US tech company. Just as the RTO excuse ended it started with AI immediately.
RTO was used to squeeze as hard as possible to force people to leave and not pay severance ("You're not in the office a month from now across the country? Looks like you decided to resign, sucks for you!"). First it was "be in any office, as long as you butt is in a building with our logo on it" to "well, no, you gotta be where you manager is, so move again. Oh you can't? Sucks for you, you effectively resigned then".
Then the AI excuse hit. "We'll be so productive, we don't need people anymore at all". That's going on currently. Everyone is token-maxing to the limit to show how on board they are with AI to avoid getting pushed out.
In between they also managed to "cut costs" by moving jobs overseas the countries you're familiar with. This required some finagling, so they shut down one set of platform/products built in US and started building another one overseas. Then said "oh well, looks like this division in US is not needed anymore".
The strange thing is this is happening in multiple companies at the same time. It's like all the CEOs and HR reps met at some golf retreat and decided to follow a script.
Meanwhile I got only 5 or so recruiter emails in the last year or so. Before it was a constant stream, almost one every a few weeks.
> The strange thing is this is happening in multiple companies at the same time. It's like all the CEOs and HR reps met at some golf retreat and decided to follow a script.
I’ve gotten the same feeling. It’s too consistent to be a fluke. I get the feeling its a fashion thats being pushed by VC funds who are all neck deep in nvidia, openai and anthropic stocks. They must have realized they can pump this to their portfolio to inflate all the investments.
> The strange thing is this is happening in multiple companies at the same time. It's like all the CEOs and HR reps met at some golf retreat and decided to follow a script.
>Meanwhile I got only 5 or so recruiter emails in the last year or so. Before it was a constant stream, almost one every a few weeks.
I've actually seen more and more LinkedIn posts from recruiters that [are proud of ] have been laid off themselves. You know things are bad when recruiters are the ones looking for jobs.
~3 years of experience. I can't exactly isolate the independent variable of my employment gap that increases as time goes by from my perceived quality of the job market, but my application response rate has steadily dropped from ~35% 2+ years ago to 18% right now. I rarely even get to talk to a human, it's either code assessments, IQ tests, or personality tests that get sent out within a day or two after applying, or no response. Almost always no response. Sometimes I get a request to video interview with an AI. I kindly reject those.
This just sounds like your Linkedin went stale for some reason or other. Do you have the Open to Work status? Or even just be active on there, apply to jobs, like posts or stuff like that?
I get plenty of messages from "recruiters" through LinkedIn. They're not particularly great, but I also only have a few years of experience
Funny, Amazon never contacted me, now after I'm 3 months in a new job, they did, but ain't paying half of how much I earn in this new one, and requires me to move to a major city in Brazil to work, sigh...
Staff eng at large startup in Bay Area, 7-10 YOE. Recently interviewed at the labs. Had to go through a recruiter friend at one of them to get a response. Very difficult interviews but mostly feasible to prep for. Had to get somewhat lucky to get an offer, staff-level. Took about two months from beginning to prep to signing an offer. Recruiters very responsive - a little arrogant re: other companies but insecure about other labs.
Got laid off earlier this year. June has been significantly better than any month earlier. I think everyone was sitting on their hands waiting for Meta to do their stuff in May
Everyone I know is having a hard time in all sorts of industries. Either they are currently unemployed and have been job searching for sometimes over a year. Or they are still employed but any looking they've done has been fruitless. So different than a couple years ago. My anecdata has people from junior to director level telling a similar story.
me: 11 years experience with big tech on resume. Located in major tech city.
I get 1-2 new recruiters in my mailbox each week for different random startups. I haven’t acted on any so IDK what the process is really like, but it does seem like people are hiring. Almost 100% seem to be some sort of AI product. Senior Eng comp base seems to be in the 200-240 range plus however much worthless equity.
Staff eng level, ~15-20 years experience. 18-36 months in position at well known large company at beginning of the year, lots of the usual recruiter interest.
Responded to one from another major company mid January. Short interview process. Started late March. Similar level, slightly higher scope, significant salary bump.
Took the opportunity to send outbounds to a few other major companies while in process, with senior referrals: ~no responses at all from that stuff.
Also, despite the employer change not being public, much less recruiter outreach the last 2 months.
To go by the numbers, it's pretty good. Not as good as the truly anomalous post-pandemic peak of hiring. But still good compared to almost every other occupational group.
I don’t know how to make the statistics match my perceived reality.
Both in this thread, and people I know in real life who are looking for jobs are struggling hard. Mass layoffs are becoming more common and the time spent between jobs is measured in six month increments.
And yet, the numbers say we are in a hiring market with more job openings than ever, except for during the pandemic.
My perceived reality and the numbers almost could not be further apart.
Same. I'm still employed, but am looking. I've had a few interviews but they're all for jobs I wouldn't really want. I know talented people who were laid off and have been looking for 6 to 9 months+. It's very rough out there. I've witnessed the dot-com crash, great financial crisis... this is the worst I've seen. Maybe other industries are better.
Why would the (USA) job numbers be real? We have yes-men at every level, purposefully installed to spin any and everything in the most positive light possible. And, if not, outright fabricate numbers.
Former BLS officials still believe the numbers are reliable, because the methodology is public and there are lots of ways for well-financed actors (e.g. wall street traders) to spot manipulation.
It reminds me of 2008/2009, but weirder. I remember in that time a lot of companies going through the motions as if everything was alright and they were still hiring just fine, but then not actually hiring in the way they were acting.
It seems weirder now partly because it isn't a clear across the board recession, though part of me keeps looking at quarterly earnings reports and the DOW and keeps wondering if we're still "early 2008" on that rather than "late 2009" and that it will get worse before it gets better.
Check r/cscareerquestions ha usually blood bath for juniors eg. thousands of applications to try and land a job. r/experienceddevs too a little different vibe there but some insight on job market
But hey if you don't use AI when doing an interview, might have a better leg up than those that do eg. pause for 5 seconds between responses, ear piece, looking at a screen, someone replacing you after hiring, etc...
I'm sure I'm not the only one, but I've gotten so aggressive about monitoring for this. I do most interviews zoomed in on the candidate's eyes and I rubric on how they "thought" through the problem, not just the results.
Thankfully the interview tools are catching on as well and now tracking this like browser focus, number of monitors, window size, and sending notifications when any of those change.
Reddit, is not and never was reality especially now with all the bots with private profiles. Either they are unemployed or a senior developer at FAANG.
Will say there is a difference between "reality" and hackernews too, this is a startup elite type place, jobs posted here, different than those posted on LinkedIn.
I'm just fortunate recruiters have found me for my jobs... there was one time I used Hired that was back in 2022 that worked for 1 job.
The hiding of user posts on reddit is bs I hate that, although it is convenient if you want to just hide all your stuff without deleting your account
I don't have lived experience, but "Who is hiring" had only 2 or 3 posts from my country this whole year. Until about 2 years ago there were 5-8 posts in each threads.
(I'm in a small central-European country, that is full of tech companies, both domestic and international)
Just guessing, Czechia? The Central European software engineering market seems to be softening as well, likely due to second-order effects from the U.S. tech layoffs and decreased demand for remote roles from SV companies.
Go to a good fire and brimstone preacher and sit in the pews for a while and whatever comes out of his mouth is far less hellish than the job market today.
I think it's primarily a filter. Candidate filters are pretty much always silly, even common ones based on degree/grades etc. But with a lot of candidates on the market, using some filters reduces the list to a manageable amount.
Personally, as someone with a German company and a good chunk of German clients, I'd argue it _does_ help a little. Occasionally. But by and large I'm far more interested in the candidate's English proficiency.
Been applying since January after a startup layoff and seeing mixed results. I have 14 years of experience spanning datacenter ops, Security certs, and all 3 major clouds. I’ve led hundreds of people across multiple technical disciplines.
Right out of the gate, I was getting great callbacks and final rounds. Then, around April, the pipeline completely dried up. I’m doing the work for EVERY application like generating custom resumes, tailored cover letters matching their culture, and engaging with leadership on LinkedIn.
I’m down to one lead at my partner’s company, but it’s a long shot. It feels like a lot of DevOps/SecOps/IT leadership roles are evaporating. Partially because companies are over-indexing on AI/LLMs to handle architecture complexity without realizing what those tools actually lack in practice.
After climbing the ladder for over a decade, I’m worried about the future of the market, but I’m not ready to stop fighting. Has anyone else with a leadership/infra background hit this exact same wall since April? How are you pivoting your approach?
Wondering what happened in April, around that time layoffs started including at my job. No reason at all aside from “AI” and the C suite wanting larger profits.
RTO was used to squeeze as hard as possible to force people to leave and not pay severance ("You're not in the office a month from now across the country? Looks like you decided to resign, sucks for you!"). First it was "be in any office, as long as you butt is in a building with our logo on it" to "well, no, you gotta be where you manager is, so move again. Oh you can't? Sucks for you, you effectively resigned then".
Then the AI excuse hit. "We'll be so productive, we don't need people anymore at all". That's going on currently. Everyone is token-maxing to the limit to show how on board they are with AI to avoid getting pushed out.
In between they also managed to "cut costs" by moving jobs overseas the countries you're familiar with. This required some finagling, so they shut down one set of platform/products built in US and started building another one overseas. Then said "oh well, looks like this division in US is not needed anymore".
The strange thing is this is happening in multiple companies at the same time. It's like all the CEOs and HR reps met at some golf retreat and decided to follow a script.
Meanwhile I got only 5 or so recruiter emails in the last year or so. Before it was a constant stream, almost one every a few weeks.
I’ve gotten the same feeling. It’s too consistent to be a fluke. I get the feeling its a fashion thats being pushed by VC funds who are all neck deep in nvidia, openai and anthropic stocks. They must have realized they can pump this to their portfolio to inflate all the investments.
Industry trends spread in all roles ?
I've actually seen more and more LinkedIn posts from recruiters that [are proud of ] have been laid off themselves. You know things are bad when recruiters are the ones looking for jobs.
2026 - one (recruiter did not name the company, hybrid six month contract in another city)
2025 - none
2024 - none
2023 - four (none after March)
2022 - twenty-seven (including Amazon, Google)
I get plenty of messages from "recruiters" through LinkedIn. They're not particularly great, but I also only have a few years of experience
I get 1-2 new recruiters in my mailbox each week for different random startups. I haven’t acted on any so IDK what the process is really like, but it does seem like people are hiring. Almost 100% seem to be some sort of AI product. Senior Eng comp base seems to be in the 200-240 range plus however much worthless equity.
Responded to one from another major company mid January. Short interview process. Started late March. Similar level, slightly higher scope, significant salary bump.
Took the opportunity to send outbounds to a few other major companies while in process, with senior referrals: ~no responses at all from that stuff.
Also, despite the employer change not being public, much less recruiter outreach the last 2 months.
https://www.comptia.org/en-us/resources/research/tech-jobs-r...
Both in this thread, and people I know in real life who are looking for jobs are struggling hard. Mass layoffs are becoming more common and the time spent between jobs is measured in six month increments.
And yet, the numbers say we are in a hiring market with more job openings than ever, except for during the pandemic.
My perceived reality and the numbers almost could not be further apart.
https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/nx-s1-5530733/bls-jobs-report...
It seems weirder now partly because it isn't a clear across the board recession, though part of me keeps looking at quarterly earnings reports and the DOW and keeps wondering if we're still "early 2008" on that rather than "late 2009" and that it will get worse before it gets better.
Most everyone I talk with is looking as well, but nobody has moved roles. It feels like were all stuck.
But hey if you don't use AI when doing an interview, might have a better leg up than those that do eg. pause for 5 seconds between responses, ear piece, looking at a screen, someone replacing you after hiring, etc...
I'm sure I'm not the only one, but I've gotten so aggressive about monitoring for this. I do most interviews zoomed in on the candidate's eyes and I rubric on how they "thought" through the problem, not just the results.
Thankfully the interview tools are catching on as well and now tracking this like browser focus, number of monitors, window size, and sending notifications when any of those change.
Seems to weed these folks out.
hired :)
I'm just fortunate recruiters have found me for my jobs... there was one time I used Hired that was back in 2022 that worked for 1 job.
The hiding of user posts on reddit is bs I hate that, although it is convenient if you want to just hide all your stuff without deleting your account
(I'm in a small central-European country, that is full of tech companies, both domestic and international)
What matters is where you live - the hiring market in Germany or Canada is going to be different from the Bay Area or NYC.
Personally, as someone with a German company and a good chunk of German clients, I'd argue it _does_ help a little. Occasionally. But by and large I'm far more interested in the candidate's English proficiency.
Right out of the gate, I was getting great callbacks and final rounds. Then, around April, the pipeline completely dried up. I’m doing the work for EVERY application like generating custom resumes, tailored cover letters matching their culture, and engaging with leadership on LinkedIn.
I’m down to one lead at my partner’s company, but it’s a long shot. It feels like a lot of DevOps/SecOps/IT leadership roles are evaporating. Partially because companies are over-indexing on AI/LLMs to handle architecture complexity without realizing what those tools actually lack in practice.
After climbing the ladder for over a decade, I’m worried about the future of the market, but I’m not ready to stop fighting. Has anyone else with a leadership/infra background hit this exact same wall since April? How are you pivoting your approach?