent.

> Currently I’m waiting for a final decision from another fully remote company and I’m in midstage with 2 more.

At the top you said you had a new job after a week, then why are you waiting on a second and continuing interviewing with two other companies.

Hiring is now by filter. Corporations do not try to hire good people, they just avoid hiring questionable people. In other words they are looking for the lowest common denominator.

If you do not think this is true, then ask yourself whether the company is attempting to use AI. THAT IS WHAT THEY WANT AND VALUE. The safer and easier you are as hire the better you will be.

So yes. You were probably hired because you are not a super genius and because you don't have a fancy company name. Not despite it, but because of it.

The question I have is why do I now think many corporations are "too stupid to succeed"? I know they will not fail, but the panicky rush for the supposed safety of AI is stunning.

What sector/size are your offers? The "who is hiring" is shifting. Many large corps are now feeling a couple of squeezes from more expensive capital, to finding their footing in a quickly changing world, to over-hiring, to market pressures to "AI-ify" themselves (doubles as excuse to layoff caused by former three squeezes).

Mid-market saas seems to be getting crushed at the moment for different reasons.

Startups and the AI shops can't hire fast enough, but also seem to be looking at different candidate profiles.

I think geography and industry will have a large influence on the job market.

There is a lot of "spam" jobs.

You see the same offer by the same company for months! with the same generic reject (seriously I think no even check the resume or whatever!).

Then, a lot of fake I-am-a-AI "companies and middleman and such things.

Ironically, I have been contacted more by somebody looking here in hn than in all the job boards!

I think in the past year it’s gotten better if you are already established. 2023 was the worst of it for me.

This is anecdotal and purely vibes based so YMMV but my view is that it’s a lot worse looking if you’re restricting yourself to just Big Tech like all of the programming subreddits do. There’s tons of companies outside that sphere who need engineers, but too many programmers thing it’s MAANG or bust.

Ragebait. Haven't been contacted by a single recruiter in years. The only time is someone trying to sell me their shitty interview course/grad school program.

From a different perspective: I do volunteer resume reviews and some coaching in a local group. Luck and timing play a role, of course.

I do see a lot of resumes that are really bad, though. Other people need a lot of help communicating during interviews. Some people go through their careers getting jobs during easy times where hiring managers will overlook a lot of things and be willing to take a chance on candidates with not so great resumes or communication skills that need help. That all stops in a job market like this where hiring managers aren’t going to waste their time on anything other than the 5-10 best applicants they get.

There’s a lot of cope material out there that shifts all of the blame to the companies: Stories about “ghost jobs” or beliefs about nepotism or “you dodged a bullet” comfort when someone doesn’t get hired. With half of the people I talk to getting them to accept that they need to improve how they’re applying and interviewing instead of blaming external factors is most of the battle. For the other half it can be things like focusing too narrowly (only FAANG, only remote, only a big title, only a compensation number they got 3 years ago during COVID and now they don’t want anything less) or some times just poor luck.

I saw this shitstorm brewing back in Jul 2025. Gave up on finding a job. Started 100% looking for cofounding (or at a minimum being a founding engineer in a startup). Networked like crazy. Landed exactly what I wanted. Cool startup, motivated people around me, money to burn on crazy projects.

If I had stayed for job hunting, I would be unemployed IMO.

I'm kinda looking at jobs available (Europe):

- AI (as in: stupid AI wrappers "disrupting" shit)

- FinTech

- Gambling

- AI in FinTech

That's about 99% of jobs advertised. No idea how hard it's to get hired, but even jobs on offer are shitty.

It's K shaped, like the economy.

You didn't give a lot of info

How much are you getting paid?

Going into the office is important too, are you in sf?

Location probably matters, where are you?

Recruiters are ghosting me if i won't reply to their LinkedIn messages same day. I've applied to 65 jobs in the last month and landed three phone screenings and zero interviews.

I have 5 years experience including two at an F500 and two as a tech lead on my current team.

In 2022, with less than 2 years experience, i had competing offers all over 100k within a month of starting to apply places.

I've been applying off-and-on for a full year, consistently for a month.

Sure seems pretty bleak to me

Wow lots of astroturfing going on here.

There's no monolithic "Job Market", so specific details matter. I have not been tracking details too closely but here are two things I am tracking:

- CRUD generation by running through JIRA tickets and clearing backlogs seem to be replaced by agentic workflows. So if you were an extremely productive dev who would machete your way through CRUD and API integrations, agentic workflows do it better, faster and for cheaper. I can point CC, Codex (Cursor in progress) at design specifications and it can turn those into perfect Django apps with well written test cases like there's no tomorrow. It might not make sense for such a business to continue to hire humans to do the same work

- Tokens for frontier models over the API are really expensive. I am personally aware of some companies that have monthly high five figure token expenses and one company that has a monthly six five figure token expense.

It's still worth it because they are churning out code 24x7 vs a typical human's 8x5 if you're putting in the right workflows, guardrails in place - that's a 4x productivity gain.

You're getting done in a month, what a full quarter would require humans to do. However, the company still has to pay for that and unless they are signing up 4x more paying net new customers every month with 0 churn, engineers have to be let go to pay for those tokens.

Yes, and going on 4+ decades, now :(

Like many things in life, it's highly situational and individualized. If you have top credential from a top school, your prospects are going to be better than someone with worse credentials, all else equal. Or if your expectations are too highs , things may seem worse.

It isn't.

As someone who has made hiring and firing decisions at the Board level, the people who are the most severely affected were either (in no order):

1. Working remotely in North America but demanding Bay Area salaries without the chops to justify it.

2. Working in Western Europe (they complain more about stuff irrelevant to the business but shy away from business critical decision making when offered the opportunity, unlike their Czech, Polish, Romanian, and Bulgarian peers despite us paying €90k-150k TCs across the EU, and Warsaw+Prague becoming Berlin level expensive).

3. Bootcamp grads who never fixed skills issues (foundational knowledge is foundational for a reason).

4. Getting paid Bay Area or Seattle salaries while living in LCOL regions like RTP. The whole point of a Cary office was inshoring - the talent was meh but if we needed a cheap QA engineer or move ops for a stagnant part of our business in 2019 we'd move that job and BU there. They didn't realize they were viewed as at the bottom of the totem pole skills wise.

-------

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.

-------

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/