In my experience, tech employment is incredibly bimodal right now. Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever, but an "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position.
Contrary to what many say, I don't think it's simple as seniors are getting hired and juniors aren't. Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone. The people getting pushed out are the intermediates and seniors who aren't high performers.
I generally tend to interview every year to see what's out there in the world (sometimes I find something worth switching for, other times not). I'm not even looking very hard but have had 4 interviews in the last month.
Personally I think it's a bit more nuanced than senior vs junior (though it is very hard for juniors right now). What I've seen a lot of hunger for is people with a track record of getting their hands dirty and getting things solved. I'm very much a "builder" type dev that has more fun going from 0-v1 than maintaining and expanding scalable, large systems.
From the early start of the last tech boom through the post-pandemic hiring craze I increasingly saw demand for people who where in the latter category and fit nicely in a box. The ability to "do what you must to get this shipped" was less in demand. People cared much more about leetcode performance than an impressive portfolio.
Now reminds me a lot of 2008 in terms of the job market and what companies are looking for. 2008-2012 a strong portfolio of projects was the signal most people looked for. Back then being an OSS dev was a big plus (I found it not infrequently to be a liability in the last decade, better to study leetcode than actually build something).
Honestly, a lot of senior devs lose this ability over time. They get comfortable with the idea that as a very senior hire you don't have to do all that annoying stuff anymore. But the teams I see hiring are really focused on staying lean and getting engineers how are comfortable wearing multiple hats and working hard to get things shipped.
> I'm very much a "builder" type dev that has more fun going from 0-v1 than maintaining and expanding scalable, large systems.
Maintaining and expanding is more challenging, which is why I’ve grown to prefer that. Greenfield and then leaving is too easy, you don’t learn the actually valuable lessons. As experience shows that projects won’t stay in the nice greenfield world, building them can feel like doing illusory work — you know the real challenges are yet to come.
> I'm not even looking very hard but have had 4 interviews in the last month.
How many offers did you receive? Companies have also adopted your strategy: interviewing candidates "to see what's out there" - there's a job I interviewed for that's still open after 10 months.
> Honestly, a lot of senior devs lose this ability over time. They get comfortable with the idea that as a very senior hire you don't have to do all that annoying stuff anymore.
A few years ago, when interest rates were 0% and companies were hiring at an unsustainable rate, I got a lot of criticism for cautioning engineers against non-coding roles. I talked to a lot of people who dreamed of moving into pure architect roles where they advised teams of more junior engineers about what to build, but didn't get involved with building or operating anything.
I haven't kept up with everyone but a lot of the people I know who went that route are struggling now. The work is good until a company decides to operate with leaner teams and keeps the people committing code. The real difficulties start when they have to interview at other companies after not writing much code for 3 years. I'm in a big Slack for career development where it's common for "Architect" and "Principal Engineer" titled people to be venting about how they can't get past the first round of interviews (before coding challenges!) because they're trying to sell themselves as architects without realizing that companies want hands-on builders now.
> I'm not even looking very hard but have had 4 interviews in the last month.
Did you get any offers yet? It seems the issue is not lack of interviews but lack of offers. Many companies are looking for a goldilocks candidate and are happy to pass on anything that doesn't match their ideal candidate
>I generally tend to interview every year to see what's out there in the world (sometimes I find something worth switching for, other times not). I'm not even looking very hard but have had 4 interviews in the last month.
You've been interviewing forever. You're the well practiced pickup artist of job searching. Of course you'll be getting the call backs over the other 1000 applicants who don't have the same experience level applying. You "just know" how to read between the lines and tailor a resume, whip up a cover letter, etc whereas they're making mistakes.
I, too, am able to get interviews. The last time I made a serious search was in 2022-23, and companies were clearly eager to hire at competitive rates. This past fall, they were not. My salary requirements stopped at least two interview processes when the question was raised. In other cases it was not clear that the company was serious about moving forward with hiring for the position at all. A three month search ultimately came up dry, which is fine because I'm currently employed, but I do not think the hiring landscape is promising at all right now.
I don’t see this reality in the style of interview being performed at all.
Everyone has seemingly adopted the FAANG playbook for interviewing that doesn’t really select for people who like getting their hands dirty and building. These kinds of interviews are compliance interviews: they’re for people who will put in the work to just pass the test.
There are so many interviews I’ve been in where if I don’t write the perfect solution on the first try, I’ll get failed on the interview. More than ever, I’m seeing interviewers interrupt me during systems or coding interviews before I have a chance to dig in. I’ve always seen a little bit of this, but it seems like the bar is tightening, not on skill, but on your ability to regurgitate the exact solution the interviewer has in mind.
In the past I’ve always cold applied places and only occasionally leaned on relationships. Now I’m only doing the latter. Interviewees are asked to risk asymmetrically compared to employers.
Seeing a lot of the same. Never studied leetcode and didn't work at leetcode companies. I could do them, I passed AWS and Microsoft cloud at L5 levels with no prep, but never was my strong suit. But I ship, and I can play politics very well. Especially in crusty organizations. Lots of callbacks, very hot market.
My friends who are "book smart" and leetcode geniuses are struggling. They're my friends, but they come off a bit "off" at first glance, the stereotypical nerd vibe. They're all really struggling since they can't sell themselves properly and lack the interpersonal skills.
>I generally tend to interview every year to see what's out there in the world (sometimes I find something worth switching for, other times not). I'm not even looking very hard but have had 4 interviews in the last month.
The Pick-Up Artist's Guide to Tech Interviewing, you should be writing.
The first 100 subscribers get a 50% off discount the month of March, you should be announcing on LinkedIn and Tiktok, and making passive income.
The rest of us experienced people with proven track records have to learn algorithms on the weekends despite having white hair.
When I was in corporate I'd talk about cover your ass mode and get'er done mode. And while realistically I know both are necessary, I was always annoyed at the need to have a cya mode. I get a bit of schadenfreude from the thougt of the market being harder for the people who don't seem to have a get'er done mode, and a bit of his at the thought it might be because there's less concern over whom to bother if something needs to be fixed later.
In your experience, what’s the best way to increase signal? I feel as though a lot of devs struggle with the initial process of getting past screening, drawing attention to projects, etc.
interviews aren't the problem, you know full well that "getting a call back" means nothing in this space, but the insane and unresolved technical round process
and sure, lots of people can't get a call back too, but starting the process means nothing
should say how many offers did you get, that's a better way to normalize it
Agreed on the bimodal, but I don't think this is junior vs. senior - I think it's just competence being rooted out.
The majority of engineers, in my hiring experience, failed very simple tests pre-AI. In a world where anyone can code, they're no better than previously non-technical people. The CS degree is no longer protection.
The gap between average and the best engineers now, though, is even higher. The best engineers can visualize the whole architecture in their head, and describe exactly what they want to an AI - their productivity is multiplied, and they rarely get slowed down.
While this could be done by junior or senior, I think junior usually has the slight advantage in being more AI-native and knowing how to effectively prompt and work with AI, though not always.
I see it the opposite way actually with respect to the CS degree. If you earned your CS degree (or any degree) before 2022 or so, the value of that degree is going to grow and grow and grow until the last few people who had to learn before AI are dying out like the last COBOL developers
AI has fundamentally broken the education system in a way that will take decades for it to fully recover. Even if we figure out how to operate with AI properly in an educational setting in such a way that learners actually still learn, the damage from years of unqualified people earning degrees and then entering academia is going to reverberate through the next 50 years as those folks go on to teach...
> The best engineers can visualize the whole architecture in their head, and describe exactly what they want to an AI
I think this must be part of it. I see so many posts about people burning a thousand dollars in AI credits building a small app, and I have no idea why. I use the $20 Claude plan and I rarely run out of usage, and I make all kinds of things. I just describe what I want, do a few back-and-forths of writing out the architecture, and Claude does it.
I think the folks burning thousands of dollars of credits are unable to describe what they want.
> While this could be done by junior or senior, I think junior usually has the slight advantage in being more AI-native and knowing how to effectively prompt and work with AI, though not always.
But juniors don't (usually) have the knowledge to assess if what the AI has produced is ok or not. I agree that anybody (junior or senior) can produce something with AI, the key question is whether the same person has the skills to asses (e.g., to ask the right questions) that the produced output is what's needed.
In my experience, junior + AI is just a waste of money (tokens) and a nightmare to take accountability for.
> The majority of engineers, in my hiring experience, failed very simple tests pre-AI
Did you consider tech whiteboard / leetcode interviews are unnatural stressful environments ? Have you gone through a mid/difficult technical appraisal yourself lately ? Try it out just to get an idea how it feels on the other side...
I was skeptical but I'm really starting to see the productivity benefits now.
I very much follow the pattern of having the whole architecture in my head and describe it to the AI which generates the appropriate code. So now the bottlenecks are all process related: availability of people to review my PRs, security sign offs on new development, waiting on CI builds and deployments, stakeholder validation, etc. etc.
I agree that what you're describing is the required skillset now. But two things I've been unsure of are what that looks like in terms of hiring to test for it, and for how long this remains a moat at all.
So much of tech hiring cargo culting has been built up around leetcode and other coding problems, puzzles, and more. We all pay lip service to systems thinking and architecture, but I question if even those are testing the correct things for the modern era.
And then what happens in a year when the models can handle that as well?
Largely agree, with a bit of clarification. Junior devs can indeed prompt better than some of the old timers, but the blast radius of their inexperienced decisions is much higher. High competence senior devs who embrace the new tools are gonna crush it relative to juniors.
I have found in the last 3 months that there are two clear tiers of developers in the company I work at, the ones that can code with AI and the ones that can't, and the ones that can't are all going to be unemployed in 6 months.
We have a lot of people where if you gave them clear requirements, they could knock out features and they were useful for that, but I have an army of agents that can do that now for pennies. We don't need that any more. We need people who have product vision and systems design and software engineering skills. I literally don't even care if they can code with any competency.
Btw, if you think that copying and pasting a jira ticket into claude is a skill that people are going to pay you for, that is also wrong. You need to not just be able to use AI to code, you need to be able to do it _at scale_. You need to be able to manage and orchestrate fleets of ai agents writing code.
Makes sense. You just reminded me of the article "Why Can’t Programmers... Program?" [1].
Before gen AI, I used to give candidates at my company a quick one-hour remote screening test with a couple of random "FizzBuzz"-style questions. I would usually paraphrase the question so a simple Google search would not immediately surface the answer, and 80% of candidates failed at coding a working solution, which was very much in line with the article. Post gen AI, that test effectively dropped to a 0% failure rate, so we changed our selection process.
> The best engineers can visualize the whole architecture in their head, and describe exactly what they want to an AI
I'd go a step further and say the engineers who, unprompted, discover requirements and discuss their own designs with others have an even better time. You need to effectively communicate your thoughts to coding agents, but perhaps more crucially you need to fit your ever-growing backyard of responsibilities into the larger picture. Being that bridge requires a great level of confidence and clear-headedness and will be increasingly valued.
This stupid industry doesn't have the wherewithal to actually make a good credential and training process like medicine and law, and instead lets everyone come up with their own process to vet people. We could even do it as an apprenticeship model, not like that hasn't served humanity throughout the ages.
I should have a credential I have to maintain every few years, one or two interviews, and that should get me a job.
Juniors from non target schools are getting pushed out since the skill floor is too high.
I graduated 9 months ago. In that time I've merged more PRs than anyone else, reduced mean time to merge by 20% on a project with 300 developers with an automated code review tool, and in the past week vibe coded an entire Kubernetes cluster that can remotely execute our builds (working on making it more reliable before putting it into prod).
None of this matters.
The companies/teams like OpenAI or Google Deepmind that are allegedly hiring these super juniors at huge salaries only do so from target schools like Waterloo or MIT. If you don't work at a top company your compensation package is the same as ever. I am not getting promoted faster, my bonus went from 9% to 14% and I got a few thousand in spot bonuses.
From my perspective, this field is turning into finance or law, where the risk of a bad hire due to the heightened skill floor is so high that if you DIDN'T go to a target school you're not getting a top job no matter how good you are. Like how Yale goes to Big Law at $250k while non T14 gets $90k doing insurance defence and there's no movement between the categories. 20-30% of my classmates are still unemployed.
We cannot get around this by interviewing well because anyone can cheat on interviews with AI, so they don't even give interviews or coding assessments to my school. We cannot get around this with better projects because anyone can release a vibe coded library.
It appears the only thing that matters is pedigree of education because 4 years of in person exams from a top school aren't easy to fake.
Can I ask what you and others that posts things like this here -"What are you actually developing?"
People are posting about pull requests, use of AIs, yada yada. But they never tell us what they are trying to produce. Surely this should be the first thing in the post:
- I am developing an X
- I use an LLM to write some of the code for it ... etc.
- I have these ... testing problems
- I have these problems with the VCS/build system ...
Otherwise it is all generalised, well "stuff". And maybe, dare I say it, slop.
I mean you don’t need your first job go to top of the top companies. Your first job is to get you into the industry then you can flourish.
How many juniors OpenAI GDM are going to hire in a year, probably double digits at max, the chances are super slim and they are by nature are allowed to be as picky as they should be.
That being said, I do agree this industry is turning into finance/law, but that won’t last long either. I genuinely can’t foresee what if when AGI/ASI is really here, it should start giving human ideas to better itself, and there will be no incentive to hire any human for a large sum anymore, maybe a single digit individuals on earth perhaps
> The retreat challenged the narrative that AI eliminates the need for junior developers. Juniors are more profitable than they have ever been. AI tools get them past the awkward initial net-negative phase faster. They serve as a call option on future productivity. And they are better at AI tools than senior engineers, having never developed the habits and assumptions that slow adoption.
> The real concern is mid-level engineers who came up during the decade-long hiring boom and may not have developed the fundamentals needed to thrive in the new environment. This population represents the bulk of the industry by volume, and retraining them is genuinely difficult. The retreat discussed whether apprenticeship models, rotation programs and lifelong learning structures could address this gap, but acknowledged that no organization has solved it yet.
Thanks for sharing this is the first I’ve seen this. I wish they had expanded on exactly what mid-level might be missing rather then just saying “fundamentals” and “practical intuition”
Someone who jumps higher than expected when the boss demands it?
Someone who works 996 in the office?
Or someone who knows what they’re doing?
I think this is bigger than any individual. It’s just a matter of time before you’re let go. There’s no loyalty from companies at all. Not when they’re seeing higher than expected profits and are still cutting huge percentages of staff every year. There’s no strategy or preference to it. I don’t think this has to do with how you or I perform on the job.
Most people I’ve talked to lately who are still employed are watching out for their job to get cut.
I’m not sure it is just that, I don’t even see positions listed where I would like to work. For salary ranges, I see lower upper limits than my second best offer three n half years ago. Considering the high inflation, that’s crazy.
I would not mind switching but 1. I don’t see interesting positions 2. they don’t pay well, and only 3. they might not even want me.
It might also be just my niche, but finding a good position feels completely impossible for me.
I am doing cross platform mobile development and I’m wondering how I could transition into backend development or I started even considering the decentralized finance…
Yeah, I don't know if I'd call myself competent (I'm late intermediate/early senior. So the worst of the curve here). But there's a difference between "interviews have gotten a lot harder now" and "I can't even get a response back". It's far, far more in the latter.
My resume isn't bad on paper either. It's not FAANG coded, but it's decent experience.
They're just as capable of typing prompts into AI, but what they don't have is good judgement of what good work/code looks like, so what's the point of asking a junior engineer to do something vs asking the LLM directly?
Because a lot of stuff doesn't need to be good it needs to be done.
Nobody is gonna lose money because some script that generates yaml for the build process every hour nested three loops instead of two. Intern, AI, junior dev, junior dev telling an intern how to use AI, doesn't matter. If it works for the week it'll work for the decade. If someone needs to pick it apart and fix something in a year it'll either take no time because they know enough to do it easily or it'll be a good low stakes learning exercise for a junior.
Everyone wants to think their stuff is important but 99.9% of code is low stakes support code either in applications or in infrastructure around them.
> In my experience, tech employment is incredibly bimodal right now. Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever, but an "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position.
This is the K-shaped economy playing out. Its a signal that the american middle class is hollowing out. Bad, very bad.
> Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone.
While I could buy that hiring managers believe this, it's not actually true.
The gulf between the quality of what a sr developer can do with these tools and what a jr can do is huge. They simply don't know what they don't know and effective prompting requires effective spec writing.
A rando jr vibe coder can churn out code like there's no tomorrow, but that doesn't mean it's actually right.
Absolutely agree, when we got our last junior one and a half year ago. He started with using AI for... Everything. If you told him research this and that topic and ways to do X and y and if it's possible. He just used AI which missed half the steps and information.
I'm not against research with AI. But using a search engine helps you go through a railway basically and helps you gather information step by step and you have time to notice it something is missing.
With AI you don't have the mental pause to process the information.
While I agree with what you said. In personal experience I have noticed the software design / architecture is becoming irrelevant for lot of enterprises (including mine of course). So design nowadays is about API design Input/Output/Error handling. And architecture is about Cloud/Kubernetes/APM , deployment and monitoring etc. Code now does not need much design. Things like performance, isolation, extensibility etc as those are now higher level concerns not part of code itself.
This is also where micro services pattern fits in well because individual unit is so small no design needed.
> and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone
Wouldn't the assumption be the opposite, in that AI is magnifying the decision making of the engineer and so you get more payback by having the senior drive the AI?
I've found this to be true so far, junior engineers with AI can be super productive but they can also cause a lot of damage (more outages than ever) and AI amplifies the sometimes poorly designed code they can generate.
I suspect a lot of it best practices will be enforcing best practices via agents.md/claude.md to create a more constrained environment.
Being able to clearly describe a problem and work with the AI to design a solution, prioritise what to put the AI to work on, set up good harnesses so the quality of the output is kept high, figure out what parallelises well and what’s going to set off agents that are stepping on each others toes… all of this needs experience and judgement and delegation and project organisation skills.
AI is supercharging tech leads. Beginners might be able to skill up faster, but they’re not getting the same results.
For a good senior, yes you get massive returns, which is why those good seniors are in incredibly high demand right now.
For average to low-performing intermediates/seniors... there's not much difference in output between them and a good junior at this point. Claude really raised the skill floor for software development.
Yes, this has been my experience. I'd consider myself average at best. I worked in the industry for almost 7 years before being laid off. I can't find anything at the moment and have resorted to moving back in with my parents.
It's pretty depressing. I'd take just about anything at the moment. I understand desperation going into a job interview isn't ideal either.
> In my experience, tech employment is incredibly bimodal right now. Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever, but an "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position.
what an interesting way to say most programmers find it extremely difficult to get a job. you sound like you have some kind of insight, but is there anything notable about jobs drying up for people who aren't cheap enough or who aren't valuable enough? that's just how jobs dry up. anytime it's a bad job market for workers it'll be like that.
it is a great way to frame the coming tech crash. it allows whoever remains to fancy themselves as top talent.
> Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone.
Seniors have much more advantage right now in using AI than Juniors. Seniors get to lean in on their experience in checking AI results. Juniors rely on the AI's experience instead, which isn't as useful.
Juniors really aren't just as capable with AI as anyone. Knowing how to unambiguously describe correctly what you want isn't something a junior can do, nor is understanding if what the ai produces is good or bad.
> In my experience, tech employment is incredibly bimodal right now. Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever, but an "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position.
That sounds good for many of us (and don’t we all like to think we’re top candidates here on HN…) but is there any data to back this up? Or it just anecdata (not to dismiss anecdata, still useful info).
This matches what I've seen too. Though I'd add another dimension: soft skills. In my experience, job searching has always been easier for people who communicate well regardless of their technical level. And soft skills might be what's making some people more resilient to this market shift specifically
That has always been true (not that I’m saying you don’t know that, I’m using your comment as a jumping off point) in this industry. I am a good developer, but I’m a very good teacher and leader, and soft skills are why I’ve had the career I’ve had over the past two decades.
I'm not a Senior, but I'm not a Junior either. The market has no place for people like me. I've killed myself for almost two years and can't secure a position. It's incredibly disheartening. I have a family to feed. I need to be able to work.
Sending you empathy. I think we have to get used to the lower pay expectation. This is the biggest negative, which does not make up for all of the AI's upsides.
This seems closest to my experience. There is work out there but it’s of lower quality.
I turn on LinkedIn “Looking for Work” a few times a year. The only recruiters I get now are those trying to run an agency, farm you out to their Blue Chip clients like BOA or Duke Energy for a low-ball salary on a 12 month contract while they dangle the hope of future hiring as a carrot.
I live close enough to a small/mid city that I could get a proper job quickly enough… except I would be taking a 30-40k pay cut and transition from remote to having an 80-mile / 3-hour commute daily.
Meanwhile at my day job we’re trying to hire a Senior Data Engineer to manage our data pipelines in AWS. Nothing too crazy, it’s remote, it’s advertised on LinkedIn, but we cannot find qualified candidates to save our life. All the while I open HN daily and see the complaints about job hunting and layoffs all over. Where are all the laid off applicants?
> Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever
I haven't found that to be true. Unless by "top candidates" you mean people working at actual AI companies such as Alphabet/Meta/OpenAI/Anthropic. If you're an AI-user and not an AI scientist it's bad out there, even for senior+ developers who previously worked in "FAANG".
I wonder if that is just a correction of the rampant hiring that took place just before this employment “crash?” - if it is as you say that its intermediates and non high performers then does that make it a good thing as well.
Truth is, when I was part of larger orgs/enterprise I definitely saw some folks who were dead weight, and I don’t mean to be harsh, a few of these knew they weren’t contributing and were being malicious in that sense.
Similarly, I wonder how many high performers now are taking multiple jobs thanks to remote work and exposing the mid to low performers. Like some kind of developer hypergamy taking place.
I'm seeing a lot of specialization. For the past 11 years I've marketed myself as a frontend engineer. I got laid off last year and the job search was largely similar to my previous job search 4 years prior.
I've been looking again this year and the landscape has changed drastically. Specialization is the name of the game, I have a good amount of experience working with Growth initiatives and I've been getting good responses from roles that are looking for either Growth or Design engineers, roles that were not as prevalent years ago.
I agree with this — there is at least some bifurcation by skillset and capabilities. Lots of engineers are overfitted to working on consumer web apps or SaaS products, but those are no longer an area of focus. You need to be adaptable enough to work on other kinds of systems too. Doing so either requires that you’re really good commercially (can lead development of a product over time, drive revenue, etc) or very good technically at a wide breadth of technologies and problems.
What makes this more extreme is that we’re in a paradigm shift, technically. Systems of the future look different than what’s been built before. Building agentic stuff is very different than web apps. The infrastructure side is also different. Moreover, both are uncertain so there’s no plug-and-play set of skills that would fit into any company in the way you could probably get hired reliably in the 2010s if you can operate Kubernetes, design a database schema, write Node.js APIs, etc.
> Contrary to what many say, I don't think it's simple as seniors are getting hired and juniors aren't. Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone.
Tell me about all the junior developers you've hired (it's none)
I sold a house after being laid off in mid-January from a government IT contractor where I had worked for eight years. The sale and move took about five weeks.
Before that role, I spent two years at another government contractor working on various govt. applications doing UX research, design, and front-end UI development. Overall, I’ve had a 17-year career in UX Research, Design and Development, starting at an ad agency in 2009.
From 2016 to 2022, I worked hard in government projects and enjoyed collaborating with great, close-knit coworkers and receiving consistently positive client feedback. From 2022 to 2026, things changed as the company grew—my role narrowed to UX research and design while newer hires handled UI development. I often felt underutilized and raised it, but management assured me I was doing well. With little direction from my last manager, I focused on staying visible to the client by monitoring user chats, identifying UX issues, and proposing design solutions that the client appreciated and the development team implemented.
Looking at where the tech industry is now—with thousands laid off from government IT and the broader tech sector flooding the job market, creating rising competition, constant pressure to work harder (Elon wants us to work as hard as Chinese workers do) and AI rapidly reshaping creative and development roles—I’m not very interested in that level of stress. I worked hard for many years and enjoyed it, but I value MY LIFE and MY HEALTH more than participating in the current “battle royale” environment in tech.
Overall, now with AI I feel graphic & web design, as well as front design web development is a stupid career! It was a nice run, bought two houses from it, worked remotely, when things were slow worked from wherever in the lower 48 and now .... in April Im starting nursing school and Im not young (20 years left of work in me). Roll with the punches here yet the punches are gonna punch hundreds of thousands to millions in the face ... not sure how this any good for an economy and society but here we are! If you are like me sell your house and stash the money away to buy houses when the crash from AI happens!
I got pushed out, and slapped with the Dead Fish of SV Ageism. It was brutal, and I got pissed off.
But in the long run, it's been the best thing that ever happened to me. I would have liked the extra ten years of salary and saving, but I'm not entirely sure that I would have survived it.
> The people getting pushed out are the intermediates and seniors who aren't high performers.
It's almost impossossible to screen for "high performers" though. When interviewing, you just don't know who you are getting, short of like, they can solve your leetcode questions well, and they had good answers to pretty high-level "work experience" questions.
So I don't think this can be true on the hiring side. Maybe on choosing who they let go when cutting down the workforce, they can look at general performance reviews and such, but I doubt it plays a role in hiring.
> It's almost impossossible to screen for "high performers" though
That's not true? leetcode is crap, but usually you can learn a lot about a person from how they approach problems and on what kind of questions they ask.
This is a very naive take. AI output still needs to be guided and iterated over, architecture decisions (even at the code level) still need experience to judge correctly.
> Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone.
That is pretty context sensitive. You're correct that there's no real deep AI use expertise broadly understood to exist at this point (unless you're Steve Yegge?), but if people think they can toss out the engineers with experience in the systems that have been around a while, with junior developers "guiding" changes — that's likely a good way for a business to fall on its sword.
Relating it to performance is just silly. Most companies barely understand the performance of their employees much less candidates. The market has shrunk but not catastrophically so. Most people haven't been majorly affected but that doesn't mean they're automatically the most deserving or best performing.
People with experience and/or credentials desired by companies in areas of growth (i.e. AI) are always in high demand
Apparently it is over a third affected in my domain. Which is crazy. Pretty much everyone in my immediate band has been hit at some point. That that weren't were usually around 5-8 above me. So basically a different generational band altogether.
I'm also seeing companies looking at only hiring juniors from overseas because they're using the same generative tools as US-based juniors but cost even less.
> The people getting pushed out are the intermediates and seniors who aren't high performers.
i argue that's a good outcome. Seniors who aren't high performers should not command high salaries. I think the anomaly that is the post-covid boom is warping salary expectations vs difficulty of job (and the competency required for it).
I worked with someone that was trying to push code with all the tells that they didn't understand the code and that it had been through multiple LLM iterations, it burned a lot of the productivity in a project.
You can be a great unblocker, team lead, and work well within cross cutting areas and with interdepartmental stake holders, have a history of strong technical performance.
and yet its nebulous if that means you're a high performer or not to those hiring. It seems I'm seeing 'culture fit' as a common reason people aren't getting hired again. That was out of vogue for a good while.
> "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position.
As was foretold in the Tyler Cowen's eponymous 2013 book "Average Is Over".
In it he argued that the modern economy will undergo a permanent shift where "average" performance no longer guarantees a stable, middle-class life.
He predicted that the economy will split into two distinct classes: a high-earning elite (roughly 10–15% of the population) who thrive by collaborating with technology, and a larger group (85–90%) facing stagnant wages and fewer opportunities.
AI summary of the other key points of that book:
The "Man + Machine" Advantage: Success will belong to those who can effectively use smart machines. Cowen uses Freestyle Chess (teams of humans and computers) as an analogy, noting that human intuition combined with machine processing power consistently outperforms either working alone.
The Power of Conscientiousness: In a world of abundant information, the scarcest and most valuable traits will be self-motivation, discipline, and the ability to focus.
Hyper-Meritocracy: Advanced data and machine intelligence make it easier for employers to measure an individual's exact economic value. This leads to extreme salary inequality as top performers are identified and rewarded more precisely.
A New Social Contract: Cowen predicts a future where individuals must be more self-reliant. He suggests society will move toward lower-cost living models for the non-elite, featuring cheaper housing and "bread and circuses" in the form of low-cost digital entertainment and online education.
EDIT: Notice how we're basically already here: Netflix is cheap, YT is free, Khan Academy and MIT OCW is free, Coursera/Udemy/etc. are cheap.
Stagnant vs. Dynamic Sectors: The economic divide is worsened by "low accountability" sectors like education and healthcare, where productivity is hard to measure and costs continue to rise, unlike tech-driven sectors that see rapid gains.
Cowen uses Freestyle Chess (teams of humans and computers) as an analogy, noting that human intuition combined with machine processing power consistently outperforms either working alone.
Unfortunately, this one hasn't aged well. Human+Computer is now consistently outperformed by Computer alone in the chess world. Also, the name Freestyle Chess is now used for Chess960, the chess variant where starting positions are randomized. It has nothing to do with computer chess now!
This is probably the dumbest take I've heard of.
They're the most likely to make mistakes with AI because they don't know the pitfalls of what they're doing.
The chart in the tweet represents year-on-year growth. Based on these figures alone the actual number of people employed in tech is still really high, and the numbers can't just go up forever.
Also this only captures 6 industries, which is a narrow view of what would define "tech" these days.
Not to say that the job market isn't tough but this graph is a very narrow view
> The chart in the tweet represents year-on-year growth.
Can’t believe how many people are commenting without looking at what the chart means. We’ve lost 50k jobs last two years after decades of adding 100k+ every year including the pandemic highs of 300k+ per year. Total employment remains way above 2000s, 2008 and 2020 unlike the title suggests.
Tech has also changed to become an all encompassing thing. In 2000, loads of people didn't have computers or cell phones. Maybe they owned a CD player and watched TV. Tech was avoidable then. But now everyone has a phone in their pocket, a computer, does all their banking through apps instead of visiting the bank, orders food online, orders taxis through apps, and so on. Everything is lumped under tech now and unavoidably so.
Yes, but how many people have tried to enter the field since then? Is the economy that supports current number of tech workers really better than one that supports 10x?
No, the title is not misleading at all - your comment is misleading. Total tech jobs being up doesn't tell us anything, since there are also way more tech workers now than back then.
Over 100K people graduate in CS/IT per year, and that doesn't even count people who come in to the industry from overseas or from other degree paths.
Absolute numbers are still higher than they were 5 years ago but the number of jobs going down means that the same (or about the same) number of people are starting to compete for a smaller number of jobs. Many people have chosen to study software development in recent years so nowadays the workforce is much larger than it was 5-10 years ago.
This imbalance of supply and demand shifts power toward employers and it's hard not to feel the pressure even if you're not looking for a job right now.
The health of the market is not a function of the total number of jobs alone, it's a function of the number of jobs and the number of people to fill them.
The number of total jobs going up year after year meant that there were increasing numbers of candidates, new people entering the field. If the job growth stops, then there still we be candidates coming in. There will also be the new hires from the last decade moving into increasingly senior roles, and there won't be space for them (unless you devalue the meaning of "senior" even more).
So the year over year change matters a lot. If it plateaus, or even declines slightly, it's more than enough to make a terrible market.
YoY change in jobs is still probably not the best way to visualize overall market health. As you say, you also have to take into account the number of people of fill the jobs. To me it seems like the least misleading statistics would be a graph showing unemployment and underemployment % over time. I'd probably also toss in graphs of length of unemployment period as well as various median wage percentiles (quintiles or deciles maybe) over time.
Thank you. And those raw numbers in the chart that go back to 2001 are not normalized percentages; what’s happening right now is NOTHING like 2001.
But, it just doesn’t hit the same way on X to say “We are back to late 2023-levels of tech employment” or “The losses in tech jobs over the last 18 months give back two months of hiring in 2022”.
And I already thought we hired more devs than needed pre-covid. It was pretty well surmised that big tech was hiring to starve other companies of talent, and thus employees were underutilised.
How’s it compare to 2000 though? Tech was ascendant in 2008 so not surprised to hear it didn’t do too badly then and in 2020 while people panicked tech again had a much easier time keeping people on remotely.
In Portland, there was a time in 2000-2002 where Nike and Intel had contract offers out to SW developers for $12/hour, and were getting slammed with applications.
I started my career at $14/hr in 1999, was at $19/hr in 2000, and switched to salary at $55k by 2001. I spent 15 years in corp IT running software teams... total comp got way better when I entered the big tech industry in 2015.
Remember that the 2000 numbers are also out of a much smaller pool and the graph uses absolute numbers. So even if they were the same numbers in 2000 as 2020 it would have been a much, much larger percentage of all jobs.
I was working in 2000 in Atlanta GA at boring old enterprises companies with 4 years of experience back then. If you were working for/targeting profitable non tech companies, the world was your oyster.
I was working at a company that printed bills for utility companies and had offers from banks, insurance companies etc. The world didn’t stop buying Coca Cola, flying Delta or stop buying stuff from Home Depot because of the dot com crash
For the last 2 years I can't even get an interview despited having 14 years of experience and being up to date with development trends, libraries, languages, AI tooling, etc.
I don't think the market is flooded with new devs as many state, I think we are in a deep silent crisis
I've been able to get something like 25 interviews in 2 months despite having long gaps on my resume and nothing especially impressive to my name. So I suspect you might be going about this wrong. I haven't gotten an offer yet, that's another story, but getting the interviews hasn't been hard. Applying in NYC/SF, senior-only.
IMO it’s just depression for tech. Back then 33% of total employment got gutted, which is probably better than tech today or in a few years when big techs start AI gut.
I don't know. The company I work at is inviting candidates for interviews, and we have to make compromises because we can't get the exact profiles we are looking for. Something about your comment does not add up to me.
Locality. People want to work close to where they live and not all places are bustling with all kind of activity. I suspect you're hybrid or on site only, right?
Sometimes it looks like the longer you're looking for a job, the harder it gets for some reason. That's unintuitive for me, as you should be getting more confident in interviews etc
That sounds like poor signaling in that you think you are doing all the correct things but all evidence points to the contrary.
Instead of focusing on the trends you might try to look at qualifications like education, certifications, security clearance, skill expertise, open source contributions, and so forth. Trends are a gravity. I recommend distancing yourself from the crowd to uniquely stand out. Then as edge case opportunities open recruiters come to you.
To some recruiters, there's this sweet spot between 5 and 10 years experience where the applicant good / independent enough to hit the ground running, not too expensive, and still young enough to put up with company bullshit.
A big problem we have is a the sheer volume of AI slop resumes, fake applicants and people trying to cheat on interviews. We had to close a req for SWE because we had so many “people” (read: automated applicants) clogging up the pipeline. You effectively need a referral
Referrals are also getting games. If your company has a referral bonus, then I promise you pretty much every single referral you have looked at, is from a guy who DIDNT know the guy. I applied to 20 Big Tech companies last month. All from "referrals". Check out teamblind.com if you don't know (Be careful. The site is like a tech version of 4 chan. Well maybe not THAT bad.) The whole game is messed up.
Not dismissing that it’s a tough market for some but folks also need to learn how to read a chart. It shows a slight decline following a massive expansion.
The primary thing going on in the market right now is a lot of companies simply over-hired during the post Covid boom and they’re correcting for that.
People have been booggeyman'ing offshoring since before I entered the industry and it's never been all that significant of a factor. Time zones are a big piece but there are a lot of other factors that make offshoring less appealing than a naive analysis of Fully Loaded Cost per head.
Covid was just starting point, no one is blaming Covid.
There are interest rates going crazy, AI hype, wars going on, visa rules changes, tariffs and trade wars.
Offshoring seems like a silly explanation in current global situation, there probably is some still but I don't believe anyone is risking having employees in Elbonia.
The roles that were, or could be, offshored are being replaced by AI. Those jobs aren’t coming back and the ones that went to India et al are going away. It was low-value stuff that got offshored. Folks in the west upskilled and tech jobs actually grew, a lot, as did comp.
The story that all the US tech jobs disappeared and got replaced by offshore simply isn’t what happened.
Even the ramp up in the late 2010s with the increase in "software publisher" hiring was crazy. Covid put a dent in that, but the increase in the increase in hiring goes back further than the post covid boom.
I just can't get over how short and intense the period between 2021 and 2023 was. There was SO much hype, such stupendous hiring, in such a compressed timeframe. Within the span of like 9 weeks it went from full steam ahead to completely seized.
At the same time, the economy at large didn't seem to change very much.
> Near zero interest rates + COVID remote work + PPP loans = Booming economy
One more factor to add to the equation...when everyone went remote during COVID, all brick-and-mortar businesses had to quickly move to conducting their businesses online driving demand for SWEs.
Company wanting to hire essentially has two options: (1) hire from the pool of fresh candidates coming out of the Universities, (2) hire people who are already employed.
This means that to inflate the numbers of software engineers on the market you also have only two options: (1) have the Universities start to somehow exponentially produce the number of software engineers which the market could not amortize, (2) let go a substantial number of software engineers who now (in between 2020-2025) all of the sudden cannot find a new job anymore
(1) is a non-sense and for (2) to take place market needs to stagnate, which is what is happening. Reasons are manyfold.
What was actually booming in though, like why did we suddenly need so many more tech workers? It didn't make much sense to me at the time so I am not particularly surprised by a correction.
The big AI companies don't really have high head counts, and the boom started somewhere before AI got taken seriously.
Was it just that there was access to cheap money thanks to covid era cash rates during that time?
The world was changing to remote employment. At the time the thinking is that it was here to stay so lots of tech companies invested in making tools for that world.
Yeah this sounds like a curse. You can’t get hired after being unemployed for 3 years in tech, he likely would have been better off being forced to work in IT or something to make ends meet. This isn’t a reflection of the state of French tech, it’s a reflection on how to end a career in tech
I’ve never really found there to be all that much of a market for specifically c++ developers. If you do decide to look for work more seriously I wouldn’t be too hung up on language, if you can code in one you can pretty much code in all of them, and I’ve never hired a developer for specific language skill outside of a few rare cases it’s something really specific we are trying to fix (e.g erlang or something), even then it wouldn’t be a complete showstopper.
YMMV but that’s coming from a guy who writes in at least 3 languages at current $dayjob.
Greater Boston area here. I've worked in C++ roles at two companies over the past three years and both times we were desperate for competent C++ developers. Similar trends for both companies: we had positions open for ~six months, interviewing many candidates, and being disappointed at their quality. We eventually filled the positions (about a half-dozen in total) but it was not easy. My current company, but different team, still has a quite a few recs out for C++ devs.
TL;DR - at least in my little bubble, the C++ systems engineer market has been consistently hiring people, though good engineers are hard to find.
You could try to get a degree on the side (not saying necessarily in comp sci) just to make your life more resilient to bad economic situations, and maybe more interesting
In my very humble view, the mythical 10x developer can now be a 100x developer, and the 2x developer usually stays a 2x developer. We live in two parallel worlds right now. Some run an army of agents and ship somehow working and testable code, and some try to prove AI is not as good as them.
I know it sounds like a good take, but I don’t really see it happening much in real life anymore.
It’s more like the 1x developer gets frustrated and defensive, and shows the 5 stages of grief, try using AI and finds all the reason why it’s bad. Then goes ahead and refactors everything and breaks production.
I haven’t seen any evidence of an army of agents producing unicorn companies. If this was the case we’d see a rash of < 10 employee startups being worth $1 billion, and to my knowledge that’s zero
Readit News
Contrary to what many say, I don't think it's simple as seniors are getting hired and juniors aren't. Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone. The people getting pushed out are the intermediates and seniors who aren't high performers.
Personally I think it's a bit more nuanced than senior vs junior (though it is very hard for juniors right now). What I've seen a lot of hunger for is people with a track record of getting their hands dirty and getting things solved. I'm very much a "builder" type dev that has more fun going from 0-v1 than maintaining and expanding scalable, large systems.
From the early start of the last tech boom through the post-pandemic hiring craze I increasingly saw demand for people who where in the latter category and fit nicely in a box. The ability to "do what you must to get this shipped" was less in demand. People cared much more about leetcode performance than an impressive portfolio.
Now reminds me a lot of 2008 in terms of the job market and what companies are looking for. 2008-2012 a strong portfolio of projects was the signal most people looked for. Back then being an OSS dev was a big plus (I found it not infrequently to be a liability in the last decade, better to study leetcode than actually build something).
Honestly, a lot of senior devs lose this ability over time. They get comfortable with the idea that as a very senior hire you don't have to do all that annoying stuff anymore. But the teams I see hiring are really focused on staying lean and getting engineers how are comfortable wearing multiple hats and working hard to get things shipped.
Maintaining and expanding is more challenging, which is why I’ve grown to prefer that. Greenfield and then leaving is too easy, you don’t learn the actually valuable lessons. As experience shows that projects won’t stay in the nice greenfield world, building them can feel like doing illusory work — you know the real challenges are yet to come.
How many offers did you receive? Companies have also adopted your strategy: interviewing candidates "to see what's out there" - there's a job I interviewed for that's still open after 10 months.
Most prefer a greenfield project.
A few years ago, when interest rates were 0% and companies were hiring at an unsustainable rate, I got a lot of criticism for cautioning engineers against non-coding roles. I talked to a lot of people who dreamed of moving into pure architect roles where they advised teams of more junior engineers about what to build, but didn't get involved with building or operating anything.
I haven't kept up with everyone but a lot of the people I know who went that route are struggling now. The work is good until a company decides to operate with leaner teams and keeps the people committing code. The real difficulties start when they have to interview at other companies after not writing much code for 3 years. I'm in a big Slack for career development where it's common for "Architect" and "Principal Engineer" titled people to be venting about how they can't get past the first round of interviews (before coding challenges!) because they're trying to sell themselves as architects without realizing that companies want hands-on builders now.
Did you get any offers yet? It seems the issue is not lack of interviews but lack of offers. Many companies are looking for a goldilocks candidate and are happy to pass on anything that doesn't match their ideal candidate
You've been interviewing forever. You're the well practiced pickup artist of job searching. Of course you'll be getting the call backs over the other 1000 applicants who don't have the same experience level applying. You "just know" how to read between the lines and tailor a resume, whip up a cover letter, etc whereas they're making mistakes.
Everyone has seemingly adopted the FAANG playbook for interviewing that doesn’t really select for people who like getting their hands dirty and building. These kinds of interviews are compliance interviews: they’re for people who will put in the work to just pass the test.
There are so many interviews I’ve been in where if I don’t write the perfect solution on the first try, I’ll get failed on the interview. More than ever, I’m seeing interviewers interrupt me during systems or coding interviews before I have a chance to dig in. I’ve always seen a little bit of this, but it seems like the bar is tightening, not on skill, but on your ability to regurgitate the exact solution the interviewer has in mind.
In the past I’ve always cold applied places and only occasionally leaned on relationships. Now I’m only doing the latter. Interviewees are asked to risk asymmetrically compared to employers.
My friends who are "book smart" and leetcode geniuses are struggling. They're my friends, but they come off a bit "off" at first glance, the stereotypical nerd vibe. They're all really struggling since they can't sell themselves properly and lack the interpersonal skills.
The Pick-Up Artist's Guide to Tech Interviewing, you should be writing.
The first 100 subscribers get a 50% off discount the month of March, you should be announcing on LinkedIn and Tiktok, and making passive income.
The rest of us experienced people with proven track records have to learn algorithms on the weekends despite having white hair.
and sure, lots of people can't get a call back too, but starting the process means nothing
should say how many offers did you get, that's a better way to normalize it
Dead Comment
The majority of engineers, in my hiring experience, failed very simple tests pre-AI. In a world where anyone can code, they're no better than previously non-technical people. The CS degree is no longer protection.
The gap between average and the best engineers now, though, is even higher. The best engineers can visualize the whole architecture in their head, and describe exactly what they want to an AI - their productivity is multiplied, and they rarely get slowed down.
While this could be done by junior or senior, I think junior usually has the slight advantage in being more AI-native and knowing how to effectively prompt and work with AI, though not always.
AI has fundamentally broken the education system in a way that will take decades for it to fully recover. Even if we figure out how to operate with AI properly in an educational setting in such a way that learners actually still learn, the damage from years of unqualified people earning degrees and then entering academia is going to reverberate through the next 50 years as those folks go on to teach...
I think this must be part of it. I see so many posts about people burning a thousand dollars in AI credits building a small app, and I have no idea why. I use the $20 Claude plan and I rarely run out of usage, and I make all kinds of things. I just describe what I want, do a few back-and-forths of writing out the architecture, and Claude does it.
I think the folks burning thousands of dollars of credits are unable to describe what they want.
But juniors don't (usually) have the knowledge to assess if what the AI has produced is ok or not. I agree that anybody (junior or senior) can produce something with AI, the key question is whether the same person has the skills to asses (e.g., to ask the right questions) that the produced output is what's needed. In my experience, junior + AI is just a waste of money (tokens) and a nightmare to take accountability for.
Did you consider tech whiteboard / leetcode interviews are unnatural stressful environments ? Have you gone through a mid/difficult technical appraisal yourself lately ? Try it out just to get an idea how it feels on the other side...
I very much follow the pattern of having the whole architecture in my head and describe it to the AI which generates the appropriate code. So now the bottlenecks are all process related: availability of people to review my PRs, security sign offs on new development, waiting on CI builds and deployments, stakeholder validation, etc. etc.
So much of tech hiring cargo culting has been built up around leetcode and other coding problems, puzzles, and more. We all pay lip service to systems thinking and architecture, but I question if even those are testing the correct things for the modern era.
And then what happens in a year when the models can handle that as well?
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We have a lot of people where if you gave them clear requirements, they could knock out features and they were useful for that, but I have an army of agents that can do that now for pennies. We don't need that any more. We need people who have product vision and systems design and software engineering skills. I literally don't even care if they can code with any competency.
Btw, if you think that copying and pasting a jira ticket into claude is a skill that people are going to pay you for, that is also wrong. You need to not just be able to use AI to code, you need to be able to do it _at scale_. You need to be able to manage and orchestrate fleets of ai agents writing code.
Before gen AI, I used to give candidates at my company a quick one-hour remote screening test with a couple of random "FizzBuzz"-style questions. I would usually paraphrase the question so a simple Google search would not immediately surface the answer, and 80% of candidates failed at coding a working solution, which was very much in line with the article. Post gen AI, that test effectively dropped to a 0% failure rate, so we changed our selection process.
[1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/
I'd go a step further and say the engineers who, unprompted, discover requirements and discuss their own designs with others have an even better time. You need to effectively communicate your thoughts to coding agents, but perhaps more crucially you need to fit your ever-growing backyard of responsibilities into the larger picture. Being that bridge requires a great level of confidence and clear-headedness and will be increasingly valued.
I should have a credential I have to maintain every few years, one or two interviews, and that should get me a job.
Dead Comment
I graduated 9 months ago. In that time I've merged more PRs than anyone else, reduced mean time to merge by 20% on a project with 300 developers with an automated code review tool, and in the past week vibe coded an entire Kubernetes cluster that can remotely execute our builds (working on making it more reliable before putting it into prod).
None of this matters.
The companies/teams like OpenAI or Google Deepmind that are allegedly hiring these super juniors at huge salaries only do so from target schools like Waterloo or MIT. If you don't work at a top company your compensation package is the same as ever. I am not getting promoted faster, my bonus went from 9% to 14% and I got a few thousand in spot bonuses.
From my perspective, this field is turning into finance or law, where the risk of a bad hire due to the heightened skill floor is so high that if you DIDN'T go to a target school you're not getting a top job no matter how good you are. Like how Yale goes to Big Law at $250k while non T14 gets $90k doing insurance defence and there's no movement between the categories. 20-30% of my classmates are still unemployed.
We cannot get around this by interviewing well because anyone can cheat on interviews with AI, so they don't even give interviews or coding assessments to my school. We cannot get around this with better projects because anyone can release a vibe coded library.
It appears the only thing that matters is pedigree of education because 4 years of in person exams from a top school aren't easy to fake.
People are posting about pull requests, use of AIs, yada yada. But they never tell us what they are trying to produce. Surely this should be the first thing in the post:
- I am developing an X
- I use an LLM to write some of the code for it ... etc.
- I have these ... testing problems
- I have these problems with the VCS/build system ...
Otherwise it is all generalised, well "stuff". And maybe, dare I say it, slop.
How many juniors OpenAI GDM are going to hire in a year, probably double digits at max, the chances are super slim and they are by nature are allowed to be as picky as they should be.
That being said, I do agree this industry is turning into finance/law, but that won’t last long either. I genuinely can’t foresee what if when AGI/ASI is really here, it should start giving human ideas to better itself, and there will be no incentive to hire any human for a large sum anymore, maybe a single digit individuals on earth perhaps
> The retreat challenged the narrative that AI eliminates the need for junior developers. Juniors are more profitable than they have ever been. AI tools get them past the awkward initial net-negative phase faster. They serve as a call option on future productivity. And they are better at AI tools than senior engineers, having never developed the habits and assumptions that slow adoption.
> The real concern is mid-level engineers who came up during the decade-long hiring boom and may not have developed the fundamentals needed to thrive in the new environment. This population represents the bulk of the industry by volume, and retraining them is genuinely difficult. The retreat discussed whether apprenticeship models, rotation programs and lifelong learning structures could address this gap, but acknowledged that no organization has solved it yet.
Someone who jumps higher than expected when the boss demands it?
Someone who works 996 in the office?
Or someone who knows what they’re doing?
I think this is bigger than any individual. It’s just a matter of time before you’re let go. There’s no loyalty from companies at all. Not when they’re seeing higher than expected profits and are still cutting huge percentages of staff every year. There’s no strategy or preference to it. I don’t think this has to do with how you or I perform on the job.
Most people I’ve talked to lately who are still employed are watching out for their job to get cut.
I would not mind switching but 1. I don’t see interesting positions 2. they don’t pay well, and only 3. they might not even want me.
It might also be just my niche, but finding a good position feels completely impossible for me.
I am doing cross platform mobile development and I’m wondering how I could transition into backend development or I started even considering the decentralized finance…
My resume isn't bad on paper either. It's not FAANG coded, but it's decent experience.
3.5 years ago was peak ZIRP hiring craziness.
It wasn't a normal reference point.
They're just as capable of typing prompts into AI, but what they don't have is good judgement of what good work/code looks like, so what's the point of asking a junior engineer to do something vs asking the LLM directly?
Nobody is gonna lose money because some script that generates yaml for the build process every hour nested three loops instead of two. Intern, AI, junior dev, junior dev telling an intern how to use AI, doesn't matter. If it works for the week it'll work for the decade. If someone needs to pick it apart and fix something in a year it'll either take no time because they know enough to do it easily or it'll be a good low stakes learning exercise for a junior.
Everyone wants to think their stuff is important but 99.9% of code is low stakes support code either in applications or in infrastructure around them.
This is the K-shaped economy playing out. Its a signal that the american middle class is hollowing out. Bad, very bad.
While I could buy that hiring managers believe this, it's not actually true.
The gulf between the quality of what a sr developer can do with these tools and what a jr can do is huge. They simply don't know what they don't know and effective prompting requires effective spec writing.
A rando jr vibe coder can churn out code like there's no tomorrow, but that doesn't mean it's actually right.
I'm not against research with AI. But using a search engine helps you go through a railway basically and helps you gather information step by step and you have time to notice it something is missing.
With AI you don't have the mental pause to process the information.
This is also where micro services pattern fits in well because individual unit is so small no design needed.
Wouldn't the assumption be the opposite, in that AI is magnifying the decision making of the engineer and so you get more payback by having the senior drive the AI?
I suspect a lot of it best practices will be enforcing best practices via agents.md/claude.md to create a more constrained environment.
Being able to clearly describe a problem and work with the AI to design a solution, prioritise what to put the AI to work on, set up good harnesses so the quality of the output is kept high, figure out what parallelises well and what’s going to set off agents that are stepping on each others toes… all of this needs experience and judgement and delegation and project organisation skills.
AI is supercharging tech leads. Beginners might be able to skill up faster, but they’re not getting the same results.
For average to low-performing intermediates/seniors... there's not much difference in output between them and a good junior at this point. Claude really raised the skill floor for software development.
It's pretty depressing. I'd take just about anything at the moment. I understand desperation going into a job interview isn't ideal either.
It feels like I'm in a hole.
what an interesting way to say most programmers find it extremely difficult to get a job. you sound like you have some kind of insight, but is there anything notable about jobs drying up for people who aren't cheap enough or who aren't valuable enough? that's just how jobs dry up. anytime it's a bad job market for workers it'll be like that.
it is a great way to frame the coming tech crash. it allows whoever remains to fancy themselves as top talent.
Seniors have much more advantage right now in using AI than Juniors. Seniors get to lean in on their experience in checking AI results. Juniors rely on the AI's experience instead, which isn't as useful.
That sounds good for many of us (and don’t we all like to think we’re top candidates here on HN…) but is there any data to back this up? Or it just anecdata (not to dismiss anecdata, still useful info).
I turn on LinkedIn “Looking for Work” a few times a year. The only recruiters I get now are those trying to run an agency, farm you out to their Blue Chip clients like BOA or Duke Energy for a low-ball salary on a 12 month contract while they dangle the hope of future hiring as a carrot.
I live close enough to a small/mid city that I could get a proper job quickly enough… except I would be taking a 30-40k pay cut and transition from remote to having an 80-mile / 3-hour commute daily.
Meanwhile at my day job we’re trying to hire a Senior Data Engineer to manage our data pipelines in AWS. Nothing too crazy, it’s remote, it’s advertised on LinkedIn, but we cannot find qualified candidates to save our life. All the while I open HN daily and see the complaints about job hunting and layoffs all over. Where are all the laid off applicants?
I haven't found that to be true. Unless by "top candidates" you mean people working at actual AI companies such as Alphabet/Meta/OpenAI/Anthropic. If you're an AI-user and not an AI scientist it's bad out there, even for senior+ developers who previously worked in "FAANG".
Truth is, when I was part of larger orgs/enterprise I definitely saw some folks who were dead weight, and I don’t mean to be harsh, a few of these knew they weren’t contributing and were being malicious in that sense.
Similarly, I wonder how many high performers now are taking multiple jobs thanks to remote work and exposing the mid to low performers. Like some kind of developer hypergamy taking place.
I've been looking again this year and the landscape has changed drastically. Specialization is the name of the game, I have a good amount of experience working with Growth initiatives and I've been getting good responses from roles that are looking for either Growth or Design engineers, roles that were not as prevalent years ago.
What makes this more extreme is that we’re in a paradigm shift, technically. Systems of the future look different than what’s been built before. Building agentic stuff is very different than web apps. The infrastructure side is also different. Moreover, both are uncertain so there’s no plug-and-play set of skills that would fit into any company in the way you could probably get hired reliably in the 2010s if you can operate Kubernetes, design a database schema, write Node.js APIs, etc.
Tell me about all the junior developers you've hired (it's none)
None of them want to hire any juniors anymore.
Where do you see juniors getting hired?
Before that role, I spent two years at another government contractor working on various govt. applications doing UX research, design, and front-end UI development. Overall, I’ve had a 17-year career in UX Research, Design and Development, starting at an ad agency in 2009.
From 2016 to 2022, I worked hard in government projects and enjoyed collaborating with great, close-knit coworkers and receiving consistently positive client feedback. From 2022 to 2026, things changed as the company grew—my role narrowed to UX research and design while newer hires handled UI development. I often felt underutilized and raised it, but management assured me I was doing well. With little direction from my last manager, I focused on staying visible to the client by monitoring user chats, identifying UX issues, and proposing design solutions that the client appreciated and the development team implemented.
Looking at where the tech industry is now—with thousands laid off from government IT and the broader tech sector flooding the job market, creating rising competition, constant pressure to work harder (Elon wants us to work as hard as Chinese workers do) and AI rapidly reshaping creative and development roles—I’m not very interested in that level of stress. I worked hard for many years and enjoyed it, but I value MY LIFE and MY HEALTH more than participating in the current “battle royale” environment in tech.
Overall, now with AI I feel graphic & web design, as well as front design web development is a stupid career! It was a nice run, bought two houses from it, worked remotely, when things were slow worked from wherever in the lower 48 and now .... in April Im starting nursing school and Im not young (20 years left of work in me). Roll with the punches here yet the punches are gonna punch hundreds of thousands to millions in the face ... not sure how this any good for an economy and society but here we are! If you are like me sell your house and stash the money away to buy houses when the crash from AI happens!
I suspect that nursing is an excellent choice.
I got pushed out, and slapped with the Dead Fish of SV Ageism. It was brutal, and I got pissed off.
But in the long run, it's been the best thing that ever happened to me. I would have liked the extra ten years of salary and saving, but I'm not entirely sure that I would have survived it.
It's almost impossossible to screen for "high performers" though. When interviewing, you just don't know who you are getting, short of like, they can solve your leetcode questions well, and they had good answers to pretty high-level "work experience" questions.
So I don't think this can be true on the hiring side. Maybe on choosing who they let go when cutting down the workforce, they can look at general performance reviews and such, but I doubt it plays a role in hiring.
That's not true? leetcode is crap, but usually you can learn a lot about a person from how they approach problems and on what kind of questions they ask.
This is a very naive take. AI output still needs to be guided and iterated over, architecture decisions (even at the code level) still need experience to judge correctly.
That is pretty context sensitive. You're correct that there's no real deep AI use expertise broadly understood to exist at this point (unless you're Steve Yegge?), but if people think they can toss out the engineers with experience in the systems that have been around a while, with junior developers "guiding" changes — that's likely a good way for a business to fall on its sword.
People with experience and/or credentials desired by companies in areas of growth (i.e. AI) are always in high demand
This is tautological.
Apparently it is over a third affected in my domain. Which is crazy. Pretty much everyone in my immediate band has been hit at some point. That that weren't were usually around 5-8 above me. So basically a different generational band altogether.
i argue that's a good outcome. Seniors who aren't high performers should not command high salaries. I think the anomaly that is the post-covid boom is warping salary expectations vs difficulty of job (and the competency required for it).
If intermediates were being pushed out they would just take junior roles to have something
Companies really don’t like hiring Juniors in general
I worked with someone that was trying to push code with all the tells that they didn't understand the code and that it had been through multiple LLM iterations, it burned a lot of the productivity in a project.
Also the people that can't market themselves. There are very average programmers that have a large following on X that seem to do very well.
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https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html
What we really need is the -10X engineer ;)
Alas, his job would entirely consist of debloating the slop everyone else is pumping out "at inference speed".
https://steipete.me/posts/2025/shipping-at-inference-speed
You can be a great unblocker, team lead, and work well within cross cutting areas and with interdepartmental stake holders, have a history of strong technical performance.
and yet its nebulous if that means you're a high performer or not to those hiring. It seems I'm seeing 'culture fit' as a common reason people aren't getting hired again. That was out of vogue for a good while.
HN user: not in my experience!
Happy to be on the high-end ^^.
As was foretold in the Tyler Cowen's eponymous 2013 book "Average Is Over".
In it he argued that the modern economy will undergo a permanent shift where "average" performance no longer guarantees a stable, middle-class life.
He predicted that the economy will split into two distinct classes: a high-earning elite (roughly 10–15% of the population) who thrive by collaborating with technology, and a larger group (85–90%) facing stagnant wages and fewer opportunities.
AI summary of the other key points of that book:
The "Man + Machine" Advantage: Success will belong to those who can effectively use smart machines. Cowen uses Freestyle Chess (teams of humans and computers) as an analogy, noting that human intuition combined with machine processing power consistently outperforms either working alone.
The Power of Conscientiousness: In a world of abundant information, the scarcest and most valuable traits will be self-motivation, discipline, and the ability to focus. Hyper-Meritocracy: Advanced data and machine intelligence make it easier for employers to measure an individual's exact economic value. This leads to extreme salary inequality as top performers are identified and rewarded more precisely.
A New Social Contract: Cowen predicts a future where individuals must be more self-reliant. He suggests society will move toward lower-cost living models for the non-elite, featuring cheaper housing and "bread and circuses" in the form of low-cost digital entertainment and online education.
EDIT: Notice how we're basically already here: Netflix is cheap, YT is free, Khan Academy and MIT OCW is free, Coursera/Udemy/etc. are cheap.
Stagnant vs. Dynamic Sectors: The economic divide is worsened by "low accountability" sectors like education and healthcare, where productivity is hard to measure and costs continue to rise, unlike tech-driven sectors that see rapid gains.
Unfortunately, this one hasn't aged well. Human+Computer is now consistently outperformed by Computer alone in the chess world. Also, the name Freestyle Chess is now used for Chess960, the chess variant where starting positions are randomized. It has nothing to do with computer chess now!
I don't see any future without feudalism like society.
This is probably the dumbest take I've heard of. They're the most likely to make mistakes with AI because they don't know the pitfalls of what they're doing.
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Also this only captures 6 industries, which is a narrow view of what would define "tech" these days.
Not to say that the job market isn't tough but this graph is a very narrow view
Can’t believe how many people are commenting without looking at what the chart means. We’ve lost 50k jobs last two years after decades of adding 100k+ every year including the pandemic highs of 300k+ per year. Total employment remains way above 2000s, 2008 and 2020 unlike the title suggests.
Lotta people in tech are going to struggle to find a job. That's the point.
Over 100K people graduate in CS/IT per year, and that doesn't even count people who come in to the industry from overseas or from other degree paths.
This imbalance of supply and demand shifts power toward employers and it's hard not to feel the pressure even if you're not looking for a job right now.
I'm not even sure this chart tells the story of the title.
The health of the market is not a function of the total number of jobs alone, it's a function of the number of jobs and the number of people to fill them.
The number of total jobs going up year after year meant that there were increasing numbers of candidates, new people entering the field. If the job growth stops, then there still we be candidates coming in. There will also be the new hires from the last decade moving into increasingly senior roles, and there won't be space for them (unless you devalue the meaning of "senior" even more).
So the year over year change matters a lot. If it plateaus, or even declines slightly, it's more than enough to make a terrible market.
But, it just doesn’t hit the same way on X to say “We are back to late 2023-levels of tech employment” or “The losses in tech jobs over the last 18 months give back two months of hiring in 2022”.
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Tech employees: 5.5m vs 9.9.
Software developers: 0.68m vs 3.2m.
Different ball game.
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EDIT: posted below as well https://xcancel.com/JosephPolitano/status/202991636466461124...
There’s a longer term graph in the thread. We’ve got a long way to go before we hit 2000 numbers which is what I’d expected.
For context, I had my 2600 square foot 3.5/2 bedroom house built that year for $175K.
I was working at a company that printed bills for utility companies and had offers from banks, insurance companies etc. The world didn’t stop buying Coca Cola, flying Delta or stop buying stuff from Home Depot because of the dot com crash
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I don't think the market is flooded with new devs as many state, I think we are in a deep silent crisis
"He's been unemployed for 13 months? Why doesn't anyone want to hire him? Must be something wrong with him"
Instead of focusing on the trends you might try to look at qualifications like education, certifications, security clearance, skill expertise, open source contributions, and so forth. Trends are a gravity. I recommend distancing yourself from the crowd to uniquely stand out. Then as edge case opportunities open recruiters come to you.
Maybe people just have their fingers in their ears but this has been a problem for years now
You guys keep trying to put a pillow over our face.
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The primary thing going on in the market right now is a lot of companies simply over-hired during the post Covid boom and they’re correcting for that.
There are interest rates going crazy, AI hype, wars going on, visa rules changes, tariffs and trade wars.
Offshoring seems like a silly explanation in current global situation, there probably is some still but I don't believe anyone is risking having employees in Elbonia.
The story that all the US tech jobs disappeared and got replaced by offshore simply isn’t what happened.
At the same time, the economy at large didn't seem to change very much.
Why did this happen?
What is happening now is the unwinding of the above. Now its:
Higher rates + AI + too many SWEs (bootcamps and over-hiring) = Busting economy
I think what we are in right now is more the norm and the post covid boom was an exception.
One more factor to add to the equation...when everyone went remote during COVID, all brick-and-mortar businesses had to quickly move to conducting their businesses online driving demand for SWEs.
Company wanting to hire essentially has two options: (1) hire from the pool of fresh candidates coming out of the Universities, (2) hire people who are already employed.
This means that to inflate the numbers of software engineers on the market you also have only two options: (1) have the Universities start to somehow exponentially produce the number of software engineers which the market could not amortize, (2) let go a substantial number of software engineers who now (in between 2020-2025) all of the sudden cannot find a new job anymore
(1) is a non-sense and for (2) to take place market needs to stagnate, which is what is happening. Reasons are manyfold.
The big AI companies don't really have high head counts, and the boom started somewhere before AI got taken seriously.
Was it just that there was access to cheap money thanks to covid era cash rates during that time?
I'm a c++ dev, with excellent senior tests, but low experience, and no degree in France. 3 years without a job.
I yearn for a new pandemic.
Fortunately, I learned how to live without a job, found other things to do and how to live a life. Welfare is generous, and I have good savings.
Honestly I don't really want to work in software anymore. If there is a job offer and recruiters are calling me, I answer and I accept.
But I'm not applying to all positions I can see and I won't run after them.
Oh to be French
YMMV but that’s coming from a guy who writes in at least 3 languages at current $dayjob.
“Oh, you know 12 ways to initialize a value in C++? That’s cute”
TL;DR - at least in my little bubble, the C++ systems engineer market has been consistently hiring people, though good engineers are hard to find.
And then 1x developer comes and rewrites it to actually work.
It’s more like the 1x developer gets frustrated and defensive, and shows the 5 stages of grief, try using AI and finds all the reason why it’s bad. Then goes ahead and refactors everything and breaks production.