I've been a software dev for almost three decades and manager the last few years of it. I've been looking for work for over 6 months. Granted, I'm trying to move back to SWE work but have been somewhat opeN to EM work.
Finding work is harder than 2008 and even harder than 2001. It's as bad as tech has ever seen.
For EMs, middle management is always the first to get culled. That was me. And there are about 10% or less EM roles to engineer roles.
No one has said it but my management years away from daily coding likely count against me.
What more, I'm seeing far fewer Staff+ roles now than in the past several years. Anecdotally, from a recent employer, I had the impression that company was attempting to hire fewer staff+ to (1) outsource more and (2) hire more people at lower levels and (3) both 1 and 2 together.
The net effect in the US is seeing many more "senior" roles (we love our title inflation in Tech where "senior" tends to mean "has more than 2 years experience") or extremely specialized roles where exceptionally few people would have the skill set at the required experience level.
The VCs and the bigger firms evidently were heavily leveraged in low interest rate loans. Raising rates meant less money to play with and lower profits. Employees are the biggest cost center so that's where companies cut.
Without significantly lower interest rates, I suspect Tech is going to experience something of a depression in terms of unemployed/under-employed software developers.
> No one has said it but my management years away from daily coding likely count against me
I bet they do, but when you get engaged again in SWE, I bet it haunts you still. I am thankfully employed and hoping to stay that way and ride out my final career years in my current org. Similarly I have been in tech nearing four decades but over the last 10 years made a conscious effort to exit technology management (was tired of managing people and all the BS that means) and moved into product management which I personally enjoy more.
I am often asked why I don’t show more ambition to lead people because of my past experience. Well, it’s because of my past experience.
Exactly. For me, the emotional labor, the responsibility I felt to my directs, one of my strongest areas, was also eating me alive from the inside out.
I want to be responsible for services and code and mentoring people and not peoples' employment status.
US East Coast === Also Dead. edit: I'm a frontend focused JS/TS dev with 5 years experience and I was laid off at the end of May and never before has my anxiety been this high about landing another SWE role. At this point I've been heavily considering some sort of "hold over job" just to keep the lights on and keep me from going crazy, but I'm hoping I don't have to go down that route.
I can second this. NYC has plenty of companies accepting applications, but an extremely small number of interviews actually happen, and an even smaller number of people are getting hired. It feels like there are 200-300 job seekers for every job posting that makes it onto a job board, with titles like "Senior Software Engineer."
If I had my druthers on specific industries to focus on it would likely be in either finance or some sort of logistics field. My last role was an education CMS product and while that was fine it never felt like things would go anywhere I wanted to go. But, with the aforementioned "deadness" of things, I'm willing to take a role almost anywhere at any level just to stay writing software.
I can anecdotally attest that the market, at least in agency spaces, has definitely shifted to offshoring/outsourcing mode. I think it’s a reaction to our swelling salaries during the pandemic during the hiring craze, and like always, although they think it’s different this time, I think it’ll swing back once they realize (again) that there is more to our jobs than just pounding out lines of code, outsourced business interests don’t always align with their own, and dealing with the extra communication lag is a headache.
As for the sluggishness, I listened to an interesting podcast called Marketplace[0] last night that said, at least according to the latest jobs numbers, we’re now in what you’d call a “normal” pre-pandemic market. The thing is, the market has been crazy the last few years, and that makes the current state of things feel worse than it really is for some. I can’t decide if I agree or not. I’m seeing postings at my LOE, at least.
However, I think all of this is also heavily dependent on YOE and skill level. AI is a compounding factor that, in combination with the outsourcing, means that people with less work experience are probably having a harder time catching a break.
Way better than 2023. 5 YOE web developer. From Argentina, though, we are benefitting from offshoring of course. But last year I had months with 0 reach outs. Nowadays every week at least 2 to 3 even with the looking for job Linkedin feature deactivated.
Last month around day 10 I made [this](https://i.imgur.com/uWoGaM3.png) taking note of reach outs. My personal anecdata, ofc...
Upvoted your post because I think what you're seeing is the flip side of so many devs in the US (especially junior devs) seeing a bad job market, and also significant downward pressure on salaries.
Of course outsourcing existed before the pandemic, but the pandemic really made everyone get used to working remotely, so now there is hardly any difference working between devs in the same city vs thousands of miles away, as long as there is considerable time zone overlap. I've seen an explosion of outsourcing to LatAm and Eastern Europe (vs the Asian outsourcing of the early-to-mid 00s), and have worked with some fantastic devs in those locations. It makes it hard to justify hiring a fresh college grad in the US if you can get a great senior dev from Argentina for less money.
Yes, of course it may be influenced by that but there were some companies from my cuontry reaching out to me as well. Not only software consulting companies from USA. Also, if you are in the west coast the timezone difference might be a nuisance tho. But for east coast companies yes, it can be a great deal.
Just as a sidenote: I've been job searching up until July and always took a look at the Who is hiring threads and saw that most of remote jobs are still for Europe only if company is EU based and USA/Canada if they're USA based. Though don't know how representative are people hiring from this platform.
Very bad in the US right now, but I spoke with a tech recruiter recently who told me that, in his experience, June and July are always slow months, across almost all industries. He thought it was due to summer vacations, and that in August, as hiring managers get back to work, things start to pick up, and that it only gets better as EOY approaches and department heads become eager to spend their budget.
Here’s hoping he was right. Best of luck to all looking.
That is more or less my experience having switched roles at least ten times in my career.
Specifically the last month of the quarter, except for June, is the best moment to start looking.
Financing decisions are made quarterly so projects normally start at the beginning of the quarter. The last month in the previous quarter is when recruitment KPIs begin to face deadlines.
> ... June and July are always slow months, across almost all industries. He thought it was due to summer vacations, and that in August, as hiring managers get back to work, things start to pick up, and that it only gets better as EOY approaches and department heads become eager to spend their budget.
This def makes sense in my experience. Fall was usually the most active period, with earl in the year (Jan + Feb) and mid summer (June + July) being the slowest.
Yeah, I think I’ve started every job I’ve ever had in this industry in the early spring or early fall. The equivalent reasoning for the spring would be that they just got new budget and are doing much needed hiring.
It feels like recruiters and HR have wedged themselves into being an untouchable block between candidates and hiring managers. Those in the wedge have no incentives for actually connecting candidates to the needs of the employer so the wedge keeps getting larger and stronger. Companies are too scared of their HR departments to stand up to them. They're basically commissars that have a MAD pact with the company should anyone try to remove them. Recruiters mostly exist to make things easier on HR though they will claim its to ensure employment equity policies are followed and the reduce the burden on hiring managers. But it's mostly so HR has less to do in their section of the wedge.
We see the frustration on the part of candidates but hiring managers are pulling their hair out too. In many cases, they actually have a strong candidate they've worked with before that is fully qualified, but everyone now must go through the HR/Recruiter obstacle course without exception. Good matches between position and candidate are tossed aside by those in the wedge and there's nothing those at either end of the pipeline can do about it.
Everything about large companies is currently broken and irrational or outright corrupt. Yet those companies just keep succeeding.
And yeah, it's due to government protection and monopoly power. Some country will eventually decide to work for its people and will become a hugely prosperous place out of nowhere, taking everyone by surprise. But everyone else will keep hearing that "it can't work that way here".
I’m going through this right now, I used to be a carpenter and a farmer.
About 15 years ago, I went into tech to pay for kids in the city.
To some extent most of the jobs I find in tech seem to me to be societal busy work. And the people that make those jobs seem to take themselves a bit too seriously.
I’m considering moving back to trades work instead of finding another infra job.
I’ve had time to get my stuff sorted and looking at journey man level salaries I’m not making too much more in tech any more.
I’m not really sure I want to keep going in tech at this point.
> To some extent most of the jobs I find in tech seem to me to be societal busy work. And the people that make those jobs seem to take themselves a bit too seriously.
I’m not sure if this is what you’re talking about, but people outside of the technical roles in this industry rarely seem to have the same curiosity and passion developers do. Is it easy to name other industries where this is true? CS is vast and young, and I’ve always found that exciting. The potential for new frontiers, even at lowly engineering applications like ours, made me want to do this work. Yet lots of managers lack even basic curiosity and sometimes make silly, bad decisions as a result. It can be hard to work alongside that.
Not entirely, what I mean is more that a lot of companies, even ‘disrupters’, are really just figuring out how to be a middle man of something that is already happening and taking a cut.
A lot of the products genuinely kinda suck, and it just feels like busy work to me sometimes.
I don’t think most of that comes out of tech, it’s product and business picking these directions and features but it’s pretty disheartening none the less.
You're spot on, but it's worse the closer you are to "scene" Valley/startup flavor companies, and much better in boring old profitable businesses. Unfortunately the former are more fun to work for (before they drive you insane).
I had a period in the early 10's where I worked with a lot of startups and it made me very cynical (though it could be said that that's more or less my default anyway); it was clear to me early on that most of them were just a retread of someone else's big idea (social network site for animators back when MySpace was fading and Facebook was booming is one that comes to mind that I actually encountered, though I tend to abbreviate this sort of thing as "Uber for dog massages" after someone's sarcastic comment I read). The goal seemed to be for founders to live the startup lifestyle by siphoning money from some VC or other. Obviously the money was a big motivater, but I also got the sense that a lot of it was a sort of status game - people wanted to be viewed as the visionary leader and be showered with attention for it, but they just didn't have real breakthroughs to bring to the table.
One thing that I often see when I look at these companies is that we’ve reached a point where we don’t really need everyone to work 40+ per week.
But, the people with money are willing to spend a mint to make sure that the most capable are working 50-60+ and that it looks like we are at full employment.
It’s not any one person, it systemic. But it’s a whole farse where programmers are so efficient that rich people are using them to suck value out of the economy in a way that returns very little value.
On the other hand there’s systems control programming and stuff that interacts with the physical world that returns incredible value, but there really aren’t enough of those jobs for the programmers we have and they don’t rent to pay big tech salaries.
> To some extent most of the jobs I find in tech seem to me to be societal busy work. And the people that make those jobs seem to take themselves a bit too seriously.
Thanks. You're putting in words something that was bothering me but didn't manage to name.
Yes, lots of busy work at various levels, from switching to the latest framework to redecorating the website because we can, to actually many companies selling nothing meaningful.
And the more vacuous the work is, the more it starts to feel like a cult. You MUST use framework X or pattern Y or clean/agile/... practice du jour, otherwise you're not one of us.
I live with physical disability, so my options are a bit limited. In theory a hip replacement might actually resolve that, but I don't know about working a trade with a joint replacement. I'm a competent carpenter, having learned from my father (my brother is one of the best I know, but got out of trades because the pay benefits were poor). I'd probably look at electrical or HVAC myself, but the thought of working summers in South Texas is also pretty daunting. Basically, there's no free lunch ;)
Of course lots of office jobs are busywork by comparison to carpentry and farming.
I'd guess farmers also aren't playing politics, and gaming metrics, for promotions.
Farmers also reap what they sow, to so speak. And don't plan to job hop before the chickens come home to roost, on resume-driven-farming technology choices.
Every job search engine sucks. Literally all of them. It's not the functionality, it's moderation. Check out Otta, which claims to manually review each company, but you can find all of their postings on LinkedIn, along with more. What I've ended up doing is using a Google search for specific sites (eg Breezy, Workable) that matches the titles I am looking for.
I have competing offers from multiple companies right now. Everything will be highly dependent on what industry you’re looking at and your skill set and experience.
I am in Toronto, Canada. I don't have the open to work flag on in LinkedIn. Two years an ago, even with the flag off, would get recruiters reaching out daily (> 20 years experience). Now it's 1 per week. I do get lots of job openings alerts in the area though. Not looking, hoping current company does not blow up (betting heavy on LLMs. Fun demos, no real products yet. Concerned it's an expensive fad) this year. But, feels like something bad is brewing (might just be crazy state of the world).
location: bay area, ca. experience: 8yrs, type: backend developer.
The number of recruiters reaching out to me has dropped a good amount over the summer, but as noted by others, thats typical. Still get phone screens/interviews but im not very good at interviewing so still looking around, but i am fortunate to still get recruiters talking to me. Fortunately im still employed so pressure is less.
My personal observation is that there is a saturation of devs and companies are focused on saving cash so work will be tough to get for a bit. Eventually the market will sort itself and work will be more available.
Sucks for those that are unemployed - i was unemployed for 2 years so i know what it feels like. Best of luck.. things will eventually turn for the better, you just gotta ride it out
1) There is a strong Cargo Cult ideation in our industry. Hence every startup is looking for a React developer who also have experience with Kafka and BigQuery.. and .. and... . And when the followed cults like Tesla, Netflix, .... began to layoff, guess what? our little cargo cult followers began to layoff, because that is the way to become the next Uber,Tesla,Netflix,whatever....
2) Lot of MBA C-Suite admins have arrived to our industry. And this is bad. We are not more an isolated island where code reigns, defines our position inside the hierarchy and so on. Now, politics, friends, nice looking people rule our dens. We are the operatives, the Storm Z cannon fodder. For every one of us, there are 300 waiting in line to "do the job".
I only have about 3 YOE, working at a non-tech Fortune 50 in the US and job searching on the side. I’ve sent out over 100 applications and haven’t received a single interview. The only interviews I do get are through LinkedIn recruiters reaching out. I have used a few referrals to apply as well but no bites on those either.
Originally, I thought it may be a Resume issue, but after getting quite a bit of feedback on it, it doesn’t seem to be that either. Before I started my job searching process, my main worry was that I wouldn’t be able to get past technical screens, but Leetcode was fairly easy to pick up again and am able to solve most mediums optimally and some hards with a less than optimal approach.
Also in the UK and can confirm very sluggish. I’m struggling to even get phone calls back from recruiters.
I would love to switch career path too. I’ve spent 6 years doing software development and vulnerability research in a heavily customer facing role, and would now like to look at something like solutions engineering. The reality is that all these companies likely have 100+ better qualified applicants, and there aren’t many companies who would like to take a gamble given the more attractive alternatives.
Don’t give up, I’m sure the right thing will come along! You’re not alone, if that’s any consolation at all.
It depends... I've been working remotely the past few years for about 40-50% above local market rates excluding a fairly long 7-month unemployment (planned on 3 months down, but took much longer). I have been approached a bit (few emails a week) for local, in-office jobs at local market rates. YMMV.
Currently employed as a Staff Engineer (position), working in a project in an Application Architect role (title in the client company), and have been working in software for close to three decades.
I've mostly worked in/around web based applications from front end, to back end, to orchestration and security infrastructure. I've worked in eLearning (mostly Aerospace) and Banking more than other industries.
Edit: I have no formal education beyond high school.. I'm self taught and have spent 10-20 hours a week on average reading, learning, experimenting and generally honing my knowledge and craft for my entire career. This has likely held me back in a lot of the companies I've applied to over the years. I also suspect that ageism is working against me now more than ever.
I have seen a recent uptick in body-shop recruiters reaching out with low-grade jobs. Annoyingly, this recent batch seems keen to use SMS to reach me instead of traditional Email.
I have started to put feelers out for a change of scenery, but nothing is landing yet. It feels like the first dotcom bust all over again.
My Gmail blocklist is basically a recruiter honeypot slash hatecrime since 99% of them are Indian. I have found nothing to combat it -- worse, I switched to date-coded email addresses in my CVs in 2008 (so email_mmyy@mydomain.com) (!) and I still get spam from those old addresses.
I should block those old addresses, and that was the implicit threat on my CV coversheet, but I haven't bothered to do it yet.
It seems most of the recruiters bought my Email from dice.com, since that corresponds to when I used the earliest email addy. I'd say I'm boycotting Dice in response (and I sorta am), but I don't think dice has been relevant in an age, so it's sort of a toothless oath. :D
The SMS are pernicious and awful. I usually drop a rude remark to them before reporting them as spam. Phone interruptions are 100x more focus-destroying than emails, and I have been forced to put my phone on do-not-disturb during the workday, and I hate it. I feel victimized by these shops.
It's weird. Not looking for full time, just contracting. Meaningful jobs have completely disappeared. Bullshit one, on the other hand, flourish, and they pay top dollar anyway. I set aside a bit of money for the therapy and go on like that.
Any advice on how to build your network if you are trying to switch industries? (E.g. I am trying to get out of web development into something less vulnerable to offshoring)
Mostly networking is revolving around making strong long-term connections, I got my job because I was close to my co-founder, then she reached out to some friends, one of whom was a recruiter and I got an interview.
Another was staying in touch with someone who was my boss 16 years ago, we re-connected and I was able to get prep for interviews at his company.
Another was a engineer I worked with, and you guessed it, got a referral to his company and some prep.
The wider the net, the more likely you'll know someone in a different industry. I have contacts now in AI, Video games, SAAS startups, FAANG, etc.
Has anyone else found that there seems to be an incredible number of job postings for AI engineers? It feels like way more than the market could actually support.
I was searching for a job from April to June 2024 as a senior/lead front-end (React) dev in EU (Germany). In addition to the usual mid-year slow down, the market itself was tougher. It seemed like a lot of companies had weird standards, contradictory at times even; even though the salaries they offered were much lower than before.
Luckily I landed a great job in late June, but it took 60+ applications and countless interviews.
As a Clojure backend dev (3YOE), I've noticed the same. Clojure jobs have always been few and far between but I believe it's slowing down even more lately.
Maybe it's time to move on from Clojure, though I really love it. I need to specialize in something, find a niche...
Thankfully for me, there are plenty of infrastructure roles where I’m at; however, they are insanely competitive. I made a final with one company, and they were interviewing eight people for the role. Eight! For one opening… those are not favorable odds.
I’m getting interviews. But the one offer I got was extremely low balled. Like 50k under previous salary and no equity.
During the process I found out that execs got equity, but not the peons.
Giant ass red flag.
OTOH: I’m getting more attention than I was in 2001-2.
International recruiters seems to have stopped all LinkedIn activities, but job postings remain pretty high in Denmark. It's a wide mix of jobs as well, but in my area at least, it's all established companies, no startups.
Very sluggish, although not totally dead (I am in Texas, USA). I'm getting some part-time work. I have the impression maybe a bit better than a couple months ago, but still very slow.
I can't read much into anecdata. (Something as simple as a meaningless tweak to LinkedIn profile can stimulate recruiter outreaches. Also, number of outreaches isn't necessarily an indicator of available jobs.)
I'd be interested in hard insights (maybe it would have to come from levels.fyi or LinkedIn) like monthly charts of: number of new hires, salary&TC distributions, title or skillset distributions, by company/industry/size per month.
And similar monthly breakdowns for ended employment.
Internal promotion numbers would be great, too (and good incentive for employers to give attention to promotions and retention, rather than the fad of transactionally renting team members for only 18 months), but maybe harder to get.
- ettinger@gmail.com, +14086562473
- Location: Los Gatos, CA USA, US Citizen (Native English speaker)
## Executive Summary
Contractor @ Profullstack: I'm looking for fullstack javascript remote roles or technical co-founder (ISTP-T) with an interest in leading engineering teams.
- Spearheaded the development of a prototype for satellite tracking utilizing NASA's worldwind.js library
- Successfully built the initiakl version of Sentinel as a Tauri app in node.js and svelte
#### Primate | Remote (Product Engineer, Jun 2023 - Present)
- Delineation of key functionalities within the open source Primate javascript framework, while reporting directly to the founder and lead developer.
- Leveraged expertise in JavaScript, Node.js, Deno, Bun, React, Vue, and Svelte to contribute to the seamless operation and optimization of the framework.
- Actively collaborated with cross-functional teams to evaluate and implement innovative solutions, resulting in improved performance and user experience.
- Spearheaded the development of the technology stack and architecture for Skatespot.com and its APIs
- Devised and executed strategic plans for the enhancement of overall technological infrastructure and performance using Deno and React Native with MongoDB running on Ubuntu
#### Profullstack, Inc. | Remote (Independent Contractor, Mar 2018 - Present)
- Consulted on JavaScript projects and REST related APIs with a focus on blockchain front-end development.
- Co-founded and served as the CTO of avenasea.com, a corporate travel app.
- Founded husko.money, an NFT and memecoin project on the Polygon mainnet.
- Managed Docker instances with CI/CD for seamless deployment.
#### Prognos Health, Inc. | Remote (Principal Engineer Mar 2021 - Jan 2022)
- Spearheaded the development of a cutting-edge underwriting user interface project, leveraging Svelte Kit and vanilla CSS.
- Successfully built and deployed the underwriting user interface, ensuring seamless user experience and efficient functionality.
- Utilized JavaScript, Node.js, HTML, CSS, and Svelte to create a robust and intuitive application.
- Effectively collaborated with cross-functional teams to gather requirements, identify technical challenges, and deliver innovative solutions.
#### IBM | Remote (Senior Software Engineer Nov 2014 - Mar 2018)
- Developed and implemented features for API Connect Editor, contributing to the advancement of the platform.
- Successfully created the base application for the rewrite, paving the way for improved functionality, clean code and a better developer experience.
- Conducted thorough UI testing using protractor, karma, and chai, guaranteeing the quality and reliability of the application.
- Proficiently utilized the ReactJS library for efficient development and provided seamless i18n and l10n implementation.
- Possess expertise in JavaScript, React, Node.js, HTML, and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) , effectively applying these skills to deliver exceptional results.
I had a feeling that might have been the case; my profile is more backend/data but I've kept a decent skill level in frontend. The pure web frontend jobs seem to have dried up. Especially as an older developer (I'm in my mid-40s) as frontend is often entry-level, there are an army of kids who can hardly code but are cheap and make things look "good".
Trump's policies (lower taxes, higher tariffs & trade wars) are highly inflationary. Interest rates will have to go up during a Trump presidency to compensate.
It's kind of moot anyways, neither side is advocating for deflation. The 2022 inflation is baked into prices now and it's never coming out unless something really bad happens to the economy.
Economists are kind of mixed on whether deflation is really bad. Periods of deflation in the past have always occurred during really rough economic times. Was the deflation cause or effect? It's hard to tell, but those times were so bad nobody is anxious to find out.
Finding work is harder than 2008 and even harder than 2001. It's as bad as tech has ever seen.
For EMs, middle management is always the first to get culled. That was me. And there are about 10% or less EM roles to engineer roles.
No one has said it but my management years away from daily coding likely count against me.
What more, I'm seeing far fewer Staff+ roles now than in the past several years. Anecdotally, from a recent employer, I had the impression that company was attempting to hire fewer staff+ to (1) outsource more and (2) hire more people at lower levels and (3) both 1 and 2 together.
The net effect in the US is seeing many more "senior" roles (we love our title inflation in Tech where "senior" tends to mean "has more than 2 years experience") or extremely specialized roles where exceptionally few people would have the skill set at the required experience level.
The VCs and the bigger firms evidently were heavily leveraged in low interest rate loans. Raising rates meant less money to play with and lower profits. Employees are the biggest cost center so that's where companies cut.
Without significantly lower interest rates, I suspect Tech is going to experience something of a depression in terms of unemployed/under-employed software developers.