It's not just you.

I have an Ivy league degree, worked in deep learning since alexnet at a leading startup in the space, was a CTO of a startup that got acquired and have referrals from very senior people at the top FANG companies and still struggled to get interviews.

I also have research scientist friends with Neurips papers, ones that solved long standing open math problems and even they are struggling to get hired.

What me and my friends heard from a lot of people at the large companies was that many of them are no longer hiring in the US, but in India, Poland and Brazil instead, and that the roles they have listed in the US are for internal transfers. I've had a referral for Google for months and did not get an interview for NYC based roles, but when I went to an ML conference in Warsaw a few months ago I learned that Google is looking to hire 2000 people there, but with people in that office making ~1/4th of my friends in the US.

On top of that you have a huge pool of bootcamp grads and foreign applicants so any role posted gets 1000s of applications in the first few hours, making it impossible for recruiters to look over all of them.

And if that wasn't enough we're going through a huge hiring downturn post the COVID bump, see: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE

Yes, this is what everybody I know is experiencing right now.

Caveat lector: This is simply a retelling of my personal experience, YMMV. This is not advice.

What has consistently worked for me: I stopped applying for jobs, and redirected all that effort into creating and publishing open source projects that demonstrate competence in the areas of work I want. And, just as importantly, I contribute to big established open source projects in those areas too.

I did not apply for my current job (started 6 months ago): they solicited me, based on my open source work. All the best jobs I've had have been like that, this is the 3rd time it worked.

When I'm unemployed, I only apply for jobs I actually want, typically spending an hour each on 0-2 extremely targeted applications per week. But I treat churning out new open source stuff as my full time job until somebody notices. In addition to successfully landing me three great jobs over the past decade, this approach has made me a much much better programmer.

Also, I strongly believe spending hours a day writing new code will enhance your ability to pass technical interviews much more than gamified garbage like leetcode.

A huge part of making this work is not living a typical valley lifestyle: I plan my life around the median national salary for a software engineer, and when I'm making more than that it all goes straight into my savings. In the bay, that requires living frugally (by bay standards...), but I can't even begin to put into words how grateful I am to past-decade-me for living like that and giving today-me the freedom to turn down the bad jobs and wait for the good ones. Obviously, I don't have children.

I do a lot more open source than a typical programmer in the valley, but I don't think I'm "exceptional" in any sense: you just have to put in the work. I do feel like I was very lucky to start my career in an extremely open-source-centric role, and in fairness that gives me a leg up here which I am probably inclined to underestimate.

My thoughts from ~ 6 weeks ago:

>> This is the toughest market I've ever seen. I easily made it to on-sites at FAANG a few years ago and now I'm getting resume rejected by no-name startups (and FAANG). The bar has also been raised significantly. I had an interview recently where I solved the algorithm question very quickly, but didn't refactor/clean up my code perfectly and was rejected.

I've since landed one decent offer, but mostly got lucky (the sys design interview was about an obscure optimization problem that I specialized in for years - though I didn't let on that fact)

Between that time, I failed multiple interviews (always solving the question, but never quickly or cleanly enough).

Companies are incredibly slow to respond back (up to 4 weeks from time of application to first interaction with a recruiter).

Some companies are incredibly demanding (recruiter screen -> tech screen -> tech screen -> take-home test -> group discussion about take-home test -> behavioral / culture interview).

Don't think it's about race. It's just an employers' market. And if you refuse to jump through the hoops, somebody else will.

For reference, the last company on my resume is a top tier company that every recruiter has heard of.

I've been out of a job for most of the past year. While sending Merry Christmas texts to my friends, I had a conversation with one (another programmer, different technologies and industry) where he revealed he was laid off last month.

I keep applying for jobs, and recently accepted the possibility to relocate for an on site position (because staying where I am and hoping to get a remote position hasn't worked out). I just had a promising lead in Texas 'move forward with another candidate'... argh!

Companies aren't willing to train people, not even their current employees. They want their candidates to come prepackaged with at least X years experience in Y technologies for several technologies. Their unwillingness to budge created the H1B catastrophe we see now. I'm more than willing to replatform my skillset (B2C Commerce Cloud to Shopify, or Java to .NET, for example), but no one's offering.

Looking around at the big picture, it seems that most money is leaving tech to chase higher returns elsewhere. If you aren't doing AI or crypto, it feels that you're fighting over bones. The scraps were gone a long time ago.

You're definitely not alone. (I am glad you're writing this because I thought I was alone here as well)

I am currently applying to ~15 jobs a day starting late Sep till now mostly on Linkedin. I know it might not be the best time to look due to holidays. When wake up the next day finding 3-5 "decided not to move forward" So then I think theres something wrong with my resume? So I update it a little each day, its an unless cycle I have probability done this 50+ times now? Also seeing 100+ job applicants even after the job posting has been up for only a few hours.

Also approaching 2 decades of experience, also white American (they always ask on applying). I have a bachelors degree but its in Interactive Media taught myself everything else.

I am one month away to moving back home with my brother because I can only afford another one month rent on Credit Card until its maxed out.

Free time I just spend it learning learning learning, and an hour gym routine helps with stress. I try not to think about the situation that I am in or the job market.

All we can do is try our best everyday, theres only so much we can do and stressing out is the worst thing for the mind/body.

I was let go from my last job. Also no CS degree. Had no LinkedIn either (deleted years ago). Had to create a resume from scratch. The only thing I had was about a decade of experience.

I started by creating a resume and LinkedIn and aggressively optimized both as much as possible. Using a ATS checker I found online, I got a score of 96 for my resume after numerous changes (29 changes after a few weeks).

I started applying aggressively (and tracking) immediately after being let go. I’m pretty sure early rejections were because my resume was awful.

After nearly 2 months, 588 applications, with an average 10% response rate within an average of 10 days per response, I had 16 move to interview stages and 2 final offers. I accepted one of them (it checked all my boxes for what I wanted so didn’t have to compromise). I had 3 referrals but none of those materialized to interviews or offers. I did not work with any recruiters.

Market is bad, no doubt about that. I can’t speak to the experience of others but I’m convinced my response rate is good enough and it’s a numbers game.

This happened earlier this year.

Some stats for those who think it may influence my results:

40s Asian male. US Citizen. So no VISA needed and not white and don’t check any DEI boxes.

This is for Senior SWE IC role.

I’m self-employed so I don’t have personal experience, but all around me (in Berlin) people are struggling to find work. I have more unemployed friends than ever and they stay unemployed for longer than ever. Others are afraid to risk their job in any way. Employers got bolder in their demands and English-speaking workers are fighting for scraps. The UX industry is absolutely cutthroat right now.

I work in immigration and my colleagues in the industry noticed the difference in skilled immigration. It even affected the overpriced temporary housing market that mostly targeted skilled immigrant workers. Freelance relocation consultants report having their worst year on record.

I also noticed a dip in traffic but it might be caused by Google’s plundering of the web with its AI summaries. I can’t tell if the actual demand changed. I run a website that helps immigrants settle.

It’s generally accepted in Germany that things are not great right now. I could likely find matching evidence in yearly reports, but the vibe alone is telling.

I am wondering if this is not just "normal".

If we look back tech jobs have been growing fast since at least the 90s.

We have basically put everything on computer and the internet in the last decades with some obvious efficiency gains. But how far should we continue to invest in this and expecting a return on investment?

At the same time, in the west, agriculture or manufacturing jobs have been annihilated. Could they see that coming?

Probably no as it was not that obvious from their point of view.

At least in the west, first world or whatever you want to call it, most people need cheaper housing, cheaper energy, less taxes and bureaucracy. This is just what most young people complain about.

People do not complain they need more computers, smart thing or self driving cars. They might actually need less of this but still consume it because it is in fact the things they can afford.

Also in the EU there is a growing and undeniable regulatory framework which is destroying the local tech industry.

What I mean is we could see the type of shift that you only see once in a lifetime. Where computer tech see the same fate as agriculture and manufacturing had.

Hard to tell if this is just a hiccup or the start of the destruction of the tech jobs market.

Remember that two things have changed the employment landscape:

- the end of zero interest rate policies mean that investments in projects can’t show a return “someday” but actually have to show some benefit on a reasonable timeline, say 2-3 years. Gone are the days when hiring armies of warm bloodies and having them work on “moon shots”.

- the expiration of the tax write off for programmer salaries when developing a new product.

The bottom line is that most of the market is now very price sensitive (hence trying to find the cheapest labor i.e. less experienced or overseas devs) and that devs in high-cost geographic areas now need to be extra productive to complete.

The longest period of unemployment I've ever experienced ended about 6 months ago. I was unemployed for 11 months. The company that finally hired me was intentionally targeting people with lots of experience. I have that. They also pay less than I used to make but I took it because I needed a job.

Previous to that period of unemployment, my resume tended to get noticed. I got interviews from 3 applications out of 5. But this time, it was 3 out of 150.

Read that last paragraph again. My resume has not gotten worse. I still have decades of experience, a master's degree and a bunch of patents. That used to count for something.

My conclusion is that the market has gotten much worse for people with experience who don't hide being white and male.

> most of them claim to be white males

There’s really no need to call this out repeatedly as if something sinister is happening. Despite ongoing efforts, the overwhelming majority of tech workers are… white males. So yes, the largest number of voices complaining about joblessness are unsurprisingly going to be white males.

Wherever there is difficulty, there is also opportunity.

I think the major thing stopping people from just going their own way is healthcare coverage. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)

I wonder if I can hack a business model that somehow provides healthcare but also gathers together sourced projects, and freelancers to bid on building them, while also getting healthcare. (And if you opt out of healthcare, you can take the difference. Maybe.) It may not result in 100% employment, but it could potentially provide a source of income while looking for something more fulltime. And I would help coordinate, while also vetting people.

Also, not sure if related to the difficulty in tech, but it might depend on your ethnicity, and not in the way you might think: https://fox11online.com/news/nation-world/major-us-companies...

I see this as a combination of three forces at play: AI, WFH, and Skillset--all adding downward pressure to hiring talent in the U.S.:

1) While A.I. may now be only adding 10-20% of productivity gains, the rapid pace of improvement leaves open the possibility that tha gains can be soon much more than that. So, instead of scaling your company now, if you can afford to, wait out a bit and see where this goes.

2) Even though much of BigTech is clawing back WFH, startups aren't as much. And once you introduce WFH to your culture and processes, it is hard to reason with the idea that you should pay $200K/year for an engineer when it can cost you a fraction (possibly 20-50% of that) to hire them remotely from another country, when also nowadays most of these remote employees are more than willing to work in EST/PST timezones. This used to be the case before COVID, but now many more startups have accepted and adapted to the idea of WFH.

3) While advanced skillsets and deep experience is necessary in many (but not most) startups, and while these skills are more difficult to find in India or Pakistan, the reality is, for many, many tech companies, most of the work doesn't require top-notch skills. You don't need a top 99% percentile in frontend engineering skills for a 1-year-old "name whatever category" app. And with the recent rise of focus on profitability, frugality, and the difficulty in fund-raising, being cognizant of cost per talent is now a thing.

I think Elon and Vivek's comments are more nuanced than they are taken. Elon, given he's at the cutting edge of engineering, must be having difficulty hiring top-99.9%-percentile talent against BigTech, and wants to open the pool of these types of talent from elsewhere. I don't think he wants H1Bs for React Native engineers. I am interpreting his comments as "I want to suck-in all A.I. researchers into America".

Think it's a confluence of a couple separate things:

* End of ZIRP

* Musk's twitter firing spree being watched & emulated by others. i.e. there was rest & vest happening & execs realised some fat can be cut

* Bootcamp generation has moved beyond entry level and is now competing with more established players

* Entire thing just naturally goes in waves

* More fractured/specialised field. Language/Framework/Job description feels like things are more granularly sliced these days

* AI whether real or illusionary has some execs focused on things other than "lets hire humans"

I know you specifically said you don't have a degree, but never the less the comment section gives me mega flashbacks to what happened with MBAs around 2010/2013. Same pattern.... everyone had been pushing MBAs as the "good" career path, schools were pumping out grads, and then the music stopped. I watched friends who dropped $150k+ on top MBA programs struggle to land jobs that would let them pay off their loans. The career offices kept pushing the "average starting salary" stats but those numbers were getting propped up by a small number of graduates landing PE/consulting gigs while a much larger group was fighting for corporate roles paying half that. The MBA eventually found a new equilibrium but the "MBA golden age" was over. Starting to feel like we're watching the same movie with tech, the industry isn't dying but the days of "learn to code" being a pretty safe path to upper middle class might very well be ending. As with any concentration, the smartest MBA grads I knew were the ones who treated it as a tool to build actual skills rather than just a credential.

I haven't been able to get a job since the pandemic.

The problem is that I work best as a lone wolf, and that's not how software is done nowadays. For good reason, I might add, so I am not complaining.

Don't make my mistake and learn your soft skills.

https://gavinhoward.com/2024/06/my-programming-journey/

Adding a topline response echoing the same thing.

Been on the job hunt since October 1, and have done hundreds of applications, yet only spoken to 3 companies, and made it past the hiring manager once.

I’m a technical product manager with 10+ years and most recently was head of product at a healthtech company. It seems like none of my experience or background matters for the initial screen.

The most frustrating part has been spending time to update a resume and a cover letter to get a rapid rejection obviously done via AI. The fastest rejection I’ve received was 2 minutes.

It is at the point where the information-asymmetry between company and applicant is so high that I don’t think it is worth the time or effort to craft a customized resume and cover letter to match the job description. Not even with the “help” of LLMs.

The promise of Remote hiring now is proving to be a double-edged sword. It can be easier to get hired, but it means competing in an almost global applicant pool.

As a way to keep me occupied I’m building a personal tool to journal my work history and use the journal as a source to leverage an LLM to customize my resume and cover letter to a job description that sounds like me. Just need to keep the momentum up for both the continued job hunt and personal projects.

Though its starting to wear on me.

Creating a throwaway account for simplicity. I was/am a hiring manager, mostly for startups.

Market is rough right now for sure but I also want to share some flags I’d personally note when looking at your website / LinkedIn.

1. You have experience in a lot of technologies, which sometimes is good, but can also be the case where you don’t have expertise in any of them. 2. According to LinkedIn since 2016 most of your gigs were about a year long. You also had a lead engineer gig that lasted eight months. I’m sure you put more info about it in your resume but it’s a pretty big flag considering that it spans not only the downturn but boom periods as well. 3. No well known companies in your list. I know it sucks that pedigree matters so much in our industry but it does. 4. Political posts / complaining on LinkedIn. Having dealt with political stuff at work (from both sides of the isle) it’s such a pain in the ass that my risk management alert kicks in. 5. I see you’re in Denver. Are you applying only for remote gigs? Sadly, a lot of companies are doing RTO and probably not in your area.

Hope this helps a bit. Hope things improve for you soon.

Anecdotally.. but not really. I was worried about the job market but this was unfounded, for me... I started applying in October and had four offers from large tech companies by end of November. A lot of this was through networking to be fair, not “cold applying” (1 was through cold applying, the other 3 through networking).

reach out to former coworkers or friends and ask for referrals. YMMV, but I do not think it is at all that bleak.

Low pay offers.

In Montreal there are plenty of offers paying ~90k CAD/year ( 62k USD/year ) for 15+ years of experience.

There are lot of job listings in Montreal, and those positions are real. Problem is that the pay makes those positions undesirable.

The second problem is that no one hires junior developers. My friend's kid finishing CS studies in May 2025 and prospect for jobs are not good.

To answer your question: No, I did not struggle to find employment. I'm at a FAANG right now, but was shopping around last year for offers, and got decent offers from the likes of Snowflake and Uber. Ended up not taking them because I'm happy where I'm at.

I took a look at your LinkedIn. If I were a hiring manager, I'd be concerned that in the last 8 years you mostly stayed at each company for a year or less and that your longest tenure was 2 years. That would most likely make me pass on your resume.

The market definitely sucks in EU too. A couple of years ago I could choose where to work as a junior dev. These days as a senior I'm happy to cling into my current job, and probably couldn't find anything if I got laid off.

Fresh grads in most other fields aren't doing either, but at least they aren't oversaturated as badly as CS is. Only ones doing fine are medical and social work professionals.

Please allow me to offer some color from the other side of the table. My colleagues and I are/were/have been hiring managers for the past decade or so. Our recent observations regarding the job market:

1. Incumbent programmers became more productive thanks to GPTs. A shop stopped hiring for junior, mid-career positions.

2. Other shops (small and medium) take it further and layoff 10% of the labor, mostly junior guys, to be replaced with GPTs.

3. Another shop (recognizable name in HN) made some offers to strong candidates, and they took the offers without negotiation. Quite unusual in the light of the past decade.

4. The ones that I wanted to hire or got hired at other shops: the going total comp was 500k - 1.5m USD/annum at senior or staff level. And this range applied to outside the bay area as well.

Talking to some headhunters -- we do see a strong hiring market at the senior level or niche markets (e.g. low latency numerical systems), but the junior levels are definitely seeing a transition. My (very obvious now) running hypothesis is that GPT is influencing the market.

I personally haven't observed any systematic or overt racism implied by OP; I do not recall race explicitly coming up in any of the discussions, but yes there is a large pool of foreign-born engineers who are willing to take a lower pay (who are just as productive, especially with GPT), so perhaps this is what the OP's circle is observing.

On a related note, I read an early research showing the impact of GPT on customer service staff productivity. GPT greatly improved the new/bottom performers but did not impact senior/top performers; a result that fits my intuition of how GPT works. I believe that a similar thing is happening at an industrial scale in tech.

I make no moral judgement here. At least on my end, the market is simply acting in line with supply and demand. Nevertheless, my sympathies for those in an unsuccessful quest.

I remember in the early 2000s, computer science was not a very attractive field. The headlines were saying the jobs would go to India. People weren't predicting that in the 2010s, demand would get so high that people would switch careers to do a 3 month boot camp (or equivalent self-study) and then making six figures remotely. To the people who got non-software stem degrees, and went into a stem career, the world of software looked like an alternative reality. Imagine a 3 month bootcamp to become a structural engineer or chemical engineer. To stem folks outside of the software world, the bar being raised feels like a return to normalcy. A lot of the mundane work you used to need an army of coders for is now doable with an LLM in cursor/vs code. Most stem majors take at least one coding class in college, but didn't have the patience to really get into it, but AI has opened that door. I don't want to sound callous or unempathetic, but a chunk of software workers no longer being unemployable makes total sense to those outside the software world. But, give it a few years, surprises often occur, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's another massive software hiring wave.

And if you look at e.g. Bachelor's enrollment in CS it's somehow still rising in Fall of 2024: https://nscresearchcenter.org/stay-informed/

That's gonna be one rude awakening.

So, I must ask for definitions. I found late 2023 and early 2024 very difficult for finding employment (I work as a freelance/consultant/temp programmer), whereas both early 2023 and late 2024 I did get some significant amount.

I know others who are white males like me, and they also found late 2023 and early 2024 to be more challenging than lately.

I should also mention that as a young man I would apply for any job in my chosen field, whereas now I look for jobs that are not just programming, but the kind of programming I wish to do (for example, in my particular case I don't like front-end and I like machine learning but am turned off by what looks like AI-hype in company descriptions). So, am I finding it harder because I am pickier? Or is it actually harder because my standards are higher, because I am fortunate enough that I can (for now, anyway) afford to be picky?

In any case, I found late 2024 to be better than the 12 months before that.

I think your categories ('white male', 'Indian', ...) are a form of racism already. I mean, there are other categories you can use. Outsourcing, offshoring, and nearshoring all describe something similar (cutting costs by replacing the workforce) but do not categorize humans based on racial factors.

I understand this is not the core of your question, but I did not want to leave it uncommented because I think it is inappropriate.

There is plenty of discussion about how hard it is to get or change jobs in tech (even with several years of experience) in the r/womenintech subreddit, along with some discussion about what other industries to potentially pursue instead.

I live in New Zealand, applied for 5 jobs in March 2024, got 2 offers (Atlassian, small startup - both Aus based remote jobs), the other 3 companies didn't move me past resume.

I have a CS degree and over a decade of experience as a full stack dev.

Maybe I just got lucky, but there have always been people out there that seem to apply for hundreds of companies and land nothing. I've also helped some of those people land a job.

IMO it mostly comes down to understanding and preparing for the interview process, and tailoring yourself for the position you're applying for. Sometimes people also need help with blind spots - little things like correctly referring to technologies in their CV, small talk and being personable etc.

I've recruited for many roles in the UK for a very large tech employer (1000s of developers but not a FAANG).

With 20 years experience you'd get through our semi-automated processes and get an interview if the skill sets and employment history matched - regardless of a university level experience.

Are you sure it's the degree that's holding you back?

I'm not advising you lie, as it's fraud, but just adding that over here it would be incredibly rare to ask for proof of academic qualifications from 20 years ago when recruiting such an experienced hire.

I myself have around 20 years experience, I have a degree but god knows where the certificate is and additionally the university who issued it no longer exists.

Although my degree is adjacent somewhat it is not in CS. I've never been asked to show it to anyone, never asked a hire for theirs either.

You have to apply to jobs at places that are smaller, growing, and aren’t using an automated resume filter.

Another piece of anecdata: a major bank and credit card issuer on the East Coast has started staffing in Mexico. You’ve definitely heard of them or even actually use their services if you’re American. They led a multi-year long tech “transformation” for which they hired heavily, especially new CS graduates. That’s now been scaled back considerably, and it’s H1B contractors as far as the eye can see. The irony is that the Indian H1Bs that undercut the local workforce are now being undercut themselves by Mexican contractors.

I haven’t found it harder than any other time since 2014 to be honest. In Sweden now, previously Palo Alto, previously Oxford/London, but remote since 2018.

The only thing that might be niche in my position is I focus on SDET contract roles while having a general dev background? I moved into SDET work originally to join a company that used Haskell because I couldn’t get a dev role there, and enjoyed it so stayed in the domain.

Ends up it’s been fairly easy to find work ever since!

I haven't had a hard time finding employment. I am going to start at a FAANG next week, coming from another FAANG. I work in embedded / hardware. I think what is being asked for is changing and people are being caught flat footed. We don't need more web or backend devs, we have so many of those. The world of embedded can't hire enough because the scope of embedded has increased. It's no longer just writing bare metal C on a tiny microcontroller, it has expanded to writing applications for embedded Linux for custom devices that are more tricked out than desktops 20 years ago. It's easier than ever to build an SoC and a device and so many companies need people to write software for them. I think it's hard to outsource because frequently it requires lab space (unless you're working on pure compute devices) and companies don't want to ship prototypes and devkits overseas. So there are industries that are hiring lots of Americans.

Also this might be a hot take, I don't agree with Elon or Vivek's plan to outsource, but I do think tech has done this to itself. Why are so many startups and tech companies so bloated with engineers? I worked at a company that sold VERY complex factory and plant monitoring software to companies around the world. It's engineering team was about 500 people supporting a wide range of products and different levels of the stack. Companies with way less complex software and less software volume have way more bloated engineering orgs and are way less efficient. Because, fundamentally most people are bad at software engineering (which is different from just programming and pure CS), including grads from MIT. A lot of companies are outsourcing because if everybody isn't that great, they might as well pay less for something that isn't good. The companies that have simple products and have crap engineers are the ones outsourcing.

Agree the rate of top US companies hiring foreign tech workers has massively increased in the past decade. But no, its not at the expense of US citizen employees. I work at a FAANG (5+ years at one, 10_+ years in other big companies). We are actively hiring great talent. The majority is white males, because...statistics. HR recruiters try to serve us a diverse pool of resumes/candidates to screen but its actually hard to find enough to fill all the roles we're hiring for (in cloud computing). Results in teams of mainly white males. Hopefully your 'anecdotal experiences shared online' are just a subset of the few that don't make it past an initial screen vs. the majority that do.

35, male, American citizen. applied to 800 jobs, few technical interviews, no offers. i believe with the advent of AI, the landscape has changed faster than the job market has corrected for it. It will never go back to the glory days of tech people getting hired, its over.

I got laid in June and was unemployed for 2 months. I'm from Bengaluru, India.

Job market here is really bad. There are companies from USA that are opening offices India but the no openings are less than the job seekers.

I have friends who are unemployed for 6 months or more. Companies don't want to match previous compensation. They want candidates at the lowest price and best skills.

There is a leetcode inflation and getting interviews is the most challenging part.

The "white males" bit is not useful/helpful. But US resident vs non is probably a bit.

There are several layers to this.

Layer one is that SW Eng work has always been both multi modal and that it's never been easy to get out of the trash distributions (e.g. $40-$60k "analyst" or "programmer" gigs, etc.) if you end up there. And it's also never been easy for someone to get a degree and find a job w/o having internships, years of part time work or other experience, or connections.

Anecdata, but a solid number of my CS graduating class more than a decade ago who were more than good enough to work in CS struggled to figure out how to find a first position if they didn't happen to have gotten internships, worked in the field before graduation, etc. While the best off got Google or MS internships that the majority of my class didn't even apply for. And even then, the majority of the jobs were for 4+ years of experience.

Add to this over the past decade many outfits have started to hire substantial numbers of overseas remote workers. For the most part, I think many companies fill their junior and slightly up roles with outside of the US remote workers. This has mixed results, but it's usually cheaper to hire several foreign remote workers over one domestic worker, and particularly in cases where time consuming grunt work is needed it can work reasonably. In some ways the H1-B doesn't matter because you can always hire remote foreign workers. The main issues I've seen relate to there being a substantial management load to deal with the amount of stuff lost in translation. I've personally had a better experience w/ South American contractors than Russian/Ukrainian/Slavic or Indian, I think because the timezones match better, English/Spanish/Portuguese seems to be easier to navigate linguistically, and the workers have seemed to better understand what we've needed and been better at showing initiative for some reason.

Then layer AI on top of this and relatively reduced hiring.

I do not think it's a good time to be looking for work, and with every year that's gone by over the least decade it's been worse for junior/early career roles especially.

I haven't seen white males being let go in favor of foreigners, but I have seen a lot of limiting hiring to a few seniors and filling the rest with overseas to save money. AI is only exacerbating. As is the fact that nobody really seems to have money for hiring. So is the desire to hire people who are magically already perfect and spun up for a role, no matter how niche.

In general, I think "white male" is a red herring.

As a white male (I only mention this since you did), I didn't have any trouble finding employment this year. I wrote about my experience here: https://sjer.red/blog/2024/job-hunt/

I do believe the market is pretty bad though, especially for new grads. I don't think it'll ever recover because of AI, and that realistically you'll have to be talented, passionate, or hard-working to work as a software engineer.

Employment is over. It will only erode further from this point on. It will become a club for well connected people and prime corporate candidates.

We need to take employment back on our hands and build small community business.

I’m approaching a year of unemployment, although I took a deliberate four month break. Don’t have a CS degree but am a CPA. Have been primarily targeting accounting and fintech companies, but I’m getting passed up for software engineers with zero accounting knowledge but much more dev experience. It’s been tough, but I’m hoping it will get better in January. I have to at least hope because I really need to get a job ASAP.

Small startup tech-cofounder here so definitely won’t apply to large companies. Only interviewed candidates sourced through referrals because the risk of a wrong hire is way too high for us. I also noticed a pattern where more senior devs tend to not be as hungry as a a younger dev, and I don’t mean accepting a lower pay, in fact we pay higher salaries for a mid level position. We require (relatively) a lot of customer facing time and product management/discovery activities and may not be everyone cup of tea.

2 years been looking, didn't help that I only found out I have ASD which was probably costing me many jobs without realization. But yea, market sucks and we hired someone to come in and cut costs.

Great comments and insights. Thanks to everybody for being constructive. I am also going through the same situation, but in Europe. Despite having a PhD in Machine Learning, somehow I cannot even get to the interviews. I am suspecting it might stupidly have to do with my LaTeX-generated CV which gets desk-rejected by badly design CV screening systems… anyone else sharing my suspicion?

Not really a problem for me but that's because I had the foresight to realize this is the way things are going and that it's time to get into my own thing and start my own companies if I am going to survive. The thing that was the writing on the wall for me ages ago was seeing older programmers with plenty of talent finding it hard to get work in their field, like the ageism thing, if you're past 35 or so and still just doing the labour thing and not in a management position people tend to give you the side eye in this industry...

So yeah if nobody is going to promote you to that you gotta promote yourself and start a company, that has been clear to me for at least 5 years since I did that. It's kind of weird seeing people complain as if this is a race subject though. I think the discrimination may be there for that but it's beyond it too and has been for a LONG time now.

when you look at who is absent at the professional level there's a theme. where are all the high agency operators?

I've spent most of my career contracting and consulting for institutions and the reason I was able to do it was because those institutions had social/diversity hiring mandates that created a huge market for people like me to actually deliver the work while not being a part of the permanent organization. they could all sit in meetings being weird and passive aggressive with each other while I just solved and built stuff. it's been a good run, but the broader economic effects of that trend are becoming unavoidable.

What's changed since the 90's is there is no longer a path from tech practitioner to executive class in any org larger than a startup. the real value of H1-B's is they make up for the conflict-avoidant agreeableness of managers as companies grow larger and become more like institutions, where the effective indenture arrangement means H-1B's have to be supple enough for uncharismatic people to manage them. it's abuse, but it's an ancient dynamic. it would be great if markets de-globalized to where my cultural capital was currency again, but what to hope for and what to do are different things.

Don't look for employment, look for work. the culture and economy don't confer meaningful status from jobs anymore. it's gone, just get work for its own sake. Getting hung up on the racial issue or anything that makes you think in an inferior way or excuses a lack of agency is going to guarantee failure. Who cares what may be true, the only thing that matters is what you can effect.

I’m 65 and I have tenure. If I didn’t, I would leave the country. If I couldn’t, I don’t know what I would do. You do not want to be on the open market in the 2020s, that’s for sure.

it is nearly impossible for people with CS degrees (especially white males) to get an interview let alone a job.

My friend, if you think it’s bad for white men, just wait till you hear what it’s like for black women. 2+ year job searches, for black tech workers, were the norm even in the pre-COVID economy.

It’s terrible for everyone who isn’t in a position to take advantage of geographic arbitrage. And even that, for a worker, is unstable… look at how fast the bastards RTO’d people as soon as their real estate holdings took a hit.

> Have you been fired in favor of foreign workers?

1) I work at a large company everyone in the US has heard of. When I walk in the public areas of the company or at lunch, it looks like we are based in Mumbai. There is no "diversity", it's one country in particular, which is India. (Funnily enough, this demographic isn't reflected in management)

2) I overheard the 4th level (above me) manager complaining to another manager that his department (he oversees the whole floor, let's say a bit under 100 employees) has 30+ open reqs, and HR has only given him a few resumes (unknown what time period this refers to). The last interview I gave was to an H1B who had an audio link in his earbuds to someone who feed him answers to my technical questions.

3) I have 20 years experience, yet this job pays the same amount I was making 10 years ago. There is effectively zero negotiation for salaries. They will happily let you go vs bargain.

4) A previous mega-corp I worked for, GE Healthcare in Wisconsin, looked like India on campus. Utter lack of diversity. I recently got a job solicitation from an Indian recruiter for $40/hr for C++ development at this location.

I think it's very clear that the cat's out of the bag about how to evade high-paying tech salaries. Set the parameters to discourage Americans from hiring, create a bottleneck so that your open reqs last longer, then use their extra-legal powers (unfettered access to congresspeople) to claim they are falling behind profitability, but if they just had those wonderful H1Bs everything will be ok.

I got laid off from Amazon and it took me around 4 months to finally land a job last summer. I did a shotgun approach to applications and make track. I completed 400 applications but only interviewed for 12 companies before getting an offer.

I'm in a similar situation, I do not have a degree but have around a decade of professional experience.

I did recently talk to our tech recruiter and he said we average about 1k applicants a day in each job post and about 95% of them are AI generated slop resumes and his leadership wants him to review every application.

I can’t comment on the current job market, but I was looking for work as a fresh grad in 2021. After applying to 200+ positions I received 5 callbacks, 3 of which were defense contractors. 3.9 GPA in EE at a top 10 state school, 2 internships, several big projects in and outside of school. Mostly applied to RTL and embedded positions, ended up in infosec for various reasons.

Yes, we reached peak tech employment. The market was flooded with job openings from a decade-plus of endlessly increasing VC funding. So a lot of not-technically-inclined people took bootcamps and entered the job market, and for a while there was enough jobs. But with VC funding slowly drying up, and a shaky economy, all those excess jobs are gone. But there's still a ton of people trying to get the jobs.

I have two decades of experience and even I have a really hard time getting an interview. I feel like there's just too many people with my skillset and not that much demand for it [anymore]. Salaries for new jobs have gone down and there's fewer remote positions [thanks, braindead CEOs].

one way out is to get good enough with AI as a tech to automate various yet-to-be-automated industries, find customers, get investors, etc... if you try to get a job for 12 months and fail, isn't it better to try another rout? the AI angle is just one of many

Question for those who lived through it: is this sense that not only is the market over but that it’s permanently over a point of discussion during the dot com crash or 2008? I’ve experienced the former personally but the idea that it’s never going to get better is a little harder to swallow, although that may be pure cope.

I work at Apple and we have a policy (new in 2024) where we are not allowed to make an offer for a manager position to a candidate unless we have interviewed a PoC or a woman for the roll. The stated goal for this policy is “diverse managers hire diverse teams”. So right off the bat we are discriminating based on race and gender.

Look at the published diversity data on the Apple website, the company is now 50% Asian in North America (they stopped publishing the data after 2022 but internally that’s the number now), because it’s cheaper to hire H1B’s and they can’t leave the company.

It’s not surprising that Americans are having trouble finding jobs right now, they are being squeezed by both DEI and cheap labor from abroad.

This topic reminds me of the old interview Bernie Sanders gave nearly a decade ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf-k6qOfXz0

I hope citizens wake up, business interests are not always aligned with your (citizen) economic interest. It doesn't matter if it's legal or illegal immigration, there are economic realities that we should talk about - stop focusing on the color of someones skin.

>I myself have had a difficult time landing an interview over the last year despite having two decades of experience.

Unfortunately many employers see that as a minus, not a plus.

Perhaps a better question is: For those who have recently found new employment; how much trouble did you have to go through in order to land the job?

No it's not just you.

There is a focus in recovering from post pandemic therefore the marching order is to hire only in India in the case of company as a low cost solution.

But I just did an interview in another company and in their case is also low cost but EU.

So yeah. That's the song playing right now.

Longterm unemployed people turn to the armed forces for employment. Intentional?

> it is nearly impossible for people with CS degrees (especially white males)

It's almost like there's some trend of racism, of a systemic kind.

I know of many hiring manager who hire with recruiters that specialise in "diverse" candidates, where diverse means women and people of color only, so they can have better looking "diversity" stats. They certainly have a preference but this has been going since (at least) 2018 - it was true before the massive layoffs of 2023-24 and the end of ZIRP. What changed recently is that the market is really crap.

Incidentally all the people I know looking for a job are white males, but it may just be because they're the majority of people in tech I know anyway.

On legality of the above (given I was pretty sure it was illegal): It's legal, because "positive discrimination" is legal in the relevant EU countries (and in the UK).

The remote work culture won, as well as capitalism. Who wanna pay a local worker 100k/year if a remote worker from small country can do the same job for half of that? I'm almost decade in the field and I'm that worker who is ready to take the half because this is enough in my country. Of course I would be considered poor in US, but here I am rich, and the hiring dynamic is pretty clear, if you want to compete on this market you need to lower your expectations.

Musk wants "hard core" talent, remember Twitter?

He wants people hungry, super motivated and, oh yeah, not too expensive. Remember stories of him eating peanut butter sandwiches and sleeping on floors? He's a frugal/cheap guy.

There's a shortage of Americans willing to meet Musks "brilliant and cheap" spec.

H1bs are cheap(er), hungrier, and sometimes brilliant. And if not brilliant at least "hard core" if required.

Since we can't replace Musk with AI yet, we have a "labor shortage" of cheap, hardcore, brilliant talent. Yup.

wtf is a KZ foreigner

Exploit foreign labour to pick crops, exploit foreign labour to do manufacturing, exploit foreign labour to do tech. At the end of the day, what is left? I keep thinking of that Henry Ford anecdote about factory workers and buying cars.

> Elon Musk and others claim there is an engineer shortage and we must increase the number of H-1B visas in order to fill this gap

There is a shortage of engineers who are willing to work cheap, and to be much more tolerant of shitty working conditions because getting fired = getting deported.

It's not anecdotal. There's no doubt there is a massive downturn in tech and in general right now. There has never before been such large revisions to job numbers. The latest is that massive print of 653k jobs in Q2 was all a lie.

> The massive downward revisions to jobs data are set to continue: latest from PHL Fed has early benchmark indicating jobs DECLINED in Q2 of this year while the initial monthly job reports estimated gains of 653k - the labor market's strength is a fiction..

https://x.com/RealEJAntoni/status/1867368092902601195

Hate to be political here, but anyone that is on this boat and is left-leaning got a taste of their own medicine

Yes. I have 15 years experience of mediocre web development, project management, and product management experience. Most of my development work was building the same CRUD apps over and over in greenfield projects and at small scale, so I never really had professional experience to "level up" and be a better candidate as a developer. Obviously in this job market with lots of other unemployed people with a more clearly good track record, it's very difficult for me to get an interview at all.

I saw an interesting post on X the other day: someone was saying that when people get a degree in something like... music, and they're bad at playing whatever their chosen instrument is, it's not surprising when they don't find employment. For some reason we do have an expectation that even bad or mediocre programmers will get jobs, which was maybe historically true simply due to the high demand for those skills at all, but maybe we're seeing the shift where it no longer is.

I think there's more at play too: many people are more productive in their roles thanks to AI, people are maybe clinging to their jobs more knowing what the job market is like, and companies are probably not spending money like they have been for the past decade due to interesting rates/uncertainty/whatever else.

One anecdote I'll add about foreign workers: my last employer was a software agency/consultancy, and they had probably twice as many developers in a country in southeast asia as they did in the US. I am not clear what the root of the issue was, I think it was probably several things, but that employer did struggle a lot with the results and output of the teams in that country, to the point that their entire office in that country closed down and I think the entire team was laid off. I think the problem was a mixture of poor management on the American side, poor hiring practices on the foreign (I don't like that word) side, cultural differences between expectations in work, communication barriers in terms of them understanding the details of the work that needed to be done, and mismanagement on both sides of the ocean causing poor morale.

I will add, that agency framed the use of foreign workers as a necessity for cost reasons, which I believe to be true. There was work they did with extremely small margins and even with foreign workers, was often times unprofitable. Small businesses just really do not have the budget for teams of software developers to make custom software, and especially not when the development process is an inefficient as it sometimes was at that agency.

disclaimer: really lovely, amazing people all around. great humans. had some understandable flaws. i don't like the use of the word foreign because i don't want to otherize anyone but not sure what other word to use

I'll add my sob story to the pile for the sake of a data point. Warning this story contains racial identity.

White male, 10 yoe, worked at FAANG and many more. I was laid off and remained unemployed for over a year. I only have my new job thanks to nepotism - or referral, if you prefer to be politically correct.

2021 - I land a new job as a senior dev at a startup with a huge salary (200k) thanks to the hiring surge. Things are good, we're all getting along, but my Indian male tech lead confides in me that he's upset that I'm paid as much as he is - he's been with the company longer, and he implies that he works harder. I encourage him to pursue a raise with management, but we maintain a good relationship, I would say friends even.

Fast forward 2 years - My skills are generally recognized by everyone, from peers, to the engineering director, even the VP - everyone has seen what I can do, and they trust and respect me to do good work. Then one day, things aren't so good - I have some home life drama and I drop the ball at work. Meanwhile, my tech lead is stressed out for his own reasons, but its a perfect storm and things boil over. He writes a lengthy (angry) email complaining to management about me, tearing me to shreds. I'm stunned and try to defend myself, some people go to bat for me, but its Dec 2022 and that email puts me on the short list when the layoff wave strikes - I'm out of work.

Its months of grinding and interviewing - I finally get an offer but my mental health is in a bad place so I turn it down. I'm still feeling raw and betrayed and I'm just wondering what the fuck is the point of it all. I take some more time, then start interviewing again, but things go from bad to worse in the job market. I succeed in a couple of on-sites but still lose out to other candidates. By a stroke of luck, I connect with an old acquaintance who was willing to advocate for me and get my resume to the top of the pile. I do the whole song and dance and land the job - that brings me to today.

The whole experience has left me with a bitter and jaded opinion of this industry, and work in general. I now consider this industry a joke. I don't enjoy programming anymore, I don't think there are any tech products that make the world a better place - any that were decent continue to enshitify - and to be honest I'm wary of non-americans going out of there way to undermine me - likely fueled by their own fears and anxiety of winding up in the same position, but with more to lose. Nonetheless, I wasn't aware that they harbored such resentment against americans, and I won't be forgetting it anytime soon.

And congrats to CEOs who once again have us fighting amongst ourselves - you've made the world a worse place and got rich doing it. Great job.

I mentioned a couple years back it looked like this was happening. HN shrugged.

While I have been self-employed for a few decades, I do see and hear about what's happening out there. I have many friends who have had challenges and others who are afraid to leave their jobs, even when paid well under what they are worth. One of them finally gave up and took a job in the oil fields in New Mexico. This, after sending hundreds of applications and enduring a few 5 to 7 stage interviews, only to be told they chose someone else.

Age discrimination has been a real problem in tech for a very long time, this isn't new at all. Yet, somehow, it feels like it has gotten progressively worse over time. There are companies where you have the young (25-ish, just out of school) comprise the majority and the managers are just a few years older than that. They simply do not want to see "Mom" or "Dad" join the team.

You are going to find very few 40, 50 or 60+ year old engineer in those environments. Their experience and capabilities do not matter at all except for a few domains where they almost have no options (RF electronics, signal/power integrity, embedded systems, gov/mil, etc.).

I am not saying that age discrimination is the only filter being applied, of course not. That is, however, likely one of the main filters for a large group in the application pool.

The other problem seems to be that a massive portion of the job posting on sites like LinkedIn seem to be fake. I have seen reports claiming that the number might be as high as 80%. These postings are fake for a lot of reasons. One of them, at least in the US, are rules/laws that require posting a job opening even when you have already identified someone you will hire (or retain) for that role. Companies have to be able to show they evaluated N applications before declaring they will hire someone from the inside or retain/bring-in an H1B.

This is terrible and --while there is no indication that this will be an objective-- I hope the new administration gives this issue some thought and modifies the rules of the game to create a real market for jobs, one where opportunities are fair for everyone (whatever that metric might be).

For example, people have been told to go study coding all the way back to the Obama administration (maybe earlier, I don't remember). So, lots of people did. And then they were dropped on their collective heads. No offense to anyone, but, if the US is telling its young to study CS, H1B visas should have become rare and exceptional. Nothing else is fair.

There are other problems, of course, many problems. One of the is that university CS programs in the US and elsewhere, well, suck. People come out of programs with their degrees and are incapable of writing code. In the US, they can argue with you about Socialism and Karl Marx, and they can't code shit. They are taught what I call "coding by library". I am going to stretch and suggest that the vast majority of them would drown if you gave them C and a raw embedded system and asked them to implement a neural network or a genetic algorithm (and many other things). Give them Python and Pybullet and they are all geniuses. Brilliant.

So, yeah, education has to change. A CS/Engineering degree should consist of three years of core, from the ground-up, subjects and one more year specializing at a higher level. Yes, that means that the $50K students are forced to pay for bullshit non-degree topics must go. They are a waste of time. General education should happen in high school, not university at $30K to $50K per year.

You should be able to graduate with a solid CS foundation in three years, a generalist, if you will. Anyone wishing to specialize should be able to add one year to their BS degree for this purpose and a Masters after that.

About two years ago I helped a recent CS graduate prepare for an interview. What I learned from this single data point was astounding. It is embarrassing that our universities are doing such a horrible job in preparing people for their future. The issues had to do both with breath and depth of knowledge. To be sure, encyclopedic knowledge isn't necessary, but you have to be able to code using something other than JS, P5.js or Python and a pile of fat libraries you do not understand.

Questions like "What's a pointer?" and "Can the data in a non-mutable Python object ever change?" should have intelligent answers that reveal understanding. BTW, the answer to the second question is: Yes, absolutely.

Getting back to the issue of finding employment, frankly, I am not sure what people can do about it. If I were looking for a job I would likely take one of two approaches. The first would be to join everyone else carpet-bombing job postings with applications. Well, that does not work. The other might be to be extremely selective and, perhaps, look for niche positions with few applicants and attempt to tailor the application to make a case for hiring you.

One thing is sure: Trying to second-guess a software-based application filter (AI or otherwise) is a waste of time. You are throwing your application into a black box and have not idea what happens inside it. Whatever guess you might make is far more likely to be random, rather than stochastic. In other words, in the first case your guesses will have almost completely unpredictable results while, in the second case, with some knowledge, the guesses are made in the context of something that resembles a probability distribution.

And yet, in the end, either case might be equally pointless. This is particularly true when the posting's intent was to support internal hire or H1B.

The other angle on this is entrepreneurship. This isn't for everyone. Most will fail and do so multiple times, dozens of times in some cases. I nearly lost everything I owned before I experienced success. Like I said, not for most.

In the end, I don't really know how this can be fixed. I don't believe in big government, so I am not comfortable with the suggestion that legislation is a solution. Then again, I also have to admit that there might be a need for this on a temporary basis to bring balance into the relevant markets.

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If you're good, and you can demonstrate that you're good, you should have no problem finding a job. There are still many more job openings than there are skilled candidates.

And I don't think there's any discrimination against white males, that's certainly a popular talking point from the far-right, but it's simply not true.

"I am seeing many anecdotal experiences shared online on various platforms stating that it is difficult to find employment in tech."

What is "tech"

100% serious question

Is it short for "technology"

For example,

"Technology is the application of conceptual knowledge to achieve practical goals, especially in a reproducible way."

Skolnikoff, Eugene B. (1993). "The Setting". The Elusive Transformation: Science, Technology, and the Evolution of International Politics. Princeton University Press. p. 13. ISBN 0-691-08631-1. JSTOR j.ctt7rpm1. Citing Harvey Brooks' definition of technology as "knowledge of how to fulfill certain human purposes in a specifiable and reproducible way."

The term "technology", historically, is not synonymous with computers despite whatever popular usage has arisen in the past ~20 years.

Technology predates the existence and use of computers and computer networks and the use of these resources for commercial surveillance

Knowledge of computers and computer newtorks is a type of conceptual knowledge

Electronic surveillance, data collection from internet usage and delivery of advertising via internet is a practical goal

The application of conceptual knowledge of computers and computer networks to the practical goal of surveillance, data collection and advertising is reproducible

However it should be self-evident that "technology" is much broader than this type of application

Most technology has nothing to do with internet surveillance or advertising