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iambateman
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.
doomkaiser21
Don't want to discredit or invalidate your/your friend's experience, but I do want to offer some hope during these times where a lot of what you see on the web is doomer posts.
From Google: The Jevons paradox occurs when technological improvements increase the efficiency of a resource, but the resulting drop in cost causes demand to rise so much that total consumption of that resource increases rather than decreases.
The message being, it may seem now that because the friction for creating software is so minimal now that there will be no need for software engineers in the future. But historically when friction has been reduced, we have seen an increase in demand that outweighs the efficiency gain, increasing total consumption. I believe that software won't be an exception to this millennia-old pattern.
While what "software engineering" may look like might change, I still believe strongly that people who understand software will actually be in higher demand than ever in the future.
NBJack
HR, particularly recruitment, was one of the biggest hit departments when the blood-letting started at Meta in 2022. The hiring freeze that followed didn't help.
paulpauper
So much pre-employment screening and automated filtering. Getting to the interview stage is like having your paper refereed instead of desk rejected.
Esophagus4
Cold applications are very difficult, especially because of the sheer volume of applicants.
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.
garbawarb
When was he looking and when did he get the job?
iambateman
Two different friends…
First spent most of 2025 looking.
Second started last week
mbgerring
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
lumost
Having just been on the job market, my experience was that career pivots are much harder now. I initially intended to transition to a neighboring field after an education break - but none of the companies in that field would speak to me. At most I had a recruiter call with one who decided to reject. To complete this transition I had been planning on a massive pay cut.
When I focused on areas I had some more credible experience in, I got significantly better engagement and eventually found a very narrow niche where I had substantial success.
I think we're partially adjusting to a world where employers expect a very narrow experience match to their role. Employers are also paying a premium within that narrow match.
kzzzznot
To be fair, in the best of climates that is still searching in a niche market with an attempt to do something new with an engineering experience gap
jitler
I suspect the third criteria might be the hardest.
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.
maerF0x0
Be sure to talk with and apply at https://charmindustrial.com/ I dont have an in / network I can share with you, but Peter was a great person to work for :)
bcbb7
How was your detour into product? What kind of skills/instincts you developed being in product? I always imagined it being kind of freeing -- leaving behind engineering implementation details and thinking more in terms of the final results.
leonhard
can you talk about the art installation section of your resume? it sounds really cool. how did you get into this niche and found projects? and is this kind of work not suitable as full-time freelance work?
mbgerring
Started with attending Burning Man starting about 12 years ago. Got jealous of my friends who were doing “real” engineering on these kinds of projects, and started volunteering, applying for and winning art grants, meeting other artists, and climbing the skill ladder.
If you attended Burning Man in 2019, Climate Week in SF in 2023, or Verge in San Jose in 2024, you may have seen my project Awful’s Gas & Snack. I also worked on the Love Blocks and the Jacks at the Conservatory of Flowers in SF (among many other projects).
I now run a small art fabrication business that just barely makes my studio rent most of the time, and is currently supplementing unemployment to pay my bills. It’s really, really hard to turn this kind of work into a livelihood, but it’s happening by necessity because I have no other work right now.
It’s also given me legitimate hardware experience — I’ve written code from scratch in Arduino and written modifications and extensions to WLED, and built custom controllers, remote sensor devices, and power systems (solar and batteries, relevant to the clean energy field). But I don’t quite know how to present this work as “legitimate”, even the stuff I’ve done as a full-fledged professional (like the work I did at Urban Putt San Jose, which you should definitely go see, it’s fun!)
mannanj
Good luck, brother.
xboxnolifes
I have 2-3 years of professional software experience. I've been unemployed for 4 years, barely able to get a response from employers, let alone interviews, let alone a job. My response rate (even just a rejection email) from applying to jobs has gone from an average of ~35% down to an average of ~18%. Numbers wise, the job market is very frustrating for me.
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.
noprocrasted
Lie and ChatGPT your resume to hell. Use those interview cheating tools to pass the bullshit interviews that will be thrown at you.
Your competition is doing it, there is no reason for you not to.
zingababba
Wisepilled response. The state of hiring is completely broken. I started a new position recently and what they told me the position was like vs what I saw/learned after I started were two completely different things. It's like managers don't even know what their own team does.
ai_slop_hater
No one knows anything and no one cares.
noprocrasted
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.
devinprater
Wait, you mean there are senior software engineers who don't know how to use a *nix terminal? I've been using them since I was like 16 or so.
pibaker
You can 100% work your way to a senior position without ever leaving windows. The people who are like that just don't tend to be hanging out on platforms like HN.
noprocrasted
To be clear, this was developing software running on *nix environments, and they were all using Mac (or WSL) and the usual open-source *nix dev tools. This is not a case of developers purely targeting Microsoft environments (indeed it would be excusable in that case).
mattmanser
I am, although I have used nix occasionally.
In Europe C# fills the role of Java.
You're just in an American echo chamber.
Now the number of senior C# engineers in Europe who couldn't fix a broken deploy on IIS or SSL cert problem on a windows server? That is rather high in the windows field too.
idunno246
i was hiring for a senior devops role a few years ago. part of the interview was ssh into a machine and debug some web server configs we purposely broke. step one was email an ssh public key to me. now, i dont remember the command cause i do it so rarely, i dont expect them to, but for a senior role we expect you can google this, its not supposed to be hard. the number of people that could not generate an ssh key was crazy. i had people emailing me their current company private key. and if we did spend half the interview on the key, they never could pass the trivial part of how we broke it, which effictively just required reading the log file.
noprocrasted
They know that it's a magic box into which you paste whatever incantation is in the README.md or spoonfed to you by an LLM, but otherwise have no mental model of how it works. Hell, they didn't even have the reflex of pressing "arrow up" to correct a mistyped command. And don't get me started on the lack of mastery of their tools - whether Docker, package managers or other tools they use daily.
(and speaking of LLMs, those can actually be a wonderful teaching aid - but they don't seem to be bothered by their lack of knowledge and so don't even try to take advantage of them)
I bet the guys are good at Leetcode though, or whatever bullshit interview process that hired them. This is in a Western European company that has adopted all the "best practices" possible, and places high importance on career progression, and these are considered senior SWEs on track to become engineering managers.
pbgcp2026
@noprocrasted - thank you for your 100% spot on comments. +1. And you summarised it so well that I hope they will be remembered by job seekers of today.
FireBeyond
> 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.
Everyone had to start doing that to get through the often dumb-as-a-brick ATS system filtering that became farcical - I remember applying for one position that was around building care and management systems for pregnant mothers - EHR, practice management, claims benefits, etc., all of which I had over a decade of experience in. "Name something that might stand you out from the crowd." "In addition to all this I've also delivered 12 babies as a paramedic". Twenty minutes later "we are looking for candidates whose experiences and skill sets are more closely aligned with the role we are looking to fill". That was my push to realize "I need to do something to ATS optimize my resume and plan otherwise I'll be unemployed for months."
> Employer-wise, everyone wants a unicorn that will lick their ass but isn't willing to pay
"Principal Product Manager. Must have 10-15 years experience, much of it in healthcare domain, including leadership and team ownership. Salary range: $90-130K".
Yup.
tavavex
I'm surprised no one here talked about the junior side of the market yet. It's underrepresented on HN, but I would have still expected to see something. I'll share what I subjectively gathered from this job market.
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.
toyetic
I have about 3 yoe and agree my friends who’ve gotten laid off took 6months to a year to get a new job and new graduated are taking about the same even longer.
What’s interesting to me is what this looks like in 10 years when the lack of junior engineers and smaller amount of cs grads come to fruition
x3cca
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.
FireBeyond
You can also tell how garbage a pipeline ATS screening and other such shit is by the sheer number of positions you see that are advertised for four to six weeks, go off-market only to re-appear 2-3 months later.
You know what's even more exhausting for an employer than having to invest energy into the top of your hiring funnel? Having to redo it every few months because an ATS filtered much of the cream off the top and sent you keyword stuffers to choose between.
pbgcp2026
Those are the "visa applicants ghost jobs".
JohnBooty
Yes, and also the "we're not actually hiring, but we're leaving the listing up anyway incase we get an application from some rockstar/unicorn/whatever candidate" ghost jobs
xboxnolifes
I'm not even seeing them taken down for a few weeks. I've been seeing the same job postings for years now from companies who don't even reply.
CM30
Have to be honest, I do sometimes wonder how many of those might be cases of literal liars/scammers getting the roles thanks to heavily puffed up CVs and lots of AI usage, only for said companies to end up needing to lay them off again when they realise their claimed skills don't match reality.
I feel like someone has to be getting past these systems, and I get the feeling it's not the people these companies want to be hiring.
FireBeyond
And some of the frustration there is I suspect then that some of those companies don't want to then return to their final round participants to see if they're still available because they're hit with a duality of "we don't want to admit we passed you over for a BS artist" and "well, if they haven't found something yet, were they really a final round person for us?" (not saying that's a valid perspective or not, but I could absolutely see it happening).
sixhobbits
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
adjejmxbdjdn
> it's not as bad as it was in the last several months
I think this needs to be caveated by the fact that the job market is seasonal. The beginning of the year is usually the best part for jobs since departments have shiny new budgets, with a boost again around March-April as people quit after getting their bonuses triggering of another set of churn.
JohnBooty
This matches my experience as well as a sr. Ruby/Python engineer (NE USA based)
The market was pretty barren in late 2025, but wasn't too terrible in Jan 2026 and I progressed nicely through two interview processes. Got an offer from one. Made it to the final round with the other but timeframes did quite not align.
shiny new budgets
saysjonathan
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.
JohnBooty
No degree seems to be a bigger gate now than it was the last time I was searching
I did have one surprise rejection during a screening call due to the fact that I had 4 years of compsci but no degree. I don't recall that happening before in ~30 years. I don't believe it was listed as a hard requirement, else I wouldn't have applied.
requirements, even for lower roles, seems to be higher than before.
ie - React shops were cool with my recent Vue experience as a substitute, since I was primarily a backend guy anyway
Not rejecting your experiences, just adding to the anecdata
talkingtab
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.
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briga
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.
pqtyw
Depends how you look at it. In tech its probably a lot easier get a job in most of e.g. Eastern Europe, of course unless you are at the top even (where the competition is higher) even adjusted by CoL salaries are much lower.
idontwantthis
I have been wondering if my LinkedIn just happens to hit all of the right content somehow. I've been afraid to post or change anything just in case I upset some secret balance!
Melatonic
I get a ton of hits too on linkedin if you want to compare or contrast ever
gaurav2372
Do you mind sharing how does your LinkedIn look like? Do you regularly post? I'd really like to know this as im struggling with this.
roymain
I have spoken to a couple of founders in the last few months and what I keep hearing isn't "we're not hiring" but "we're hiring fewer juniors and being pickier about the ones we take." The bar for what a screen actually tests for moved a lot in the last 18 months and most companies haven't caught up. Its like everyone has so much to absorb before they can decide who to pick. Most down-selected candidates have gone through 5-6 rounds of interview in their selection process.
benchwright
"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.
tbojanin
> Given some of the retraction of "warm feelings"
Why do you say this? Is this coming from personal experience, or anecdotally?
alephnerd
> It can be more difficult in compressed markets where talent is either in surplus (read: SV, Dub, etc)
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.
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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?