HACKER Q&A
📣 pm90

Hiring managers for SWEs, how is the market changing for open positions?


With all the recent layoffs, are you getting flooded with too many great applicants? Are open positions filling up lightning quick? Or has it been more gradual?

Just want to understand what the environment looks like post major layoffs from the hiring side.

  👤 djohnston Accepted Answer ✓
Most people getting laid off aren't SWEs. This is what I'm hearing from a headhunter friend. She also said that hiring folks are using layoffs as a proxy for "not high performer". I told her this was unfortunate and probably not that accurate of a heuristic.
👤 kunjank
I am personally not hiring. But the hiring landscape is very different. I had a conversation about this with another manager who is hiring at work. Very anecdotal info below:

We may see much higher applications. Most are going to be backed with good brands. It's hard to let go of the bias that we maybe looking at the bottom quartile for these companies. Most will be extremely good at the interviewing. The candidates will also have very different motivations.

👤 willcipriano
Bad time of year to look at this. I'd be more interested in this answer in a month.
👤 awb
Surprisingly no.

Several clients have reduced hiring and while there is a steady stream of SWE applicants, they’re not from prominent tech companies.

This is for multiple small, funded, successful startups.

👤 cwkoss
The suits fear funding will be all dried up next season, so there aren't any open positions.
👤 dakiol
> With all the recent layoffs, are you getting flooded with too many great applicants?

Why do you think the people who were laid off were "great" to begin with? Surprises me a lot the folks who think that a software engineer with Twitter in their CV is a "great" software engineer. The majority of good software engineers out there do not work for FAANG. This is pure statistics.