Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions
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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.
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 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.
> 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…
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?
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.
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?
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 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)
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!
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
Tech employees: 5.5m vs 9.9.
Software developers: 0.68m vs 3.2m.
Different ball game.
I don't think the market is flooded with new devs as many state, I think we are in a deep silent crisis
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.
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
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.
The story that all the US tech jobs disappeared and got replaced by offshore simply isn’t what happened.
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.
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.
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”
Oh to be French
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.
I got 4 or 5 standard rejections.
I have non-English name so that definitely hurts. I have AP EAD which is a stage between H1B and Green Card and I still require sponsorship. It's complicated but I can't just switch to EAD right away.
It's not just engineers. It's managers and experienced people as well. Don't believe top comment that it is bimodal. Unless you are supertar (99.99%) it becoming hard to get noticed. I thought of going back to IC role but it is hard to pick up and do leetcode all over again. It is extremely hard with a special needs kids at home.
Any suggestions or recommendations for me?
I had managerial* position I ghosted because they had Leetcode literally written on the agenda.
* - managerial is replaced with Lead. Lead is expected to be hands-on as well as have serious managerial experience. Since it's easier to lie about managerial experience, you have people lying into these roles and becoming terrible managers.
https://www.citadelsecurities.com/news-and-insights/2026-glo...
Also, that spike in 21/22 really did a number on people's expectations. The one constant in this industry is its cyclical nature.
If it continues, then yes it could be bad, but so far it seems like a correction for over-hiring in 2021 - 2023. Seems a little weird to be focusing on a decline in 2024 - 2026, without addressing the large increase right in the years before.
Tech employees: 5.5m vs 9.9.
Software developers: 0.68m vs 3.2m.
Different ball game.
I had no idea I was in such an exclusive group back in 2000. Everyone I knew was a software engineer or in tech one way or another so I suppose I got a warped sense that I belonged to a larger group.
Wow. Just wow.
Be that ideal. The shareholders are counting on you!
So have all the great engineers I've been working with - there's a deep desire for growth past the things that you're currently good at.
The people worrying they might code themselves out of a job are in a different skill demographic. (Ironically, that means they won't be able to code themselves out of a job)
What exactly do you mean by that? Do you mean you finished one project but your employer had another one for you, which you then were expected to work on instead of sitting idle? Or do you mean you coded yourself into a "promotion"?
My comment was just mocking the foolish selfless ethos of many software engineers, who don't look out for themselves and idealize giving to psychopathic organizations that will screw them the moment that's advantageous. Many software engineers have a pathological level of naivete and confusion about the role they really inhabit (e.g. righteously going on about buggy-whip makers).
Exactly my point. Encourage LLM adoption, faster, faster. Be excited about your homeless future, software engineers!
I still kinda want to see this going back to 2000. That must be the biggest tech crash by far. 2008 and 2020 were overall market crashes, but tech was booming.
This chart shows that the rate of year-over-year, month-by-month change is worse than 2020.
But the number of tech jobs has grown by 12% since April of 2020 (2.34M vs. 2.63M). Heck, there are more tech jobs today than at the beginning of 2022 (2.61M), even.
Job market sucks, trend is bad, but post title is a misnomer for what this chart shows.
(Numbers based on a quick grab BLS.gov data of CES6054151101 (Custom Computer Programming Services) + CES5051800001 (Computing Infrastructure Providers, Data Processing & Web Hosting) + CES6054151201 (Computer Systems Design Services)---couldn't find other ones quickly and gave up :))
I was able to find the following:
- Software Publishers https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SMU06000005051320001
- Regional data available only, numerous national statistics are discontinued
- California region matches up, but places like Boston don't https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SMU25000005051320001
- Matches up perfectly, no notes here.
- However, the graph in the tweet doesn't include the February data (even though it claims "recent") which shows an increase
- Matches up, but February data isn't in the graph which shows an increase from January
- Doesn't include January or February 2026 data, doesn't match up with graph in tweet
There are numerous open questions in this analysis which I would need to be addressed before drawing any conclusions. My gut feeling would love to accept it at face value but I never trust my gut.
I haven't heard from a recruiter in probably 6 months. I recently put my feelers out and applied to a handful of positions I was qualified for, and got rejection letters from all of them.
There are also a lot of people posting fake jobs for feeding LLM datasets, running scams, and bidding down labor costs. =3
Jobs are now significantly more demanding too, do more and make less.
also getting into plumbing, curious to see what others are doing in this regard.
I grinded my 20s away trying to have a successful career and if that just gets pulled out from under me I’ve got absolutely nothing.
You are not your profession. Life can and will change.
While I think a lot more was going on with him than being unemployed, I'm convinced AI hitting the scene had a bit to do with it. They were an older dev 50+.
Too bad I guess.
"Other professional, scientific, and technical services" grew month over month and year over year
"Information" took a hit, but the bulk of that was "Motion picture and sound recording industries"
"Computing infrastructure providers, data processing, web hosting, and related services" modestly shrunk, but "Web search portals, libraries, archives, and other information service" is the only area to grow under information.
This seems different then what the post says. They also said worse then 2008, but didn't post any information. I would imagine the total market was much smaller, so the while total jobs lost was probably smaller, percentage was probably larger. When I started in 2012, tech would take any with a science degree.
I don't understand the job titles being propose in the post, are the using different BLS data then me?
It's a weird employment category that includes both Google SWEs and your local librarian.
The next step is for me to respond with an LLM. Maybe if my LLM is good enough it’ll convince their LLM to skip the interview and just offer me a job.
That being said, I don't think it's unfair to point out that creating a massive influx of new developers without jobs that provided good mentorship (most jobs are awful at mentoring junior developers) is going to have huge consequences that we're now dealing with. I think the "learn to code" thing was a massive mistake. Encourage the people that want to, sure, but don't try to pull people in that are only marginally interested in a paycheck.
Could speculate this is likely to be a shift in what gets funded and invested in.
In the mid 2010s, then most notably in late 2020 - 2021, you had people who had no interest in tech entering the industry because they saw it as an easy career to make decent money in.
It got pretty bad in the late 2010s, but it become almost comical in 2021 with people who took a two-week coding bootcamps suddenly landing 6 figure jobs. Some of these people were even working at multiple companies at the same time.
The optimist in me hopes this all shakes out with those people who had no interest in tech moving on to other things. These types of people were not only bad employees, they were also bad for the industry, and in my opinion responsible for culture shift from tech being a place dominating by "nerds" and "geeks" in the 90/00s to the modern "tech-bro" stereotype.
The realist in me though will continue to warn people the tech job they're working at today is likely their last. Between tech industry growth slowing, the excessive over production of tech talent and AI + SASS automating a lot of traditional software development work it's going to be exponentially harder to remain employed in tech in the coming years.
So much so you might as well find a relatively worse paid job if it means you don't have periods of months of unemployment every year.
But as per usual, the bust hit just as hard as the boom. Multiple high profile failures in games and initiatives as a whole, Microsoft and Apple decided to stop bleeding money with their respective subscription deals, mobile gaming (from the advent of Genshin Imapct and co) became less an easy cash grab and more a 2nd wing of AAA development, investments dried up overnight for indies (unless 'AI').
And the headcount, of course: https://variety.com/2026/gaming/news/one-third-video-game-wo...
COVID did weird things to the industry, that's for sure.
Tech was and still is the easiest way to make 200k base salary, before even thinking about the stock.
We need a reset and anyone who can’t make it can go fill the jobs we need in construction, education, etc.
Facebook: 2008: 0.8k, 2020: 58k, 2026: 74k
Apple: 2008: 32k, 2020: 147k, 2026: 155k
Microsoft: 2008: 91k, 2020: 163k, 2026: 220k
Most people would be thankful to have a secure well paying job in the post AI blow off; increasingly it's going to harder to differentiate yourself against anyone else using AI. That we have people still in the thick of AI that don't understand that is a strong signal that AI boom is still going to come take some jobs.
If you're in a software related role and AI isn't making you more productive, it's on YOU as a dev to figure things out quickly.
AI is coming for your job so you can either be an AI manager, or you can get managed out for AI.
caveat: This is my take as someone who used to do a lot of hand coding, and now regularly has a small team of AI doing anything that would have normally required mostly brute coding strength but not too much thought; that's facet'ed plots, refactoring libraries, improving pipeline efficiency, adding parallelization where possible, building presentations, adding test coverage.
Bottom line, if programmers are fucked, so is just about anyone else.
AI companies have set themselves up for this scenario. They won't solve themselves out of the equation, they will only solve you.
What is software publishers category? As it seems it’s picking up while Computer system design is the largest negative impact.
I would appreciate if there was a better chart explaining sort of roles and locations that had the largest impact
I’ve been looking for work for nearly seven months. I can write low level systems code in C and C++ to web applications in Python and compilers in Haskell. I have tons of industry experience.
Yet most places I apply to ghost me or follow up a month later that the position has been filled.
Companies that have been lying off people claim they are seeing record profits.
It seems like we went from a relatively stable growth to just chaos.
---
As I also mentioned, the only way you can survive in American tech at this point is to:
1. Move to a Tier 1 tech hub like the Bay and NYC. If you get laid off, you will probably find another job in a couple of weeks due to the density of employers. Seattle used to be a good option, but WA's norms around noncompete clauses incentivize larger employers which reduces the ability for startups to truly scale.
2. Start coming into the office 2-3 days a week. It's harder to layoff someone you have had beers or coffee with. Worst case, they can refer you to their friends companies if you get laid off
3. Upskill technically. Learn the fundamentals of AI/ML and MLOPs. Agents are basically a semi-nondeterministic SaaS. Understanding how AI/ML works and understanding their benefits and pitfalls make you a much more valuable hire.
4. Upskill professionally. We're not hiring code monkeys for $200K-400K TC. We want Engineers who can communicate business problems into technical requirements. This means also understanding the industry your company is in, how to manage up to leadership, and what are the revenue drivers and cost centers of your employer. Learn how to make a business case for technical issues. If you cannot communicate why refactoring your codebase from Python to Golang would positively impact topline metrics, no one will prioritize it.
5. Live lean, save for a rainy day, and keep your family and friends close. If you're not in a financial position to say "f##k you" you will get f##ked, and strong relationships help you build the support system you need for independence. The reality is the current set of layoffs and work stresses were the norm in the tech industry until 2015-22. We live in a competitive world and complaining on HN does nothing to help your material condition.
For people that can’t/dont want to move to the “hubs”, just know that there is absolutely still a career path. I will say though that you need to have above average communication skills and proactively build relationships during in person off-sites.
https://lukasz-madon.github.io/hacker-news-monthly-top-level...
I'd be great to access some data on how many SDE were in top 1000 companies and how many jobs openings there were in the last 15 years.
My friends who are still at Google also say that most job postings will end up going to someone internally - in fact people say they don't do that many external interviews anymore.
Finally the interview cycle seems to take a lot longer than I remember with quite a few added rounds.
https://muneebdev.com/software-development-job-market-india-...
For what its worth, I ended up getting a tech job in Japan instead. Ironically, the requirements at U.S. startups are much higher, and U.S. startups fit the stereotype of Japanese work culture more than Japanese companies nowadays.
US: 77,000
European Economic Area: 58,000
India: 51,000
China: 48,000(probably undercounted)
UK: 9,000
Canada: 7,000
Brazil: 6,000
Mexico: 4,000
Aus & NZ: 2,000
Eastern Africa: 300
Western Africa: 500
Southern Africa: 600
Northern Africa: 1,000
Within europe:
Nordics: 3,000
Germany: 15,000
France: 8,000
Italy: 3,000
Poland: 5,000
Romania: 2,000Signal v noise ratio so much higher in hardware, nobody performatively studies mechanical engineering to make $60k in ohio.
After all the people I know that got laid off, I just can't trust a single company to provide most of My monthly income anymore.
The most recent one few months ago and I passed it with great score, top 5% of candidates etc but that wasn't enough to get me hired.
Terrible market, i'm at my wits end to even how to approach this.
We could arrive at the technical singularity and come up with 8000 IQ robots that can do things in a clean room but in the messy physical reality? I believe they will fail to catch up forever.
They will fail to deal with a stripped bolt head deep inside an engine bay that's been exposed to 40 years of road salt, that needs to be hit right with a 10lb hammer and a home made chisel until shit knocks loose, combined with cutting, welding, drilling, torching, tapping, impromptu redneck engineering, cursing, the use of 8 different kinds of penetrating lubricants, the acquisition of weird and highly model-year specific parts in a junkyard 500 miles away, realizing it's all wrong and doing it again.
Multiply the complexity by 100 times and that's what it's like to take on a classic car project.
Short term I'm freelancing and doing whatever else I can find to get by. Hoping for one more full time role before I start my self published ventures.
I have no idea about what's coming, but I wouldn't pay a whole lot of attention to people who are looking at the plots of a highly volatile and cyclic industry that goes through constant boom-and-bust cycles, and are trying to position this as proof that AI is or isn't having an impact.
Should be something like tech employment rate of growth is lower than it was in 2008 or 2020.
There are many many more tech workers than at either of those points.
The other thing is it's showing first derivative, not absolute numbers, which is a very questionable way to derive "worst employment situation" in a field that has been on world-changing boom over the last 50 years.
Any commentary about tech jobs that does not include the interest rate environment and the massive over hiring that occurred between 2019 and 2022 is borderline dishonest.
Look at federal data of SWE job postings and look at the federal funds rate for the same period. Jobs is giant mountain peaking in ‘22. Interest rate is zero for the pandemic and then spikes right when SWE jobs start to collapse.
Tech hiring is all downstream of interest rates. AI has had almost no impact, at least not yet. (Block layoffs were not AI, look at their stock, they basically can only succeed as a financial company when money is free, very misleading and a convenient excuse for terrible management to now say they need to be “AI native”)
What mediums are you using for recruiters to contact you? Do you have a linked-in or are you applying directly to recruiting companies? Are you active anywhere else?
Genuinely interested in how you're receiving so many recruitment emails. That used to be my go to way to hit the job market.
The "inshoring" hubs like RTP and Denver or those hubs that are dominated by a handful of oversized companies like Seattle are the worst impacted.
I get rejection for every single position that I apply to. Often I read literally a description of myself in job posting, and it's still "we decided to no move forward".
At the same time, I hire people and see that 8/10 candidates are just trash. Not in the sense they "are not aligned", or "emit wrong vibes", or other bs. They literally can't write a single line of code, on their own laptop, in their own IDE.
Make it make sense.
One low point was an interview with a guy who connected with his current work laptop and couldn’t find the $ key on it for a basic scripting question.
I can’t make it make sense either.
And then there's the significant change in computer infrastructure, data processing (AI hype?), web hosting, & related.
If sustainable growth is at the +125k/year (picking a number out of the hat), there is a lot above that line.
Also, this is the plot of the derivative... if there's a line with a slope greater than 1 there, then the corresponding "how many people are in the field" is accelerating.
... And also compare the increase in hiring rate for 2020 to 2023 to 1990 to 2000. The peak for the dot com boom (which was associated with irrational exuberance and hiring for things with no feasible way to make money) was lower than the post covid boom.
Looking at the data, I wonder if the 2023 correction was enough of a dip... and if not, then the other side of it is that the length of the period of job contraction will be longer.
https://www.citadelsecurities.com/news-and-insights/2026-glo...
* Since I hit the pavement in late January, I've tracked 100 job applications
* Of those 100, only 7 have turned into interviews
* Of those seven interviews, 3 turned into second-round
* ~50% of all applications never receive a response
* ~20% of rejections for any reason have the role re-posted within thirty days
* For rejections stating "higher quality applications", that role re-post rate is closer to 50%, suggesting ATS systems culling too many candidates to fill the role or ghost jobs
* Despite my state requiring salary requirements be posted in the JD, only around 70% of postings included what could be considered "reasonable" estimates
* 100% of interviews have been for local employers requiring 3+ days on-site
And now, some observations not captured in the data directly:
* Employers are trying to "under-title" folks; Senior roles want to hire former Leads, and Management roles want next-rung candidates for prior-rung titles (e.g., hiring what should be a Senior Manager for an entry-level management role)
* Employers are also trying to underpay workers by a large margin, especially folks coming from Big Tech ("We don't pay {SV_FIRM} money" while offering salaries below the local 50%ile for the role in question); they're blaming a "surplus of tech talent", which may or may not be true (I lack the data to prove either way)
* The two above points are in conflict, because rent/mortgages in these areas are so steep that even with major lifestyle changes to cut costs, these wages simply aren't survivable for local areas
* "Credential Creep" is back in force: Architect certs required for mid-level engineering roles, buzzwords prioritized over outcomes and achievements, and AI ATS' rejecting qualified candidates flat-out
* College Degrees are relevant again as a means of pruning candidates; fifteen years of experience is irrelevant for a lot of Senior roles if you don't have a BS or Masters, which wasn't the case even last year
* Industry-specialization is also back, even for roles where industry specialization is generally moot or easily picked up (e.g., Corporate IT stuff)
* A significant number (~75-85%) of roles explicitly reject H1B and other visa workers; not a problem for me (Citizen), but this is the worst possible time to be job hunting on a non-LPR status.
And now, my personal experiences:
* There's a very strong attitude of "you're being entitled" when it comes down to salary negotiations, even when you show your math for essentials - and share prior compensation history reflecting the cuts you've already taken since your Big Tech salary to "rejoin the market".
* Employers generally have no clue how expensive it is to live right now, especially in major metros; one such employer who balked at my comp floor genuinely had no clue the median rent was three and a half grand per month.
* Compensation seems particularly tilted towards working couples; as in, neither alone makes enough to survive, and employers assume you have a FTE spouse to shore up finances so they can pay you less
* Employers also don't seem to know what they actually want or need. Specialist Engineer roles (e.g., Cloud Engineer, Network Engineer) cite required experience and expertise with the full technology stack inclusive of ERP and HRIS nowadays, which is something that used to be handled by a specific team for the entirety of my career thus far, even in smaller (<1k) orgs. I've also seen Architect roles demanding Help Desk work, and Software Dev roles who want experience supporting Entra.
* AI does not feature in as many interviews as I would've thought. The few times it does, it's very much a "that's nice, but we're taking a wait and see approach" attitude
* There's a lot of eagerness to hire domestically again (I think even middle managers were tired of outsourcing or offshoring), but a lack of budget to afford domestic talent.
Ultimately, it's pretty bleak - but still better than last year, at least thus far (~300 apps, ~2 companies interviewed with, 1 offer in 2025). AI isn't the value-add I was sold on by career counselors and LinkedIn (huge surprise there /s), and there definitely seems to be the appetite to hire, but not the realism of what to expect or how much it'll cost. I very much view it as a sort of tug-of-war at the moment, between workers who did everything expected of them and have cut to the bone already, and employers who somehow think they can pay <50%ile wages while mandating 4-days on-site in a major metro for experienced talent.
If you're an employer looking to hire, I have some advice:
* Ditch the AI ATS or AI summaries and read resumes, especially if you're requiring local presence.
* Understand what you need (and what that will cost you) before posting the JD
* Understand the local cost of living, and budget accordingly (i.e., if your Senior Engineer can't afford median rent, they're not going to stick around when things improve)
* If you value loyalty and aren't paying TC to afford a median home in the area, then you don't actually value loyalty
* Don't pigeonhole yourself with hyper-specific candidates as a means of winnowing down applicants; that level of specialization will flee the second they get a better offer elsewhere
* Post salaries in the JD, required or not, so you don't waste your time with candidates whose expectations don't align with your budget
I don't want to sound like it's all a horror show though, I've had some interviews that have gone well with companies being sensible, so I think there's good stuff out there. But it's overall a rough market.
I've also run into the industry specialization roadblock a few times. Got turned down by a fintech company after multiple interview rounds because I did not have banking industry experience, for example. I guess I get it as a tie breaker but I've operated in a PCI compliant environment for years, seems like that should count as relevant experience? Also if you're going to dumpster candidates without banking experience why on earth did you waste several hours of your staff's time giving me tech screens?
Job hunting has always sucked. But it feels particularly busted at the moment. The process is miserable. If you've coasted to an easy hiring in the last year, you're either amazing (and hats off to you!) or got very lucky.
It has been a pleasure to read.
Thank you for sharing.
This guy really thinks doctors make 120k/year.