US tech company. Just as the RTO excuse ended it started with AI immediately.
RTO was used to squeeze as hard as possible to force people to leave and not pay severance ("You're not in the office a month from now across the country? Looks like you decided to resign, sucks for you!"). First it was "be in any office, as long as you butt is in a building with our logo on it" to "well, no, you gotta be where you manager is, so move again. Oh you can't? Sucks for you, you effectively resigned then".
Then the AI excuse hit. "We'll be so productive, we don't need people anymore at all". That's going on currently. Everyone is token-maxing to the limit to show how on board they are with AI to avoid getting pushed out.
In between they also managed to "cut costs" by moving jobs overseas the countries you're familiar with. This required some finagling, so they shut down one set of platform/products built in US and started building another one overseas. Then said "oh well, looks like this division in US is not needed anymore".
The strange thing is this is happening in multiple companies at the same time. It's like all the CEOs and HR reps met at some golf retreat and decided to follow a script.
Meanwhile I got only 5 or so recruiter emails in the last year or so. Before it was a constant stream, almost one every a few weeks.
> The strange thing is this is happening in multiple companies at the same time. It's like all the CEOs and HR reps met at some golf retreat and decided to follow a script.
I’ve gotten the same feeling. It’s too consistent to be a fluke. I get the feeling its a fashion thats being pushed by VC funds who are all neck deep in nvidia, openai and anthropic stocks. They must have realized they can pump this to their portfolio to inflate all the investments.
>Meanwhile I got only 5 or so recruiter emails in the last year or so. Before it was a constant stream, almost one every a few weeks.
I've actually seen more and more LinkedIn posts from recruiters that [are proud of ] have been laid off themselves. You know things are bad when recruiters are the ones looking for jobs.
> The strange thing is this is happening in multiple companies at the same time. It's like all the CEOs and HR reps met at some golf retreat and decided to follow a script.
~3 years of experience. I can't exactly isolate the independent variable of my employment gap that increases as time goes by from my perceived quality of the job market, but my application response rate has steadily dropped from ~35% 2+ years ago to 18% right now. I rarely even get to talk to a human, it's either code assessments, IQ tests, or personality tests that get sent out within a day or two after applying, or no response. Almost always no response. Sometimes I get a request to video interview with an AI. I kindly reject those.
This just sounds like your Linkedin went stale for some reason or other. Do you have the Open to Work status? Or even just be active on there, apply to jobs, like posts or stuff like that?
I get plenty of messages from "recruiters" through LinkedIn. They're not particularly great, but I also only have a few years of experience
Funny, Amazon never contacted me, now after I'm 3 months in a new job, they did, but ain't paying half of how much I earn in this new one, and requires me to move to a major city in Brazil to work, sigh...
Everyone I know is having a hard time in all sorts of industries. Either they are currently unemployed and have been job searching for sometimes over a year. Or they are still employed but any looking they've done has been fruitless. So different than a couple years ago. My anecdata has people from junior to director level telling a similar story.
Staff eng at large startup in Bay Area, 7-10 YOE. Recently interviewed at the labs. Had to go through a recruiter friend at one of them to get a response. Very difficult interviews but mostly feasible to prep for. Had to get somewhat lucky to get an offer, staff-level. Took about two months from beginning to prep to signing an offer. Recruiters very responsive - a little arrogant re: other companies but insecure about other labs.
My whole team got laid off recently and I have been in constant communication with them, I also have multiple friends who got laid off this year who shared the pain it has been to get a new role,
Market seems better than the last few years but it still does not feels right to me,
We have got multiple people reaching out but the majority of the roles are in-office or hybrid while I work fully remotely.
I posted on LinkedIn, with the help from friends I got quite a lot of visibility (most viral post I have ever had) but still, out of the ~10 recruiters that reached out, only 2 are remote roles, I also got a few offers to work for equity only.
I posted on the monthly "Who's wants to be hired?" thread, it has lead to a few offers to work for equity only + shady people that want me to attend calls and "delegate" the work to them while splitting the revenue.
I have also got a few referrals and even for these, they are moving slowly.
To put it in perspective, years before I'd easily get 10 recruiters in my inbox per week,
Market seems tough and I can't imagine what junior people are passing through while trying to get a job.
EDIT: I forgot mentioning the people reaching out with promising offers and the intention of getting me to run their malware hidden in coding challenges.
Got laid off earlier this year. June has been significantly better than any month earlier. I think everyone was sitting on their hands waiting for Meta to do their stuff in May
Staff eng level, ~15-20 years experience. 18-36 months in position at well known large company at beginning of the year, lots of the usual recruiter interest.
Responded to one from another major company mid January. Short interview process. Started late March. Similar level, slightly higher scope, significant salary bump.
Took the opportunity to send outbounds to a few other major companies while in process, with senior referrals: ~no responses at all from that stuff.
Also, despite the employer change not being public, much less recruiter outreach the last 2 months.
me: 11 years experience with big tech on resume. Located in major tech city.
I get 1-2 new recruiters in my mailbox each week for different random startups. I haven’t acted on any so IDK what the process is really like, but it does seem like people are hiring. Almost 100% seem to be some sort of AI product. Senior Eng comp base seems to be in the 200-240 range plus however much worthless equity.
Check r/cscareerquestions ha usually blood bath for juniors eg. thousands of applications to try and land a job. r/experienceddevs too a little different vibe there but some insight on job market
But hey if you don't use AI when doing an interview, might have a better leg up than those that do eg. pause for 5 seconds between responses, ear piece, looking at a screen, someone replacing you after hiring, etc...
I'm sure I'm not the only one, but I've gotten so aggressive about monitoring for this. I do most interviews zoomed in on the candidate's eyes and I rubric on how they "thought" through the problem, not just the results.
Thankfully the interview tools are catching on as well and now tracking this like browser focus, number of monitors, window size, and sending notifications when any of those change.
Reddit, is not and never was reality especially now with all the bots with private profiles. Either they are unemployed or a senior developer at FAANG.
Will say there is a difference between "reality" and hackernews too, this is a startup elite type place, jobs posted here, different than those posted on LinkedIn.
I'm just fortunate recruiters have found me for my jobs... there was one time I used Hired that was back in 2022 that worked for 1 job.
The hiding of user posts on reddit is bs I hate that, although it is convenient if you want to just hide all your stuff without deleting your account
To go by the numbers, it's pretty good. Not as good as the truly anomalous post-pandemic peak of hiring. But still good compared to almost every other occupational group.
You realize that job posting is almost a completely useless metric right? We just had the biggest spam machine released in the history of humanity. Of course we are going to see huge number of spam job postings as well.
I don’t know how to make the statistics match my perceived reality.
Both in this thread, and people I know in real life who are looking for jobs are struggling hard. Mass layoffs are becoming more common and the time spent between jobs is measured in six month increments.
And yet, the numbers say we are in a hiring market with more job openings than ever, except for during the pandemic.
My perceived reality and the numbers almost could not be further apart.
Why would the (USA) job numbers be real? We have yes-men at every level, purposefully installed to spin any and everything in the most positive light possible. And, if not, outright fabricate numbers.
Former BLS officials still believe the numbers are reliable, because the methodology is public and there are lots of ways for well-financed actors (e.g. wall street traders) to spot manipulation.
It reminds me of 2008/2009, but weirder. I remember in that time a lot of companies going through the motions as if everything was alright and they were still hiring just fine, but then not actually hiring in the way they were acting.
It seems weirder now partly because it isn't a clear across the board recession, though part of me keeps looking at quarterly earnings reports and the DOW and keeps wondering if we're still "early 2008" on that rather than "late 2009" and that it will get worse before it gets better.
Same. I'm still employed, but am looking. I've had a few interviews but they're all for jobs I wouldn't really want. I know talented people who were laid off and have been looking for 6 to 9 months+. It's very rough out there. I've witnessed the dot-com crash, great financial crisis... this is the worst I've seen. Maybe other industries are better.
I don't have lived experience, but "Who is hiring" had only 2 or 3 posts from my country this whole year. Until about 2 years ago there were 5-8 posts in each threads.
(I'm in a small central-European country, that is full of tech companies, both domestic and international)
Just guessing, Czechia? The Central European software engineering market seems to be softening as well, likely due to second-order effects from the U.S. tech layoffs and decreased demand for remote roles from SV companies.
Go to a good fire and brimstone preacher and sit in the pews for a while and whatever comes out of his mouth is far less hellish than the job market today.
The CEO herd mentality is in full swing. RTO and AI everywhere. I don't think it's been this bad since the 2008 crash. The Fed is indicating a rate hike so that's probably going to get worse in the near-term.
I think it's primarily a filter. Candidate filters are pretty much always silly, even common ones based on degree/grades etc. But with a lot of candidates on the market, using some filters reduces the list to a manageable amount.
Personally, as someone with a German company and a good chunk of German clients, I'd argue it _does_ help a little. Occasionally. But by and large I'm far more interested in the candidate's English proficiency.
Been applying since January after a startup layoff and seeing mixed results. I have 14 years of experience spanning datacenter ops, Security certs, and all 3 major clouds. I’ve led hundreds of people across multiple technical disciplines.
Right out of the gate, I was getting great callbacks and final rounds. Then, around April, the pipeline completely dried up. I’m doing the work for EVERY application like generating custom resumes, tailored cover letters matching their culture, and engaging with leadership on LinkedIn.
I’m down to one lead at my partner’s company, but it’s a long shot. It feels like a lot of DevOps/SecOps/IT leadership roles are evaporating. Partially because companies are over-indexing on AI/LLMs to handle architecture complexity without realizing what those tools actually lack in practice.
After climbing the ladder for over a decade, I’m worried about the future of the market, but I’m not ready to stop fighting. Has anyone else with a leadership/infra background hit this exact same wall since April? How are you pivoting your approach?
Wondering what happened in April, around that time layoffs started including at my job. No reason at all aside from “AI” and the C suite wanting larger profits.
US tech company. Just as the RTO excuse ended it started with AI immediately.
RTO was used to squeeze as hard as possible to force people to leave and not pay severance ("You're not in the office a month from now across the country? Looks like you decided to resign, sucks for you!"). First it was "be in any office, as long as you butt is in a building with our logo on it" to "well, no, you gotta be where you manager is, so move again. Oh you can't? Sucks for you, you effectively resigned then".
Then the AI excuse hit. "We'll be so productive, we don't need people anymore at all". That's going on currently. Everyone is token-maxing to the limit to show how on board they are with AI to avoid getting pushed out.
In between they also managed to "cut costs" by moving jobs overseas the countries you're familiar with. This required some finagling, so they shut down one set of platform/products built in US and started building another one overseas. Then said "oh well, looks like this division in US is not needed anymore".
The strange thing is this is happening in multiple companies at the same time. It's like all the CEOs and HR reps met at some golf retreat and decided to follow a script.
Meanwhile I got only 5 or so recruiter emails in the last year or so. Before it was a constant stream, almost one every a few weeks.
> The strange thing is this is happening in multiple companies at the same time. It's like all the CEOs and HR reps met at some golf retreat and decided to follow a script.
I’ve gotten the same feeling. It’s too consistent to be a fluke. I get the feeling its a fashion thats being pushed by VC funds who are all neck deep in nvidia, openai and anthropic stocks. They must have realized they can pump this to their portfolio to inflate all the investments.
>Meanwhile I got only 5 or so recruiter emails in the last year or so. Before it was a constant stream, almost one every a few weeks.
I've actually seen more and more LinkedIn posts from recruiters that [are proud of ] have been laid off themselves. You know things are bad when recruiters are the ones looking for jobs.
> The strange thing is this is happening in multiple companies at the same time. It's like all the CEOs and HR reps met at some golf retreat and decided to follow a script.
Industry trends spread in all roles ?
This is a matter of public record, the joint is called Little St James.
How do you think they all had the same remote only work, then hybrid and then 5 days a week ?
They even talk and act the same at conferences with clasping seal hands.
They are mostly highly paid bots, paid by the real puppeteers - boards and above to execute the common mission.
RTO - Return to Office
~3 years of experience. I can't exactly isolate the independent variable of my employment gap that increases as time goes by from my perceived quality of the job market, but my application response rate has steadily dropped from ~35% 2+ years ago to 18% right now. I rarely even get to talk to a human, it's either code assessments, IQ tests, or personality tests that get sent out within a day or two after applying, or no response. Almost always no response. Sometimes I get a request to video interview with an AI. I kindly reject those.
I'm tired, boss.
I am a programmer in the US. Linkedin mails to me from recruiters -
2026 - one (recruiter did not name the company, hybrid six month contract in another city)
2025 - none
2024 - none
2023 - four (none after March)
2022 - twenty-seven (including Amazon, Google)
This just sounds like your Linkedin went stale for some reason or other. Do you have the Open to Work status? Or even just be active on there, apply to jobs, like posts or stuff like that?
I get plenty of messages from "recruiters" through LinkedIn. They're not particularly great, but I also only have a few years of experience
Funny, Amazon never contacted me, now after I'm 3 months in a new job, they did, but ain't paying half of how much I earn in this new one, and requires me to move to a major city in Brazil to work, sigh...
Everyone I know is having a hard time in all sorts of industries. Either they are currently unemployed and have been job searching for sometimes over a year. Or they are still employed but any looking they've done has been fruitless. So different than a couple years ago. My anecdata has people from junior to director level telling a similar story.
My company is simultaneously doing mass layoffs and mass hiring. Morale is dead in the water
dang. hang in there! :(
Staff eng at large startup in Bay Area, 7-10 YOE. Recently interviewed at the labs. Had to go through a recruiter friend at one of them to get a response. Very difficult interviews but mostly feasible to prep for. Had to get somewhat lucky to get an offer, staff-level. Took about two months from beginning to prep to signing an offer. Recruiters very responsive - a little arrogant re: other companies but insecure about other labs.
My whole team got laid off recently and I have been in constant communication with them, I also have multiple friends who got laid off this year who shared the pain it has been to get a new role,
Market seems better than the last few years but it still does not feels right to me,
We have got multiple people reaching out but the majority of the roles are in-office or hybrid while I work fully remotely.
I posted on LinkedIn, with the help from friends I got quite a lot of visibility (most viral post I have ever had) but still, out of the ~10 recruiters that reached out, only 2 are remote roles, I also got a few offers to work for equity only.
I posted on the monthly "Who's wants to be hired?" thread, it has lead to a few offers to work for equity only + shady people that want me to attend calls and "delegate" the work to them while splitting the revenue.
I have also got a few referrals and even for these, they are moving slowly.
To put it in perspective, years before I'd easily get 10 recruiters in my inbox per week,
Market seems tough and I can't imagine what junior people are passing through while trying to get a job.
EDIT: I forgot mentioning the people reaching out with promising offers and the intention of getting me to run their malware hidden in coding challenges.
Remoteok has remote only job positions listed.
Got laid off earlier this year. June has been significantly better than any month earlier. I think everyone was sitting on their hands waiting for Meta to do their stuff in May
Staff eng level, ~15-20 years experience. 18-36 months in position at well known large company at beginning of the year, lots of the usual recruiter interest.
Responded to one from another major company mid January. Short interview process. Started late March. Similar level, slightly higher scope, significant salary bump.
Took the opportunity to send outbounds to a few other major companies while in process, with senior referrals: ~no responses at all from that stuff.
Also, despite the employer change not being public, much less recruiter outreach the last 2 months.
me: 11 years experience with big tech on resume. Located in major tech city.
I get 1-2 new recruiters in my mailbox each week for different random startups. I haven’t acted on any so IDK what the process is really like, but it does seem like people are hiring. Almost 100% seem to be some sort of AI product. Senior Eng comp base seems to be in the 200-240 range plus however much worthless equity.
Check r/cscareerquestions ha usually blood bath for juniors eg. thousands of applications to try and land a job. r/experienceddevs too a little different vibe there but some insight on job market
But hey if you don't use AI when doing an interview, might have a better leg up than those that do eg. pause for 5 seconds between responses, ear piece, looking at a screen, someone replacing you after hiring, etc...
> pause for 5 seconds between responses
I'm sure I'm not the only one, but I've gotten so aggressive about monitoring for this. I do most interviews zoomed in on the candidate's eyes and I rubric on how they "thought" through the problem, not just the results.
Thankfully the interview tools are catching on as well and now tracking this like browser focus, number of monitors, window size, and sending notifications when any of those change.
We actually state in our job listings that we will have an onsite interview as part of the process (we pay for travel/hotel, of course!).
Seems to weed these folks out.
I did not have Voight-Kampff tests on my 2026 hiring bingo card, but here we are.
I know this is HN and we’re not supposed to laugh, but this gave me a smile.
We are heading into Blade Runner times so V-K test is the appropriate prop :)
And SpaceX is the Tyrell corporation… /s
Surely all of those metrics can be easily gamed by a competent software engineer.
> competent software engineer
hired :)
Reddit, is not and never was reality especially now with all the bots with private profiles. Either they are unemployed or a senior developer at FAANG.
Can't say this place is any better.
Will say there is a difference between "reality" and hackernews too, this is a startup elite type place, jobs posted here, different than those posted on LinkedIn.
I'm just fortunate recruiters have found me for my jobs... there was one time I used Hired that was back in 2022 that worked for 1 job.
The hiding of user posts on reddit is bs I hate that, although it is convenient if you want to just hide all your stuff without deleting your account
To go by the numbers, it's pretty good. Not as good as the truly anomalous post-pandemic peak of hiring. But still good compared to almost every other occupational group.
https://www.comptia.org/en-us/resources/research/tech-jobs-r...
Thanks. For those who are interested are some number from the report:
The 1st number is for May, the second is “vs April”:
TECH SECTOR EMPLOYMENT
PC, Semiconductor, Components Mfg. 993,300 +900
Telecommunications 574,300 -400
Cloud Infrastructure, Data Processing, Hosting 466,100 +3,700
Other Info Services, Search, Platforms 180,600 +900
IT & Custom Software Services | Sys. Design 2,373,900 +1,700
TECH JOB POSTING ACTIVITY
Software Developer / Engineer 57,386 +2,052
Systems Engineer 25,557 +624
Tech Support Specialist 15,897 +209
Cybersecurity Engineer / Analyst 13,855 +387
Artificial Intelligence Engineer 17,267 -286
You realize that job posting is almost a completely useless metric right? We just had the biggest spam machine released in the history of humanity. Of course we are going to see huge number of spam job postings as well.
I don’t know how to make the statistics match my perceived reality.
Both in this thread, and people I know in real life who are looking for jobs are struggling hard. Mass layoffs are becoming more common and the time spent between jobs is measured in six month increments.
And yet, the numbers say we are in a hiring market with more job openings than ever, except for during the pandemic.
My perceived reality and the numbers almost could not be further apart.
Why would the (USA) job numbers be real? We have yes-men at every level, purposefully installed to spin any and everything in the most positive light possible. And, if not, outright fabricate numbers.
Former BLS officials still believe the numbers are reliable, because the methodology is public and there are lots of ways for well-financed actors (e.g. wall street traders) to spot manipulation.
https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/nx-s1-5530733/bls-jobs-report...
It reminds me of 2008/2009, but weirder. I remember in that time a lot of companies going through the motions as if everything was alright and they were still hiring just fine, but then not actually hiring in the way they were acting.
It seems weirder now partly because it isn't a clear across the board recession, though part of me keeps looking at quarterly earnings reports and the DOW and keeps wondering if we're still "early 2008" on that rather than "late 2009" and that it will get worse before it gets better.
Same. I'm still employed, but am looking. I've had a few interviews but they're all for jobs I wouldn't really want. I know talented people who were laid off and have been looking for 6 to 9 months+. It's very rough out there. I've witnessed the dot-com crash, great financial crisis... this is the worst I've seen. Maybe other industries are better.
Same, I'm at about a 40% ghost rate & 5% response for any applications I put out.
Most everyone I talk with is looking as well, but nobody has moved roles. It feels like were all stuck.
Yep, I feel stuck. Almost everyone I talk to is unhappy.
I don't have lived experience, but "Who is hiring" had only 2 or 3 posts from my country this whole year. Until about 2 years ago there were 5-8 posts in each threads.
(I'm in a small central-European country, that is full of tech companies, both domestic and international)
Just guessing, Czechia? The Central European software engineering market seems to be softening as well, likely due to second-order effects from the U.S. tech layoffs and decreased demand for remote roles from SV companies.
No, he's in Switzerland. Unexpectedly, I must say, as many big tech including AI labs are expanding here
I fear when someone says which country you are so fast lol.
Go to a good fire and brimstone preacher and sit in the pews for a while and whatever comes out of his mouth is far less hellish than the job market today.
The CEO herd mentality is in full swing. RTO and AI everywhere. I don't think it's been this bad since the 2008 crash. The Fed is indicating a rate hike so that's probably going to get worse in the near-term.
This gets constantly asked on HN.
What matters is where you live - the hiring market in Germany or Canada is going to be different from the Bay Area or NYC.
German startups that used to be English-speaking are now asking for German. I don't understand what that solves.
I think it's primarily a filter. Candidate filters are pretty much always silly, even common ones based on degree/grades etc. But with a lot of candidates on the market, using some filters reduces the list to a manageable amount.
Personally, as someone with a German company and a good chunk of German clients, I'd argue it _does_ help a little. Occasionally. But by and large I'm far more interested in the candidate's English proficiency.
Been applying since January after a startup layoff and seeing mixed results. I have 14 years of experience spanning datacenter ops, Security certs, and all 3 major clouds. I’ve led hundreds of people across multiple technical disciplines.
Right out of the gate, I was getting great callbacks and final rounds. Then, around April, the pipeline completely dried up. I’m doing the work for EVERY application like generating custom resumes, tailored cover letters matching their culture, and engaging with leadership on LinkedIn.
I’m down to one lead at my partner’s company, but it’s a long shot. It feels like a lot of DevOps/SecOps/IT leadership roles are evaporating. Partially because companies are over-indexing on AI/LLMs to handle architecture complexity without realizing what those tools actually lack in practice.
After climbing the ladder for over a decade, I’m worried about the future of the market, but I’m not ready to stop fighting. Has anyone else with a leadership/infra background hit this exact same wall since April? How are you pivoting your approach?
If you are leading hundreds of people then you really should not be cold applying to jobs. Someone in your network should bring you onto their team.
Wondering what happened in April, around that time layoffs started including at my job. No reason at all aside from “AI” and the C suite wanting larger profits.