7 ms·

I’m not trying to be unsympathetic in this comment so please do not read it that way, and I’m aware having spent most of my career in cloud infrastructure that

I’m not trying to be unsympathetic in this comment so please do not read it that way, and I’m aware having spent most of my career in cloud infrastructure that I am usually in high demand regardless of market forces - but this just does not make sense to me. If I ever got to the point where i was even in high dozens of applications without any hits, I’d take a serious look at my approach. Trying the same thing hundreds of times without any movement feels insane to me. I believe accounts like this, because why make it up? as other commenters have noted there may be other factors at play. I just wholly disagree with the conclusion that this is a common situation brought by AI. AI coding simply isnt there to start replacing people with 20 years of experience unless your experience is obsolete or irrelevant in today’s market. I’m about 10 years into my career and I constantly have to learn new technology to stay relevant. I’d be really curious what this person has spent the majority of their career working on, because something tells me it’d provide insight to whatever is going on here. again not trying to be dismissive, but even with my fairly unimpressive resume I can get at least 1st round calls fairly easily, and my colleagues that write actual software all report similar. companies definitely are being more picky, but if your issue is that you’re not even being contacted, I’d seriously question your approach. They kind of get at the problem a little by stating they “wont use a ton of AI buzzwords.” Like, ok? But you can also be smart about knowing how these screeners work and play the game a little. Or you can do doordash. personally I’d prefer the former to the latter. Also find it odd that 20 years of experience hasnt led to a bunch of connections that would assist in a job search - my meager network has been where I’ve found most of my work so far.

rahimnathwani 1y ago
AI coding simply isnt there to start replacing people with 20 years of experience unless your experience is obsolete or irrelevant in today’s market. Perhaps in years 3-20 they relied solely on skills and knowledge they acquired in years 1 and 2. So even if the work still needs to be done, it can be done at 10x productivity using AI, requiring fewer people.
- apwell23 1y ago
  > it can be done at 10x productivity using AI, doubt. maybe if you are cranking out crud widgets, which you should've been using an abstraction in first place.
  - rahimnathwani 1y ago
    Right, but not everyone whose job title is 'software engineer' would think to do that.
    - apwell23 1y ago
      True
sabellito 1y ago
Overall I'd agree with your sentiment, but it depends on the market. I only know personally of one counter example to your message. In my career, I've reviewed, interviewed, and hired a few hundred people for somewhat known companies and startups. I also helped many friends find jobs in the past, before the market became what it is today, without any issues. So I like to think I understand what recruiters and hiring managers are looking for. End of last year, a friend with 12 years of relevant experience started looking for a job. I reviewed his CV (which he tweaked for some of the applications) and cover letters (he wrote one for each company). Everything was as good as it can be for the position he was applying for. Out of ~20 applications he got a total of 4 replies: 3 generic rejections and one screening that led him to being hired. He killed it during the interviews, but just getting his foot in the door was so hard. Maybe in some parts of the world we're back to 2015-2020 levels of recruiter "harassment", but in others it's super dry, even for senior positions.
- JohnMakin 1y ago
  That ratio you mentioned vis a vis applications to hire is about normal for me and something I would consider tolerable
  - sabellito 1y ago
    I'm sure it varies quite a bit depending on role. Before the market change, for senior engineering and eng management positions, the ratio was 1:1 if the person so wished. My whole career was exactly that: 1 application, 1 offer, always.
  - strken 1y ago
    Absolute numbers are probably less interesting than the % change. If you're getting a 5% hit rate but you used to get 20%, that implies that someone who used to get a 5% hit rate is going to have a much harder time. I'm not sure the relationship is strict enough that the formerly 5% hit rate engineer is now going to see 1.25%, but my guess would be that they'll at least find things a lot more difficult.
olddustytrail 1y ago
Last year I applied for a single job, out of a vague interest, and immediately had multiple calls from recruiters from different companies trying to talk to me. This year I'm actually looking, applied for multiple jobs, and had silence. Might be a Trump effect but it's not the same just now. Reminds me of 2008.
- tmaly 1y ago
  As someone commented below, I think the end of ZIRP is the cause and not Trump.
  - xboxnolifes 1y ago
    The end of ZIRP was well before last year.
    - JohnMakin 1y ago
      The effects could take a while, I assume many companies had a ton of runway that’s now dwindling. There seems to have been a strong belief for some time that ZIRP will return too.
johnea 1y ago
Your mileage may vary. I know a number of very experienced engineers that went through hundreds of application over more than a year before finally finding employment. Often there would be several rounds of interviews, sometimes 6!, with several leading to c-suite interviewers saying "you'll be receiving an offer", and then nothing. Ghosted. These are people with decades of experience, big corps, successful startups, extensive contact networks. The DOGE breed of 20 something darlings are in for a rude awakening down the road. I'm very very glad I'm at the tail end of my 40 year career. If I were looking at university enrollment in the present, I don't think I'd choose engineering. The tech industry is just not the employment growth opportunity that it was. I'd choose being an electrician before being an electrical engineer in the current conditions...
- xtracto 1y ago
  You made me login to reply :) , thanks. Back in the early 2000s when I was finishing my Software Engineer BSc degree I saw the choice of becoming a "generalist" vs becoming a "specialist". I actually liked EVERYTHING technology wise: From Neural Networks to Game development (graphics with OpenGL) to algorithms, Web development, to Java JNI, assembler and whatnot. I couldn't see myself focusing in one thing. Fast forward to 2025, I'm 44 years old and have been 24 years in the industry. In the last 5 years I've had 3 jobs: One, helping a startup move form a non-scalable monolith system (ruby) to a very scalable microservices one. I was CTO of a crypto-exchange company, building ECS/nodejs based microservices and then an App (React Native). And right now I am helping some young guys in a startup doing AI based Tax reconciliation (helping exporting companies recover their VAT). In my opinion, right now is the BEST moment to be a developer. Coding with Cursor is magic. Implementing an API in python with FastAPI is so freaking easy and quick. I don't have to worry about recalling a lot of details, but mainly think on problem solving. I have the hypothesis that the people that are struggling are the "specialists". Suddenly with AI it doesn't matter that you know the in and outs of Java, Hybernate and the whole stack. There's more value in solving problems. I am happy that I chose the "generalist" path. I think AI will reduce the demand the "specialist" skillset.
  - JohnMakin 1y ago
ponow 1y ago
Could it be that your particular position required more ongoing learning, and that has kept you better prepared for a changing world? What fraction of positions require that ongoing learning, or at least to that degree? Also, consider many other jobs, are they doing their job, and the doing of their job itself provides the experience that makes you a more valuable worker? Or is the doing of the job basically a necessary distraction from the actual task of preparing yourself for a future job? What fraction of humanity actually takes on two jobs, the paying job and the preparing-for-the-next-job? Might doing the latter get you fired from the former? Most importantly, is doing that latter job getting more important over time, that is, are our jobs less secure? If so, is this what is an improving economy, rising, as it were, with GDP?
- CrimsonRain 1y ago
  if you are in computer engineering and you are not doing "ongoing learning", you deserve to be left behind. While the company should provide some opportunities for learning, ultimately, it is your responsibility.
  - endemic 1y ago
    What's your strategy for continuing education?
    - vel0city 1y ago
      I tend to hop into projects even if I only have a cursory knowledge of the platform and spend time ferociously reading the docs as I catch up to speed. I ask a lot of questions of those who do know parts of it. If I hear something I don't know or understand in a meeting I always write it down and research it later. In a dev environment, I poke at things. Back up that config file, tweak some things, see what happens. Take stuff apart, put it back together. Revert things to put it back when I'm done. It's the dev environment, it's supposed to be shaken up and messed with. With code, I find a good debugger for whatever new platform I'm trying to get into. Put some break points into interesting spots, step into to the function, step into, step into. See what's really happening. Inspect all the things. How does this thing actually tick? Watch it spin. When an employer offers any time for training, I take it. I try and get as much out of it as I can. My employer offers some continuing education reimbursement. I use it. And I try and also teach things at my place of employment. This forces me to actually challenge what I do know and really dig into the topic. Sometimes I find out what I thought I knew wasn't really true! We have a regular meeting on Monday afternoons to share and talk technology. I usually talk Kubernetes and containers on the third Mondays, digging deep into how all that stuff actually works. And it's not just me rambling for an hour, we usually get good discussion going about the focus on the talk and I end up learning something knew even though I'm the one presenting! Make time in your work schedule to spend some time learning every week. Make yourself a 30 minute or 1 hour recurring meeting with only you. And finally, there's probably a lot of small dead time moments you have in your life. I'm not saying make all of those focused on learning tech, but if even a third of the time you would have spent doing something else unproductive you instead catch a few more minutes of a training or listen to a lightning talk from a programming conference you'll slowly still glean new stuff and find more topics to dig into when you get a chance.
harmmonica 1y ago
Pure speculation, but I wonder if it's not so much AI as tech companies realizing they actually can do more with less. And, again, I have no evidence to back this up other than "feels," but I swear when Elon bought Twitter and cut so much of the workforce that's when sentiment seemed to shift materially. I wonder if that wasn't a bit of an "aha" moment for mega tech and tech in general. It's like all the major companies said maybe we don't need as many people as we have. Of course people are going to debate whether the changes at Twitter had a monumentally-negative impact (they may very well have in terms of revenue, but I'm not so sure in terms of absolute or even relative profit). Of course, as a sibling comment, I think, said it could be the end of ZIRP. But maybe the truth is it's end of ZIRP, seeing a "peer" shed employees en masse and not fail outright, and AI. Twitter deal in 2022. Headcount by year for a few (not suggesting this data supports my theory; just sharing to reality check)... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platforms/number-of-employees https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platform... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/number-of-employees https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/numb... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/number-of-employees https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/number-... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/number-of-employees https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/num... Edit: grammar
- sapphicsnail 1y ago
  Do people see Elon's takeover of Twitter as a success? I think he leveraged Twitter as a social media platform to make himself wealthy, but as far as I can tell, the actual company has been losing a ton of money.
  - pclmulqdq 1y ago
    For every engineer who sees things not working on the site and going unfixed, there's a manager who sees how many people still use it.
  - giobox 1y ago
    Ignoring the financial aspects, I agree to some extent with OPs opinion this trend of doing more with less engineers really took off following Elon reducing Twitters headcount. It's worth remembering Twitter was a buggy mess before Elon bought it. Sure it's still a buggy mess today, but the staffing costs are dramatically lower. Losing a ton of money was something Twitter was also pretty good at even before Elon too - only profitable 2 years out of the 8 leading up to the acquisition while it was still a public company etc.
JKCalhoun 1y ago
Honestly, his power-wash business is likely his redemption. If I was running into the kind of wall he was trying to get a coding job [1], I think I, like him, would be looking at a career change. When I was in the Bay Area, living on a street of white-collar professionals, the one "blue collar" guy on the block had a house painting business. It's probably no surprise he began as a painter himself, working for someone else. He was smart enough to know how to bail and go into business for himself. That eventually lead to him hiring others. He's the boss now. When I retired and left the neighborhood, his day appeared to begin with going out to the various job sites that day and see that his crew were on task, knew the plan. He played golf most of the middle of the day. By the afternoon he went around the sites to see how his guys had done. In the evening with the garage door open, he would be at a small desk doing books, whatever. Have pickup truck will travel. [1] The jobs are going to come from knowing people already employed that can say, "Hey, we have an opening — I'll send your resume to my boss."
bradgessler 1y ago
It feels like we're in a phase where hiring is slow for a lot of reasons: 1. Lot's of great talent on the market. It's a great time to be owning a company right now in terms of hiring. 2. The reality and perception of AI making it possible to do "more with less". I can imagine conversations playing out today, "we need to hire more developers" with the rebuttal, "ok, what about AI? Let's see how far it will go without hiring more people" 3. Even without AI, software teams can do more with less because there's simply much better tooling and less investment is required to get software off the ground. 4. Interest rates and money is simply more expensive than it was 3-5 years ago, so projects need to show greater return for less money. It does feel like the reality and perception of AI hasn't converged yet. There's a general sense of optimism that AI will solve a lot of huge problems, but we don't really know until it plays out. If you believe history rhymes, humans will figure out what AI does well and doesn't do so well. Once that's worked out, the gap between perception and reality will close and labor markets will tighten up around the new norm.
- teeray 1y ago
  > I can imagine conversations playing out today, "we need to hire more developers" with the rebuttal, "ok, what about AI? Let's see how far it will go without hiring more people" That is almost certainly happening. What needs to play out for the pendulum to swing the other way is all of these companies realizing that their codebase has become a bunch of AI-generated slop that nobody can work on effectively (including the AIs). Whether that plays out or not is an open question: how much slop can the AI generate before it falls over?
  - kyleee 1y ago
    That’s what I am wondering as I aggressively spew technical debt into the universe, is the sudden accelerated creation of technical debt going to be good or bad for my long term job prospects?
- araes 1y ago
  > It does feel like the reality and perception of AI hasn't converged yet I learned a word cruising Reddit the other day that summarizes that issue quite well - "liminal". At the time, it was in the context of malls, and the collapse of American storefront consumerism, yet the issues are similar: "relating to the transitional stage of a process", or "the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage" > general sense ..., but we don't really know ... the gap between perception and reality will close and labor markets will tighten up We're stuck in that in-between land where your 2) seems like it's often the response to most suggestions. We'll, we don't really want to take a risk ... cause tomorrow AI may make that choice irrelevant. We don't really want to invest ... cause tomorrow AI may make our investment worthless. We don't really want to hire more people ... cause tomorrow AI may do their jobs easily. And there's always that number 3) sensation somewhere "your team can do more, you're just not leveraging tools enough".
didibus 1y ago
> I come from poverty. my father was a drug addict who is dead. my mother is disabled and i’m helping support her. my grandparents are dead. my friends are on the west coast, dealing with similar financial hardships and they are already living with their parents and on couches. I’m not above asking for help, but there is no one to ask. I wonder how much this factors in. We know from statistic this situation tends to lead to worse outcomes. Basically those connections you are talking about, are some form of nepotism and a kind of privilege. Should it be this way?
- bobsomers 1y ago
  I don't think nepotism is what we're talking about here. I don't come from poverty, I come from a firmly middle class background. We were a single income household where my dad was a public attorney. Nobody in my immediate or extended family worked in tech. Over the course of my ~15 year career, I've built up a fairly extensive network of former coworkers, many of who I'm sure would try to hire me or get me referrals at their companies if they found out I was on the market. None of this was built through nepotism, as I literally had no connections in tech when I started out. So, that's the question. The author claims they have had a 20 year career. What happened to all those connections? Do they have a bunch of connections, but no prior coworkers would want to work with them again?
  - squigz 1y ago
    I don't think GP was talking about TFA - and thus not a professional network - with regards to nepotism, but rather being able to depend on family. In any case, networks can be hard to build and maintain, and they can easily fall apart if you fall into a rut.
  - em-bee 1y ago
    as i wrote in my other comment, for myself a 20 year career only led to a dozen or so meaningful connections. and, in my culture, using connections to get a job or a deal IS considered nepotism if not outright corruption.
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shawnfrompdx 1y ago
i get where you are coming from. i tried 5 versions of my resume in the last year. talking to recruiters. shotgunning resumes. hand crafting one-off cover letters. I have tried many approaches. you can guage my resume for yourself. the current strategy is to pander to people who are mainly looking for ai-dev skills https://shawnfromportland.com/Shawn_K_Resume_2025-4.pdf https://shawnfromportland.com/Shawn_K_Resume_2025-4.pdf
- Aurornis 1y ago
  If you're up for some unsolicited feedback from someone who has read a lot of resumes: This is one of the more chaotic and difficult to parse resumes I've seen. Can I suggest you try returning to a standard resume format where you simply list jobs in chronological order with short bullet points underneath each one? You lead your Professional Summary with a point about using AI coding tools and the #1 skill you list in the skills box is "Vibecoding". It's good to keep up with AI-assisted tools, but putting "Vibecoding" in your resume is an instant turn off for most people. Vibecoding is associated with poor software quality, not professional development. I'd remove that word from your resume and never put it back. Your job duty bullet points are very wordy but convey little at the same time. You have 3 jobs in a row where you "Built award-winning state of the art web experiences" but I have no idea what technologies you used, what your role was on the team, what the websites actually did, how many users were served, or any other useful information. At minimum you need to list some technologies. Your entire personal brand is "shawnfromportland" but you apparently live on the other side of the country? I understand the attachment to your username, but you have far more "Portland" on your resume than "New York". If you're applying to any local jobs, the Portland branding is an obstacle for anyone scanning 100s of resumes who doesn't have time to consume every little detail and resolve ambiguities. Using 1/5th of the page for context-less name dropping of skills isn't helpful. Delete that box and list specific skills in specific jobs. With 20 years of experience it's impossible to know if each skill you list is something you read a Wikipedia page about or used at 5 of your jobs.
  - twic 1y ago
    Suggest hosting the resume on http://imlivinginnewyorkthesedaysbutimstill.shawnfromportland.com http://imlivinginnewyorkthesedaysbutimstill.shawnfromportlan...
ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
I suspect it's not AI. > dismissing me when they find out my dinosaur age of 42 I gave up, after encountering this (at 55). It's been a thing for quite some time (more than the 2.5 years he mentions). What's annoying, is that the very people doing the dismissing, are ones that will soon be in those shoes. I believe ol' Bill Shakey called it "Hoist by your own petard."
rr808 1y ago
> I’m about 10 years into my career and I constantly have to learn new technology to stay relevant. Sounds like you dont have kids to help look after or a parent to care for, and you're still in the desirable age to hire from. Wait another ten years after you help kids with their homework or sports in the evening and dont have energy to work on a side projects.
- JohnMakin 1y ago
  This is a crazy assumption and really insulting to parents or non-parents and wrong on nearly every count.
  - JohnMakin 1y ago
    Don't know why I'm being downvoted. Almost everything assumed in the GP comment about me is wrong. I'm north of 40 and I have dependents. Don't blame your decision to have kids for your failures or deficits. It's a really annoying thing people do and inevitably gets projected onto the children, who didn't ask to be here in the first place.
    - rr808 1y ago
      You do have a good angle that it is entirely possible. I dont think we're "blaming" children though, just the reality that a young single person with 10 years experience likely has a lot more spare time and energy than those older. Saying its easy to keep working long hours and learning new waves of technology likely aren't sustainable.
    - oldandboring 1y ago
      It's because the experience of so many parents these days is exhaustion. There just aren't enough hours in the day. In my experience it often turns out that if a fellow parent has significantly more personal time than me (for side projects, exercise, whatever) it turns out there is an unequal distribution of labor in the household. For example, a spouse who doesn't work who handles all the domestic stuff could allow the other spouse more free time. That same stay-at-home-spouse could find themselves with a lot of free time as the kids get older and require less hands-on parenting. That sort of thing.
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georgeecollins 1y ago
>> Also find it odd that 20 years of experience hasnt led to a bunch of connections that would assist in a job search - my meager network has been where I’ve found most of my work so far. I had the same impression. Anyone reading this who is younger: at some point in your life your employment will probably mostly depend on the connections you make to your successful peers, the companies you start, or the products/ technologies you are associated with. When you are starting, strangers will hire you off of your resume. At some point this effectively stops and if people aren't familiar with you or your work they will not consider you. This has been true long before LLMs existed.
- em-bee 1y ago
  it really depends on how your career is developing. the last 10 years i worked for a single company. i made a few connections there. but except one they are all my junior and themselves don't have enough connections so that they could refer me. beyond that there may be a dozen more. i talked to almost all of them. nothing so far. they either work in small companies that are not hiring, or in big ones where they can't influence the hiring process. add to that that where i am from using connections to get a job is frowned upon, bordering on corruption. the one connection that did give me work was an acquaintance i made at a tech meetup about two years ago, who then connected me to someone interested in working with me. but even then it took almost a year before we started working. and it's only a part time gig, not enough to cover expenses. otherwise i did get 3 or 4 interviews out of more than 100 applications. not a single offer though.
karaterobot 1y ago
It's hard to say for sure without knowing his whole situation, but I will agree with you that when I hear someone say they've submitted 750 applications, my first thought is that they're taking a machine gun approach, applying to a lot of jobs in a short time. I was always taught that you tailor your resume to the position you're applying for, and apply only after doing a lot of research on the company to know whether you are suitable for their position. I'm older than the author of this post, and applied for my most recent job at about his age—though it was a few years ago, before AI was really a consideration. In my entire life, I've probably applied to ~25 positions, made it to the final round 8 times, and been hired 6 times. Knock on wood that he's wrong about the cause of his current frustration, because that means it's fixable.
- JohnMakin 1y ago
  That is my approach as well. It ends up being a lot less work than the machine gun approach.
kagakuninja 1y ago
I am 61, and have been working for almost 40 years. I don't really have a lot of personal connections, because I am on the autistic spectrum. Yes, I have many former co-workers linked on LinkedIn, but to most of those people, I'm just an old acquaintance, not someone they are going to phone up with a hot new job opportunity. The exception is one college friend who did help me get multiple jobs at startups, but he retired several years ago. Establishing and maintaining relationships is hard, and many of us are simply not good at it. Now I did make sure to stay in touch with a couple ex-managers who I knew would be good references. One of them even helped me get an interview. But even when I had a connection on the inside of a company, all that really does is move me to the head of the line, past the HR screen. I still have to interview, something I still suck at despite decades of practice.
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starik36 1y ago
I see you already have 27 replies...but I'll throw in my two cents. I didn't believe it was this bad until I was made to believe it. My kid with 1 year full time experience at a FAANG adjacent company and a 6 month internship prior to that, is simple unable to get ANY interviews at all. And he is genuinely good at software development, much better than I was at his age. I was skeptical, I thought his approach was wrong, I thought this and that. He let me take over his job looking process for a week. I submitted over 100 applications for positions local and remote - positions that he is qualified to do. Not a single interview. Not even a phone screen. Compare this with when I left college. Interviews were available at the drop of a hat.
- Philadelphia 1y ago
  That doesn’t seem to be particularly unusual at the start of a career. When did you leave college? When I graduated 22 years ago, basically no one in my (Ivy League) class had a job lined up, and a lot of us didn’t find one until a year later.
  - myth_drannon 1y ago
    My anecdotal experience is very different. It's possible that you graduated just after the dotcom bust. Couple of years later and it was very easy for a new grad to get an offer without that much effort.
    - Philadelphia 1y ago
      I know at least that it was back to that from 2008 - 2010, because I was involved in hiring then. The small company I was working for got swamped with new graduates. We ended up hiring more than we planned to, because they would work for so little. I think generally, historically, being able to get a high-paying job right out of college with no effort is an anomaly that people just got used to treating as normal due to the periods of free money and fast growth because of the new and growing Internet, and free money. They’re gone now, and with the way things are, they’re unlikely to come back.
arkh 1y ago
> I’d be really curious what this person has spent the majority of their career working on I feel like early career is a huge factor. As a young person you'll be ok to be a junior when joining a company working on high scale problem. You're also ok with companies working on low scale. But 10 years later, most high scale companies won't even think about hiring you for anything but junior position if you've never got to work on high scale operations. And that's not the kind of experience you can easily get on your own time. So if you've accepted to work for small scale companies at the start of your career? You're stuck unless you accept a huge salary cut (and that's if you pass the "too qualified/old for this position" filter).

rahimnathwani 1y ago

AI coding simply isnt there to start replacing people with 20 years of experience unless your experience is obsolete or irrelevant in today’s market. Perhaps in years 3-20 they relied solely on skills and knowledge they acquired in years 1 and 2. So even if the work still needs to be done, it can be done at 10x productivity using AI, requiring fewer people.

apwell23 1y ago
> it can be done at 10x productivity using AI, doubt. maybe if you are cranking out crud widgets, which you should've been using an abstraction in first place.
- rahimnathwani 1y ago
  Right, but not everyone whose job title is 'software engineer' would think to do that.
  - apwell23 1y ago
    True

sabellito 1y ago

Overall I'd agree with your sentiment, but it depends on the market. I only know personally of one counter example to your message. In my career, I've reviewed, interviewed, and hired a few hundred people for somewhat known companies and startups. I also helped many friends find jobs in the past, before the market became what it is today, without any issues. So I like to think I understand what recruiters and hiring managers are looking for. End of last year, a friend with 12 years of relevant experience started looking for a job. I reviewed his CV (which he tweaked for some of the applications) and cover letters (he wrote one for each company). Everything was as good as it can be for the position he was applying for. Out of ~20 applications he got a total of 4 replies: 3 generic rejections and one screening that led him to being hired. He killed it during the interviews, but just getting his foot in the door was so hard. Maybe in some parts of the world we're back to 2015-2020 levels of recruiter "harassment", but in others it's super dry, even for senior positions.

JohnMakin 1y ago
That ratio you mentioned vis a vis applications to hire is about normal for me and something I would consider tolerable
- sabellito 1y ago
  I'm sure it varies quite a bit depending on role. Before the market change, for senior engineering and eng management positions, the ratio was 1:1 if the person so wished. My whole career was exactly that: 1 application, 1 offer, always.
- strken 1y ago
  Absolute numbers are probably less interesting than the % change. If you're getting a 5% hit rate but you used to get 20%, that implies that someone who used to get a 5% hit rate is going to have a much harder time. I'm not sure the relationship is strict enough that the formerly 5% hit rate engineer is now going to see 1.25%, but my guess would be that they'll at least find things a lot more difficult.

olddustytrail 1y ago

Last year I applied for a single job, out of a vague interest, and immediately had multiple calls from recruiters from different companies trying to talk to me. This year I'm actually looking, applied for multiple jobs, and had silence. Might be a Trump effect but it's not the same just now. Reminds me of 2008.

tmaly 1y ago
As someone commented below, I think the end of ZIRP is the cause and not Trump.
- xboxnolifes 1y ago
  The end of ZIRP was well before last year.
  - JohnMakin 1y ago
    The effects could take a while, I assume many companies had a ton of runway that’s now dwindling. There seems to have been a strong belief for some time that ZIRP will return too.

johnea 1y ago

Your mileage may vary. I know a number of very experienced engineers that went through hundreds of application over more than a year before finally finding employment. Often there would be several rounds of interviews, sometimes 6!, with several leading to c-suite interviewers saying "you'll be receiving an offer", and then nothing. Ghosted. These are people with decades of experience, big corps, successful startups, extensive contact networks. The DOGE breed of 20 something darlings are in for a rude awakening down the road. I'm very very glad I'm at the tail end of my 40 year career. If I were looking at university enrollment in the present, I don't think I'd choose engineering. The tech industry is just not the employment growth opportunity that it was. I'd choose being an electrician before being an electrical engineer in the current conditions...

xtracto 1y ago
You made me login to reply :) , thanks. Back in the early 2000s when I was finishing my Software Engineer BSc degree I saw the choice of becoming a "generalist" vs becoming a "specialist". I actually liked EVERYTHING technology wise: From Neural Networks to Game development (graphics with OpenGL) to algorithms, Web development, to Java JNI, assembler and whatnot. I couldn't see myself focusing in one thing. Fast forward to 2025, I'm 44 years old and have been 24 years in the industry. In the last 5 years I've had 3 jobs: One, helping a startup move form a non-scalable monolith system (ruby) to a very scalable microservices one. I was CTO of a crypto-exchange company, building ECS/nodejs based microservices and then an App (React Native). And right now I am helping some young guys in a startup doing AI based Tax reconciliation (helping exporting companies recover their VAT). In my opinion, right now is the BEST moment to be a developer. Coding with Cursor is magic. Implementing an API in python with FastAPI is so freaking easy and quick. I don't have to worry about recalling a lot of details, but mainly think on problem solving. I have the hypothesis that the people that are struggling are the "specialists". Suddenly with AI it doesn't matter that you know the in and outs of Java, Hybernate and the whole stack. There's more value in solving problems. I am happy that I chose the "generalist" path. I think AI will reduce the demand the "specialist" skillset.
- JohnMakin 1y ago

ponow 1y ago

Could it be that your particular position required more ongoing learning, and that has kept you better prepared for a changing world? What fraction of positions require that ongoing learning, or at least to that degree? Also, consider many other jobs, are they doing their job, and the doing of their job itself provides the experience that makes you a more valuable worker? Or is the doing of the job basically a necessary distraction from the actual task of preparing yourself for a future job? What fraction of humanity actually takes on two jobs, the paying job and the preparing-for-the-next-job? Might doing the latter get you fired from the former? Most importantly, is doing that latter job getting more important over time, that is, are our jobs less secure? If so, is this what is an improving economy, rising, as it were, with GDP?

CrimsonRain 1y ago
if you are in computer engineering and you are not doing "ongoing learning", you deserve to be left behind. While the company should provide some opportunities for learning, ultimately, it is your responsibility.
- endemic 1y ago
  What's your strategy for continuing education?
  - vel0city 1y ago
    I tend to hop into projects even if I only have a cursory knowledge of the platform and spend time ferociously reading the docs as I catch up to speed. I ask a lot of questions of those who do know parts of it. If I hear something I don't know or understand in a meeting I always write it down and research it later. In a dev environment, I poke at things. Back up that config file, tweak some things, see what happens. Take stuff apart, put it back together. Revert things to put it back when I'm done. It's the dev environment, it's supposed to be shaken up and messed with. With code, I find a good debugger for whatever new platform I'm trying to get into. Put some break points into interesting spots, step into to the function, step into, step into. See what's really happening. Inspect all the things. How does this thing actually tick? Watch it spin. When an employer offers any time for training, I take it. I try and get as much out of it as I can. My employer offers some continuing education reimbursement. I use it. And I try and also teach things at my place of employment. This forces me to actually challenge what I do know and really dig into the topic. Sometimes I find out what I thought I knew wasn't really true! We have a regular meeting on Monday afternoons to share and talk technology. I usually talk Kubernetes and containers on the third Mondays, digging deep into how all that stuff actually works. And it's not just me rambling for an hour, we usually get good discussion going about the focus on the talk and I end up learning something knew even though I'm the one presenting! Make time in your work schedule to spend some time learning every week. Make yourself a 30 minute or 1 hour recurring meeting with only you. And finally, there's probably a lot of small dead time moments you have in your life. I'm not saying make all of those focused on learning tech, but if even a third of the time you would have spent doing something else unproductive you instead catch a few more minutes of a training or listen to a lightning talk from a programming conference you'll slowly still glean new stuff and find more topics to dig into when you get a chance.

harmmonica 1y ago

Pure speculation, but I wonder if it's not so much AI as tech companies realizing they actually can do more with less. And, again, I have no evidence to back this up other than "feels," but I swear when Elon bought Twitter and cut so much of the workforce that's when sentiment seemed to shift materially. I wonder if that wasn't a bit of an "aha" moment for mega tech and tech in general. It's like all the major companies said maybe we don't need as many people as we have. Of course people are going to debate whether the changes at Twitter had a monumentally-negative impact (they may very well have in terms of revenue, but I'm not so sure in terms of absolute or even relative profit). Of course, as a sibling comment, I think, said it could be the end of ZIRP. But maybe the truth is it's end of ZIRP, seeing a "peer" shed employees en masse and not fail outright, and AI. Twitter deal in 2022. Headcount by year for a few (not suggesting this data supports my theory; just sharing to reality check)... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platforms/number-of-employees https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platform... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/number-of-employees https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/numb... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/number-of-employees https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/number-... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/number-of-employees https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/num... Edit: grammar

sapphicsnail 1y ago
Do people see Elon's takeover of Twitter as a success? I think he leveraged Twitter as a social media platform to make himself wealthy, but as far as I can tell, the actual company has been losing a ton of money.
- pclmulqdq 1y ago
  For every engineer who sees things not working on the site and going unfixed, there's a manager who sees how many people still use it.
- giobox 1y ago
  Ignoring the financial aspects, I agree to some extent with OPs opinion this trend of doing more with less engineers really took off following Elon reducing Twitters headcount. It's worth remembering Twitter was a buggy mess before Elon bought it. Sure it's still a buggy mess today, but the staffing costs are dramatically lower. Losing a ton of money was something Twitter was also pretty good at even before Elon too - only profitable 2 years out of the 8 leading up to the acquisition while it was still a public company etc.

JKCalhoun 1y ago

Honestly, his power-wash business is likely his redemption. If I was running into the kind of wall he was trying to get a coding job [1], I think I, like him, would be looking at a career change. When I was in the Bay Area, living on a street of white-collar professionals, the one "blue collar" guy on the block had a house painting business. It's probably no surprise he began as a painter himself, working for someone else. He was smart enough to know how to bail and go into business for himself. That eventually lead to him hiring others. He's the boss now. When I retired and left the neighborhood, his day appeared to begin with going out to the various job sites that day and see that his crew were on task, knew the plan. He played golf most of the middle of the day. By the afternoon he went around the sites to see how his guys had done. In the evening with the garage door open, he would be at a small desk doing books, whatever. Have pickup truck will travel. [1] The jobs are going to come from knowing people already employed that can say, "Hey, we have an opening — I'll send your resume to my boss."

bradgessler 1y ago

It feels like we're in a phase where hiring is slow for a lot of reasons: 1. Lot's of great talent on the market. It's a great time to be owning a company right now in terms of hiring. 2. The reality and perception of AI making it possible to do "more with less". I can imagine conversations playing out today, "we need to hire more developers" with the rebuttal, "ok, what about AI? Let's see how far it will go without hiring more people" 3. Even without AI, software teams can do more with less because there's simply much better tooling and less investment is required to get software off the ground. 4. Interest rates and money is simply more expensive than it was 3-5 years ago, so projects need to show greater return for less money. It does feel like the reality and perception of AI hasn't converged yet. There's a general sense of optimism that AI will solve a lot of huge problems, but we don't really know until it plays out. If you believe history rhymes, humans will figure out what AI does well and doesn't do so well. Once that's worked out, the gap between perception and reality will close and labor markets will tighten up around the new norm.

teeray 1y ago
> I can imagine conversations playing out today, "we need to hire more developers" with the rebuttal, "ok, what about AI? Let's see how far it will go without hiring more people" That is almost certainly happening. What needs to play out for the pendulum to swing the other way is all of these companies realizing that their codebase has become a bunch of AI-generated slop that nobody can work on effectively (including the AIs). Whether that plays out or not is an open question: how much slop can the AI generate before it falls over?
- kyleee 1y ago
  That’s what I am wondering as I aggressively spew technical debt into the universe, is the sudden accelerated creation of technical debt going to be good or bad for my long term job prospects?
araes 1y ago
> It does feel like the reality and perception of AI hasn't converged yet I learned a word cruising Reddit the other day that summarizes that issue quite well - "liminal". At the time, it was in the context of malls, and the collapse of American storefront consumerism, yet the issues are similar: "relating to the transitional stage of a process", or "the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage" > general sense ..., but we don't really know ... the gap between perception and reality will close and labor markets will tighten up We're stuck in that in-between land where your 2) seems like it's often the response to most suggestions. We'll, we don't really want to take a risk ... cause tomorrow AI may make that choice irrelevant. We don't really want to invest ... cause tomorrow AI may make our investment worthless. We don't really want to hire more people ... cause tomorrow AI may do their jobs easily. And there's always that number 3) sensation somewhere "your team can do more, you're just not leveraging tools enough".

didibus 1y ago

> I come from poverty. my father was a drug addict who is dead. my mother is disabled and i’m helping support her. my grandparents are dead. my friends are on the west coast, dealing with similar financial hardships and they are already living with their parents and on couches. I’m not above asking for help, but there is no one to ask. I wonder how much this factors in. We know from statistic this situation tends to lead to worse outcomes. Basically those connections you are talking about, are some form of nepotism and a kind of privilege. Should it be this way?

bobsomers 1y ago
I don't think nepotism is what we're talking about here. I don't come from poverty, I come from a firmly middle class background. We were a single income household where my dad was a public attorney. Nobody in my immediate or extended family worked in tech. Over the course of my ~15 year career, I've built up a fairly extensive network of former coworkers, many of who I'm sure would try to hire me or get me referrals at their companies if they found out I was on the market. None of this was built through nepotism, as I literally had no connections in tech when I started out. So, that's the question. The author claims they have had a 20 year career. What happened to all those connections? Do they have a bunch of connections, but no prior coworkers would want to work with them again?
- squigz 1y ago
  I don't think GP was talking about TFA - and thus not a professional network - with regards to nepotism, but rather being able to depend on family. In any case, networks can be hard to build and maintain, and they can easily fall apart if you fall into a rut.
- em-bee 1y ago
  as i wrote in my other comment, for myself a 20 year career only led to a dozen or so meaningful connections. and, in my culture, using connections to get a job or a deal IS considered nepotism if not outright corruption.

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shawnfrompdx 1y ago

i get where you are coming from. i tried 5 versions of my resume in the last year. talking to recruiters. shotgunning resumes. hand crafting one-off cover letters. I have tried many approaches. you can guage my resume for yourself. the current strategy is to pander to people who are mainly looking for ai-dev skills https://shawnfromportland.com/Shawn_K_Resume_2025-4.pdf https://shawnfromportland.com/Shawn_K_Resume_2025-4.pdf

Aurornis 1y ago
If you're up for some unsolicited feedback from someone who has read a lot of resumes: This is one of the more chaotic and difficult to parse resumes I've seen. Can I suggest you try returning to a standard resume format where you simply list jobs in chronological order with short bullet points underneath each one? You lead your Professional Summary with a point about using AI coding tools and the #1 skill you list in the skills box is "Vibecoding". It's good to keep up with AI-assisted tools, but putting "Vibecoding" in your resume is an instant turn off for most people. Vibecoding is associated with poor software quality, not professional development. I'd remove that word from your resume and never put it back. Your job duty bullet points are very wordy but convey little at the same time. You have 3 jobs in a row where you "Built award-winning state of the art web experiences" but I have no idea what technologies you used, what your role was on the team, what the websites actually did, how many users were served, or any other useful information. At minimum you need to list some technologies. Your entire personal brand is "shawnfromportland" but you apparently live on the other side of the country? I understand the attachment to your username, but you have far more "Portland" on your resume than "New York". If you're applying to any local jobs, the Portland branding is an obstacle for anyone scanning 100s of resumes who doesn't have time to consume every little detail and resolve ambiguities. Using 1/5th of the page for context-less name dropping of skills isn't helpful. Delete that box and list specific skills in specific jobs. With 20 years of experience it's impossible to know if each skill you list is something you read a Wikipedia page about or used at 5 of your jobs.
- twic 1y ago
  Suggest hosting the resume on http://imlivinginnewyorkthesedaysbutimstill.shawnfromportland.com http://imlivinginnewyorkthesedaysbutimstill.shawnfromportlan...

ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago

I suspect it's not AI. > dismissing me when they find out my dinosaur age of 42 I gave up, after encountering this (at 55). It's been a thing for quite some time (more than the 2.5 years he mentions). What's annoying, is that the very people doing the dismissing, are ones that will soon be in those shoes. I believe ol' Bill Shakey called it "Hoist by your own petard."

rr808 1y ago

> I’m about 10 years into my career and I constantly have to learn new technology to stay relevant. Sounds like you dont have kids to help look after or a parent to care for, and you're still in the desirable age to hire from. Wait another ten years after you help kids with their homework or sports in the evening and dont have energy to work on a side projects.

JohnMakin 1y ago
This is a crazy assumption and really insulting to parents or non-parents and wrong on nearly every count.
- JohnMakin 1y ago
  Don't know why I'm being downvoted. Almost everything assumed in the GP comment about me is wrong. I'm north of 40 and I have dependents. Don't blame your decision to have kids for your failures or deficits. It's a really annoying thing people do and inevitably gets projected onto the children, who didn't ask to be here in the first place.
  - rr808 1y ago
    You do have a good angle that it is entirely possible. I dont think we're "blaming" children though, just the reality that a young single person with 10 years experience likely has a lot more spare time and energy than those older. Saying its easy to keep working long hours and learning new waves of technology likely aren't sustainable.
  - oldandboring 1y ago
    It's because the experience of so many parents these days is exhaustion. There just aren't enough hours in the day. In my experience it often turns out that if a fellow parent has significantly more personal time than me (for side projects, exercise, whatever) it turns out there is an unequal distribution of labor in the household. For example, a spouse who doesn't work who handles all the domestic stuff could allow the other spouse more free time. That same stay-at-home-spouse could find themselves with a lot of free time as the kids get older and require less hands-on parenting. That sort of thing.

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georgeecollins 1y ago

>> Also find it odd that 20 years of experience hasnt led to a bunch of connections that would assist in a job search - my meager network has been where I’ve found most of my work so far. I had the same impression. Anyone reading this who is younger: at some point in your life your employment will probably mostly depend on the connections you make to your successful peers, the companies you start, or the products/ technologies you are associated with. When you are starting, strangers will hire you off of your resume. At some point this effectively stops and if people aren't familiar with you or your work they will not consider you. This has been true long before LLMs existed.

em-bee 1y ago
it really depends on how your career is developing. the last 10 years i worked for a single company. i made a few connections there. but except one they are all my junior and themselves don't have enough connections so that they could refer me. beyond that there may be a dozen more. i talked to almost all of them. nothing so far. they either work in small companies that are not hiring, or in big ones where they can't influence the hiring process. add to that that where i am from using connections to get a job is frowned upon, bordering on corruption. the one connection that did give me work was an acquaintance i made at a tech meetup about two years ago, who then connected me to someone interested in working with me. but even then it took almost a year before we started working. and it's only a part time gig, not enough to cover expenses. otherwise i did get 3 or 4 interviews out of more than 100 applications. not a single offer though.

karaterobot 1y ago

It's hard to say for sure without knowing his whole situation, but I will agree with you that when I hear someone say they've submitted 750 applications, my first thought is that they're taking a machine gun approach, applying to a lot of jobs in a short time. I was always taught that you tailor your resume to the position you're applying for, and apply only after doing a lot of research on the company to know whether you are suitable for their position. I'm older than the author of this post, and applied for my most recent job at about his age—though it was a few years ago, before AI was really a consideration. In my entire life, I've probably applied to ~25 positions, made it to the final round 8 times, and been hired 6 times. Knock on wood that he's wrong about the cause of his current frustration, because that means it's fixable.

JohnMakin 1y ago
That is my approach as well. It ends up being a lot less work than the machine gun approach.

kagakuninja 1y ago

I am 61, and have been working for almost 40 years. I don't really have a lot of personal connections, because I am on the autistic spectrum. Yes, I have many former co-workers linked on LinkedIn, but to most of those people, I'm just an old acquaintance, not someone they are going to phone up with a hot new job opportunity. The exception is one college friend who did help me get multiple jobs at startups, but he retired several years ago. Establishing and maintaining relationships is hard, and many of us are simply not good at it. Now I did make sure to stay in touch with a couple ex-managers who I knew would be good references. One of them even helped me get an interview. But even when I had a connection on the inside of a company, all that really does is move me to the head of the line, past the HR screen. I still have to interview, something I still suck at despite decades of practice.

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starik36 1y ago

I see you already have 27 replies...but I'll throw in my two cents. I didn't believe it was this bad until I was made to believe it. My kid with 1 year full time experience at a FAANG adjacent company and a 6 month internship prior to that, is simple unable to get ANY interviews at all. And he is genuinely good at software development, much better than I was at his age. I was skeptical, I thought his approach was wrong, I thought this and that. He let me take over his job looking process for a week. I submitted over 100 applications for positions local and remote - positions that he is qualified to do. Not a single interview. Not even a phone screen. Compare this with when I left college. Interviews were available at the drop of a hat.

Philadelphia 1y ago
That doesn’t seem to be particularly unusual at the start of a career. When did you leave college? When I graduated 22 years ago, basically no one in my (Ivy League) class had a job lined up, and a lot of us didn’t find one until a year later.
- myth_drannon 1y ago
  My anecdotal experience is very different. It's possible that you graduated just after the dotcom bust. Couple of years later and it was very easy for a new grad to get an offer without that much effort.
  - Philadelphia 1y ago
    I know at least that it was back to that from 2008 - 2010, because I was involved in hiring then. The small company I was working for got swamped with new graduates. We ended up hiring more than we planned to, because they would work for so little. I think generally, historically, being able to get a high-paying job right out of college with no effort is an anomaly that people just got used to treating as normal due to the periods of free money and fast growth because of the new and growing Internet, and free money. They’re gone now, and with the way things are, they’re unlikely to come back.

arkh 1y ago

> I’d be really curious what this person has spent the majority of their career working on I feel like early career is a huge factor. As a young person you'll be ok to be a junior when joining a company working on high scale problem. You're also ok with companies working on low scale. But 10 years later, most high scale companies won't even think about hiring you for anything but junior position if you've never got to work on high scale operations. And that's not the kind of experience you can easily get on your own time. So if you've accepted to work for small scale companies at the start of your career? You're stuck unless you accept a huge salary cut (and that's if you pass the "too qualified/old for this position" filter).