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.

I apply everywhere in the US, and at this point I consider it a success if I get a rejection email, since that's getting pretty rare. The only recruiters who reach out to me are very clearly shotgun recruiters who have not read my resume and bring positions which are obviously looking for a different type of applicant.

I know I can do the work. Half of my friends work in software or software adjacent roles. I'm at least as capable as them, and, based on how much they have to complain about them, more capable than some of their coworkers.

So, I don't know what the issue is. Clearly I'm not good at marketing myself, but what exactly to change, I'm not sure. I know the 4 year gap looks awful to recruiters, but it's not getting any smaller and I didn't choose it willingly. At this point I'm just mindlessly sending out more resumes, because I don't know what else to do.

- 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-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.

Senior devs, people with many years of experience, people who have had the chance to funnel themselves into something specialized are doing okay. It's still not as good as it once was, many still find themselves out of a job and unable to find another one without having to settle for worse conditions or a lower wage, but the squeeze isn't nearly as bad on them.

For juniors and new grads, it's a bloodbath. The best people I know are sending hundreds of tailored job applications to try and get just about anything, and it's still almost impossible. Rates of applications to interviews are probably <1% for most people. Internships still help, but it's not as much of a difference as it once was. Everyone is desperate, and people are lowering their standards as far as they'll go, but employers are still not budging.

Basically, it seems like the sides of the job market are diverging. People who are already in are usually still in. You're either doing great or living through the most hopeless and soul-crushing time of your professional life, with a small portion of outliers in either group.

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

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.

Even just finding appropriate openings has been next to impossible. Every company seems to be looking for either a generalist (lots of full-stack) or a senior in an exact specialized bucket and stack. My role at Microsoft was a sort of specialized databases/compilers/functional programming hybrid, but without clear buzzwords no one seems interested. What was once a frequent stream of corporate recruiter messages dried up a little over a year ago too.

My suspicion is that things are a lot better for non-remote positions in the usual hubs.

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.

Maybe you're just lucky.

To anyone considering quitting, search first.

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!

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.

it IS easier to have built up a resume but each time im hired they joke my resume is shit...

this stuff can be really dynamic though as in you can be lucky to run into nice recruiter, live somewhere with more work available, etc. etc.

i dont think its in 1 state, good or bad. it has a lot of dependencies.

I'd also say it's a mix of not having the best company experience in the world (even the larger ones I worked for didn't use cutting edge tech), not having enough war stories about times of adversity, and having to compete with both top tier engineers from FAANG companies and liars just using AI to make up everything.

But based on other people's experiences, it seems like some people get way luckier than others in this job market. I know people who've gotten a job in a week or two without any hassle and others who've been out of work for months or years now. One of my friends had probably the best luck I can imagine in that regard; they got laid off from one job and then a week later found a job in the same exactly industry doing the exact same thing at approximately the exact same salary range. They went from designing brochures and posters for medical companies at one company to designing brochures and posters for medical companies at a direct competitor.

But yeah, it seems like a very tough market right now, and one where success pretty much depends on the stars aligning in the right way.

It's super super hard for companies first and foremost, forget employees for a second. The environment is extremely hostile to private industry right now

> I got laid off recently and I had a new job within a week

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

> How unusual is this experience?

Yes, unusual. Most people aren't this active with their interviewing. You basically have a full deal pipeline.

I was using Seek.com to get jobs but it’s increasingly difficult to get past the fake jobs, the resume harvesting and the thousands of AI or overseas applications.

The only real solution seems to be referrals or recruiters.

From my perspective the job market here is brutal.

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 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.

My current company is highly abusive and is doing a bunch of saber rattling over layoffs and I'm honestly fed up at this point.

They want us to work 7 days a week and are like "ohh maybe we'll lay half the company off, we'll see". And all of the reorgs are making my life fucking hell. (It's a large company that's run by an asshole. Guess which one)

The hard part is just getting the time to prepare for interviews properly. I'm not even bothering interviewing at the more leetcode heavy companies right now.

- 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.

How much are you getting paid?

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

- 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.

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 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