Is the Job Market That Bad?

Been looking for a year and a half for something full-time and permanent. No luck so far. Chopped about fifteen years off my resume, and that seemed to help get more interviews, but I think that backfired because then they were surprised by my wrinkles and bald spot and figured if I was lying about my experience, I was lying about other things too.

One thing that does not help was a string of startups I worked for which all eventually ran out of funding, so I have like four companies in four years. Also, no thanks to Patreon, who hired me to do one thing, went through a bunch of managers and could never get the ball rolling, then laid off a bunch of people nine months later. really hard to explain to a hiring manager without sounding like I'm mad and resentful. Because I'm mad and resentful.

Picking up odd jobs here and there. Small part time gigs, some substitute teaching, bar-backing and construction work.

As someone involved in hiring, there are a few factors going on:

1. There's no available headcount. No one is leaving since there are no opportunities elsewhere. Especially those on visas.

2. When we do have headcount, we get 1000 resumes within an hour or two. We also have a stack of referrals to get through first. A lot of these resumes are experienced folks with backgrounds in FAANG.

3. Supply remains high (100k CS undergrads every year including global supply) whereas innovation is low.

It's getting better, but it's still dire.

Anecdotally I've gotten a fair few more job interviews in the last month or so than I did when still at my previous company, and seems recruiters are reaching out a bit more than they did back then as well.

But it's still really bad for anyone that's not a senior, especially anyone who hasn't been a senior at a large tech company. I often look on LinkedIn and Glassdoor and other such sites for jobs, and whenever I end up on the home page feed, there's always at least a few very popular posts from people lamenting how bad the market/search is. Those posts are filled with comments from people saying it's been weeks/months of effort to get anything, including from those in the tech industry.

And heck, I've even seen depressing stories pop up all the time outside of job boards and related sites too. Twitter, Threads, BlueSky, Mastodon... they've all got a lot of people who seem to be in serious trouble right now, and in pretty much every industry under the sun.

It definitely feels bad, especially when people I know with a lot of experience are struggling to even get interviews. We're talking senior devs, team leads, managers, etc. All people that I feel should be getting offers left, right and centre, yet are struggling to get anywhere.

Makes me rather worried as someone who is by default unlikely to have much of a personal network, and who has basically negative charisma.

Yes/No. It's probably the worst it's been in a decade, but it's my understanding it's nothing even resembling the 2008 crash or the dotcom bubble (I wasn't working during those times). With that said, it feels worse than it is because the 2021-2022 period was uniquely euphoric.

Key driving factors are people who have been laid off working to find positions against the backdrop of many tech companies not adding headcount right now. Additionally the decade+ long messaging campaigns of "CS is going to be the most in-demand major forever etc etc" have now materialized into a steady supply of CS grads every year.

I'm fortunate to be interviewing for a role at a big tech company right now (arguably the most desirable tech employer rn outside of MANGA) and the recruiters have told me that they get almost 1000 applications for every role posted and are basically exclusively hiring from referrals. I imagine this is exacerbated by people using llm scraping bots to automatically submit applications.

With all that said, anecdotally I'm seeing cold approaches from recruiters tick up. 6 months ago my linkedin/email were radio silent, but I've had ~10 people reach out in the last 2 months or so.

> Previously, my LinkedIn profile used to be flooded with job offers, but now it’s nearly silent

Can confirm. I nowadays receive mostly messages from people who are looking for a job and curious if our team is hiring. Though it is mostly entry-level candidates (fresh grads, people who have completed bootcamps, etc.), which probably tells something about the job market.

HRs occasionally reach out to me but only to try to sell devs. So it looks like nobody's hiring and everyone is desperately looking for a job. Or maybe it's just LinkedIn is dead and people use other channels to find opportunities.

I graduated recently and have been looking ever since. It’s abysmal. No replies at all. Compared to co-op where I was interviewing a dozen times a week and getting half a dozen offers, it’s post-apocalyptic.

No one’s interested in taking on anyone at recent grad / entry-level. Not sure what to do.

What I find paradoxical is that despite the fact there's a lot of people "on the market" (or so many say), I'm having a hard time finding software engineers to fill a few open positions.

Granted, I work for a small company doing things that may be considered boring and maybe people are looking elsewhere.

I would be curious to know if that feels like the case for other companies too.

I get recruiter and "join my startup" messages once or twice a week now, up from it being completely dead a year ago.

It's definitely still a tough market, but I don't know anyone good who was laid off and then stayed unemployed.

Potentially related to ground truth shared in what was posted here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41493049

https://old.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/1fbhap7/sec...

Yes - 20 years of tech experience at major players and not able to find a single full time role in over a year- looking remote anywhere or in person in Seattle

Have been doing contract work - currently doing AI engineering

Side bar: I've been back in the UK for a longer spell for the first time in years, and the number of adverts for "blue collar" jobs I've seen just walking around is unreal.

So many places looking for kitchen staff, waiters, carers etc. Might just be that I've been in smaller towns with leaner recruitment pools, but it's been striking.

Anecdotally, I see the market picking up again. Fewer good candidates coming across the recruiting desks and hearing stories of the friends of our new grad engineers finally landing jobs.

Yes. I'm the CEO of Google and I can't even get an internship at Google

But tbh yes, it seems job postings for software jobs are the lowest in 4 years, almost as low as the dip that occurred just after the pandemic. The COVID job boom was clearly temporary and is now being massively offset by AI

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?width=880&he...

It's over. Best alpha for people who aren't being flooded rn is to just start their own company while applying in the background via AI so it doesn't waste their time. All their applications are being culled via AI anyway so it's fair.

Yes, it's really that bad. Even trying to change teams internally at my company is the hardest it's ever been in over a decade of experience.

One promising anecdotal is that I've seen a big uptick in the last 8 weeks of people leaving my current place (not FAANG but you've heard of it) with work secured whereas that wasn't the case much for the last 2 years.

Well, at least I don't feel so alone now. Same situation here: LinkedIn is silent, or I'm getting really bad offers. My experience being mostly in Clojure certainly doesn't help either.

Plus, interviews have become really intense. I recently had an interview (the first one, "HR") that consisted of me talking about myself and my experience for 10 minutes, without any questions from the interviewer, and then it went straight into a coding challenge (a change-making problem, which I couldn’t finish in time).

I'm still getting LinkedIn recruiter spam, just nothing interesting.

The only two software people I know who lost jobs this year are now employed again.

LinkedIn is now silent for me besides spam.

So it’s weird. I was unemployed for 6 months last year after being laid off. That long 6 month span was largely self inflicted. As a JavaScript developer I got tired of the hyper insecurity of nobody knowing to program in that language so I waited until I found something else to do.

“Profile was flooded with job offers”? Do you mean job interviews?

I was on the market a few months ago. It was fine. Worse than 2021 but better than 2020 and 2019 (I had the same level on my resume in 2020 and 2021).

Very rough out there. Response rates are almost zero.

Yes quite bad clearly worst since 2008 if not worse.

Anecdotally I just got a new job and a massive raise from my last position but my friends who are new grads or have less experience/weird educational backgrounds are still struggling to land roles. Definitely a much better market than a year ago but the floor still dropped out from under us and it took the new grads and bootcamp devs with it.

Yes