> Nice severance; but in this job market, holy shit.
I just talked to a bunch of recruiters (we're hiring) and their main piece of advice was: The market is crazy. Move fast. We're seeing people getting jobs within days of starting to look, bailing on offers after signing because they got a better offer somewhere else, etc. 24 hours is the longest you can leave a candidate waiting. You have been warned
edit: I am in SFBA. Your reality may be different. People have spilled some 2 trillion dollars onto the area in the past 2 years. A lot of that is going to software engineers as everyone tries to shove AI down consumers' throats. Rents are up 60% in 12 months, which is not the sign of a cold employment market :)
I'm in NYC which I think has similar demographics to SF in this regard; I found my job in August of last year, after about five months of searching, and I found it because a friend of mine referred me. It's a good job, and I like it, I'm grateful for that friend.
Regardless, it's not like that was the only job I applied to. I had a policy of applying to at least ten jobs a day, so I applied to about ~1500 jobs, and literally all of them rejected me except for the one I have right now. I had about twenty other interviews (edit: 15, checked my calendar from last year), a few that got to late stages, and they didn't pan out [1].
I psychotically save money so I wasn't worried in any kind of existential sense, I could survive for years if I needed, but man I would have killed to be in a situation where I even had the opportunity to bail on an offer.
This has been the worst economy for software engineers I've seen in my ~15 year career. I am slightly optimistic that it will improve eventually but I suspect "eventually" might mean several more years.
[1] And one at a one of the world's largest bank (that my lawyer/mom has advised me not to name publicly) where my interviewers were potentially the most incompetent people I have ever talked to and who didn't seem to know what an atomic was in Java, and "corrected" my counter code with a mutex. And I put "corrected" in quotes, because what they corrected it to would deadlock. Morons.
The trick to applying these days is to have a contact on the inside that can tell you what the hiring manager is actually looking for, vs what's in the public JD, and then to refer you.
That doesn't scale to 10 jobs/day for very long because almost nobody has a network that big. If you don't land something through referral to the hiring manager, it's mostly a crap shoot these days.
Yeah, it wasn't lost on me that a lot of job listings are fake, even at the time (I think I even wrote comments saying as much on this very forum). I did reach out to contacts asking if they had openings but of course that's a finite set and most of them told me they didn't.
What I had tried to do was start randomly requesting connection invites with people on LinkedIn in fields I was interested, and a surprisingly large number of them accepted my requests, but that didn't actually pan out to anything productive, which is a little depressing.
I hope I don't get laid off from my current gig, because now I really don't have a clue on the best way to find a job. Maybe I could try that "CEO at a big corporation" thing, it doesn't look too hard and apparently you can lay off half your staff and still be rewarded.
I'm a senior in NYC, considering changing jobs but haven't pulled the trigger. I've got a good amount of reachouts from finance recruiters and small-to-medium sized startups but haven't heard anything from the established players (admittedly I haven't been looking).
I got a number of finance recruiters reaching out then too but nothing stuck. I got a few interviews (even got to meet a few interesting characters like Martin Shkreli) but nothing panned out until my friend gave me a referral to my current gig.
I think recruiters will just carpet bomb emails out and then only respond like ten percent of the people that email them back.
I think it's starting to turn around. My sense is there's still a ton of devs on the market but there's a lot of jobs opening recently. Here's the data from the st luis fed: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE
You're hiring, so of course that's the message you're getting from recruiters. "Market is hot", so take their candidates quick before someone else snaps them up. Don't believe this line without confirmation.
No, that's just the reality of the market right now. Software engineers are an extremely hot field, likely because everybody is trying to add AI to their products.
I'm being very picky with what I look at, which doesn't help, but yeah, it doesn't seem great. Maybe they're all in person gigs? Or is there some ageism? (There has always been some ageism in software)
Easier to hire consultants to add AI to do your software engineering for you than temporarily hire humans with needs and benefit costs to add AI to do your software engineering for you.
Just the current reality in SFBA. People have spilled some 2 trillion dollars onto the area in the past 2 years. A lot of that is going to software engineers as everyone tries to shove AI down consumers' throats.
Not being obtuse, I even googled it, but I have no idea what SFBA is in this context. I'm assuming it's not to do with windsurfing in the San Francisco Bay Area or some kind of insulation. Could you elaborate?
They're just saying the job market is hot in the location of the S (San) F (Francisco) B (Bay) A (Area) it's not cryptic, I'll assume you had a brain fart here it happens.
Unless I'm getting whooshed now lol, but yeah the market here is just super hot because all the AI money sloshing around.
For what it's worth I actually took "SFBA" and Googled it because I wasn't sure either. I've always heard of it referred to as SF or SV. Learn new stuff every day.
Pre-covid, and during the early covid hiring spree, I used to get messages from eager recruiters every week, I get maybe one a month these days, and they are much more tepid.
I've actually had really positive responses. I'm fairly senior (~20 years of experience). I was laid off by Meta in 2022, started at Block 3 months later. Laid off by Block in 2024, started at a smaller company 1 month later. Decided to leave that company in early 2025, contacted one company from a HN Who's Hiring post and took that job. That ended up being a poor fit, and I went back to a FAANG around July of 2025.
In the last three transitions I applied to a grand total of 5 companies.
Also, looking at the recruiter emails I've been getting, they've been ramping up over the last few months, and I'm back up to one or two cold emails per week.
But again, I'm fairly senior, and I have deep domain knowledge in a few key areas. I understand the market is brutal if you're early career or your knowledge isn't "T" shaped.
Started looking in November, four offers by end of January, all decent, last two competing offers were fantastic with great companies and I accepted one. Past few months and even now I’ve had more inbounds from recruiters than any time since Covid boom. Offer salaries aren’t as high as Covid boom days but there are a ton of startups that need people.
Varied. Most were exactly the same processes I remembered from interviewing years ago: some startups with no processes and unable to get signals, big public tech companies abusing leetcode, awkward screeners hoping for keywords, and everything in between for the most part. Biggest change is they all asked about AI and wanted to hear that I embrace modern tools and am hungry to find the best ways to work. I am positive that skepticism about AI in November prevented me from getting some interviews; demonstrating fluency (insofar as one can be fluent in these racing waters) and excitement for it in January was key to getting some (but not all) offers.
Around 12 calls if I remember correctly. With the exception of those who ghosted me, every company was very prompt, respectful of my time, and had a reasonable process that went from first to final interview pretty fast. I got a ton of outright rejections to my resume, which I sent around a lot. Getting the first call was the hardest part. YC job board ultimately led to finding my new role.
The company I went with had the best, warmest process that reflected how they like to work and was built to find people who had overlapping priorities. Thinking back, I think that most companies either deliberately or inadvertently wind up with processes that sync up with how they are organized internally and what kind of people they hope to hire.
Wildy varies. I'm a new grad and got my first offer after 8 applications and got another offer last week unprompted. Meanwhile my friend graduating from the same university has done 300 applications and a couple dozen interviews with no offer.
Yeah, mid-late last year was one of the worst markets I've seen in my career, but the last couple of months things have really seemed to pick up speed.
They did not, you get the same date range and the same graph shape going to FRED and pressing the "1Y" option, and the series includes the first two months of 2026 so it's 12 months: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1SGzm
However, the chart settings were actually modified to hide/deemphasize the earlier decline: the the index date was changed. 2025-02-20=100 in their graph, default of 2020-02-01=100 would have the chart start at 64 and rise to 71.44.
Sure, I assumed status quo everyone is talking about is basically the several years before that graph. I still think it's relatively bad compared to that despite the modest improvement.
What's not shown in a graph of job postings is the demand side. With all the layoffs, out of work college grads, people staying put in jobs they are unhappy with, etc., I'd wager that demand per job is still at a historically high level compared to what we have been accustomed to
I just talked to a bunch of recruiters (we're hiring) and their main piece of advice was: The market is crazy. Move fast. We're seeing people getting jobs within days of starting to look, bailing on offers after signing because they got a better offer somewhere else, etc. 24 hours is the longest you can leave a candidate waiting. You have been warned
edit: I am in SFBA. Your reality may be different. People have spilled some 2 trillion dollars onto the area in the past 2 years. A lot of that is going to software engineers as everyone tries to shove AI down consumers' throats. Rents are up 60% in 12 months, which is not the sign of a cold employment market :)