I’m working as a full stack SWE in SV and am interviewing around looking for something different with… interesting results, I’m wondering how others are finding it?
I’ve applied to probably 40 companies, gotten invited to do around 6 phone screens (some including two rounds to pass), and have yet to make it to an on-site.
Some of the phone screens I’ve done I just never heard back from, I’ve had two separate instances at different companies where in between passing the first and going on to the second round the company went through layoffs and the recruiters that were handling me were part of those affected, I’ve been told I will get an invite to an on-site after the company recovers from lay offs which never materialized, and I’ve just flat out not passed the rest.
The bar seems definitely much higher than I can ever remember it being at this stage, and companies seem pretty disinterested in following through with hiring. I have heard things are starting to stabilize in tech but it still seems like everyone is bracing for the worst.
From my observation, there is plenty of demand in AI/ML and Data Science. But fields like web-dev and QA are down significantly. We are hiring a few Data Science engineers right now at work and they are going for top dollar right now and we can't find enough to interview. We have 1 ML position available and can't get any serious applicants.
We are also hiring QA engineers which are a dime a dozen and its really competitive, we have our pick and salaries are a tad lower than they were last year (which means they are way down if you account for inflation). We haven't hired back any frontend or backend devs since layoffs last year. Our DevOps/SRE are hiring and getting about average feedback on the market, similar to last year.
My personal experience (i am an SRE manager) and I have been getting several recruiting offers that I have turned down but might start to flirt with soon. The number of overall incoming demand for me has been down from last year, but there is still a steady supply of it. I haven't taken interviews though so I can't speak to the interview process.