Has the job market improved in recent months?

Posted by Massive-Survey2495@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 48 comments

Hi, I have seen a few random news features about how the market for hiring developers has started to ramp up again in recent months after companies are realizing that AI is not as valuable as they thought it would be. I am pretty out of the loop but I have heard that things have been pretty rough over the past 2 years for less experienced devs with just a few years under their belts.

I find it hard to take any of these news stories too serious as they were also running stories about how Claude code was going to replace all software developers not long ago. It's hard to keep up lately and wanted to ask what some of you think about the current job market for developers. I assume a lot of you here are pretty senior so perhaps you haven't ever noticed much of a downturn at all but if anybody can provide any insight I would much appreciate it.

Thanks!

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TadpoleNo1549@reddit

feels like the market didn’t bounce back, it just changed shape, less easy entry for juniors but still solid demand if you can actually work with ai and think beyond just coding, a lot of the headlines are noise tbh, reality is somewhere in the middle

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Fritoes@reddit

In general, it's still bad for everyone. Worse depending on your area of expertise.

I've been working in casino gaming for almost 15 years, and the only places that want me, expect me to relocate. Game companies outside of casino gaming don't even give me the time of day. Companies outside the gaming sector altogether? Forget about it.

I've been looking for 8 months, and have gotten as many interviews in that time.

It doesn't help that I'm not seeing a lot of Unity developer positions. Most are looking for Unreal experience.

Sorry, this turned into a rant. Good luck out there!

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zezer94118@reddit

Not in US as far as I can tell

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Otherwise_Source_842@reddit

I’m actively interviewing people for a mid level role and a senior role for a new team that is focused on revamping a .NET api service which hasn’t been touched in a decade and integrating it onto our new next.js based platform. All candidates are giving us shit multi page resumes talking about high school burger flipping or yoga teacher in college experience.

The mid level candidates were solid, many people appear to have our goal experience with cloud knowledge, .NET, and React. As well as reasonably leverage AI tools to improve performance but maintain a skeptical eye for output.

The senior level candidates are sucking hard so far. We have interviewed two so far. The first was fuck cloud fuck testing fuck discovery work attitude.

The second lied up and down his resume, asked tell me about the react experience you list on your resume and just got told oh I was the one who worked on the react side. Ok well how about where you say you architected and designed the product? Well I didn’t do that either my architect did. Well what did you work on? I used TDD to build a .NET api. What did this api do? It moved data from one place to another.

My current reaction is Jesus this is my competition on the market yet somehow I’m struggling to find decent job opportunities even though I have a well written easy to read resume and solid experience.

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protocolzed@reddit

This makes me feel better. I'm a full stack dev with 5 years of experience. I've been getting a decent amount of interviews but keep failing at the hiring manager and live coding rounds. They grill me hard and no matter how much I walk them through my thinking process, how I solved problems, led projects, implemented complex patterns, it still seems not enough to impress them.

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Otherwise_Source_842@reddit

I’ll share the questions I was asking. I personally didn’t touch on the .net expertise and focused on the react and cloud aspects which make up about 20% of the technical work.

1: Have you built or worked on a layer that sat between a frontend and multiple backend services before? What did it look like and what did it do? 2: Walk me through how you handle errors. Specifically how you surface them and what you show the user versus the dev who would be investigating that error. 3: If a user complains and says that a page is slow walk me through how you would diagnose the issue. 4: Have you ever set up or managed a pipeline for a service? If so what stages did it have and what gates would block a merge or deploy? 5: Have you ever provisioned cloud infrastructure through code rather than manually through a console?

In addition the pipeline question was followed up by another interviewer with how did you manage deployments can you describe your rollback plan if things went wrong? This was a more senior focused question as we don’t have the expectation that mid level engineers are owning deployments consistently.

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protocolzed@reddit

These are great questions. Thanks for the insight. I've been asked a couple of these before, but probably need to tighten up and practice my responses more. :)

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BuzzAlderaan@reddit

So you’re saying there’s a chance for me after all?

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anoncology@reddit

I believe it.

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upsidedownshaggy@reddit

It probably depends on where you are/what you're domain expertise is. So far I've had a single local recruiter reach out offering contract positions that pay significantly worse than my current role and I've not been able to get interviews beyond the internal recruiter phone screen even with referrals for the jobs :/

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casualPlayerThink@reddit

Many companies have "end of year" or fiscal year-end around these months, so many finalize budgets, finalize roadmaps, set goals, and start hiring for new projects, tasks, etc.

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RespectableThug@reddit

It’s a mixed bag as others have said, but it has improved a bit IMO. I’m starting to get recruiters messaging me again, which is generally a good sign.

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Evinceo@reddit

Yeah there was a good year or so where it was crickets. That said a lot of the companies I'm seeing recruiters for seem way more fake than the last go around.

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RespectableThug@reddit

How can you tell the companies are fake?

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Evinceo@reddit

I mean they're real companies but their products seem like bogus cash-ins on hype.

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thomas_grimjaw@reddit

Yes there is an uptick, but imo the overall quality of jobs has fell off.

I'm not based in the US but my ex-colleagues in US that weren't hit by layoffs tell me all the offers they got are worse than what they have, so there is no inscentive to switch.

This has a trickle down effect on off-shore outsourcing where basicaly all previous "good value for money" markets like Eastern Europe and the Balkans are being skipped to go directly to India, Vietnam and Nigeria. And wih the exception of India, those other markets are also being squeezed.

So seems like it's a big nothingburger for everyone other than a small percentage of people hit by layoffs to get a gig to make ends meet before situation improves or they too get outsourced.

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usernamesaredumb321@reddit

I will say that I had 4 offers to chose from for my next role. All full-remote with a fair compensation. The maket exists if you have proven skills that are on-demand.

Something I noticed: engage with humans!

I got absolutely no response from submitting my CV though application portals. When I had a human introduce me (be it a recruiter or an old colleague) the process was much more natural.

My perception is that the maket is flooded with AI applications and low quality candidates, you need human connection to pass the slop filter.

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engineer_in_TO@reddit

It’s better for experienced people or people with good matches to a JD but generally worse for non-experienced people or people without modern skillsets.

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Square_Ad_2456@reddit

i had something like this happen

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outlaw1148@reddit

What? Guessing a broken bot with that name

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Tasty-Perception6273@reddit

I feel like we will have a good amount of positions open up to deal with the AI slop, but I think it currently is still pretty bleak, and may be for a while, unfortunately.

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Abigboi_@reddit

The slop is going to be real. I got put on an iOS app so I'm trying to learn Swift and a new framework. Manager asked us to put a % on how much of our code is written by Copilot. I got scolded for estimating mine was "only" 50% AI generated.

To hell with learning apparently, just use AI.

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gHx4@reddit

It finally recovered a little from the recessionary conditions after the COVID-19 pandemic, and the fiscal quarter around January is a really active period for hiring because it starts the fiscal year.

But although now there is a bit of activity hiring, it's still low for juniors -- it's unprofitable for companies to hire juniors unless they are subsidized by government internship programs. It does seem to be improving noticeably for senior-level positions and a bit for mid-level as well. I've started receiving recruiter cold calls again, for example, after nearly 4 years of a very quiet inbox.

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Cute_Activity7527@reddit

I get some offers, but those are either not good money or uninteresting. So its „better” if you need any slave job, but its still shit if you are looking for meaningful work.

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onefutui2e@reddit

From what I've seen, there are more roles opening up but it's still an employer's market, just different angles.

A year or two ago, there weren't a lot of roles, but companies were more willing to hire a "good enough" candidate that checked off most of the requirements and assumed you'd ramp up and learn on the job.

This time around, again from my experience having taken more interviews recently, companies are being very choosy and trying to get the exact right fit.

I got turned down for a role because while I have extensive experience setting up and working with RabbitMQ and Celery, they were looking for someone more familiar with **using Kafka. And this wasn't a recruiter who didn't know any better, it was feedback I got from the hiring manager.

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Reasonable-Shock3789@reddit

i had a similar experience with kafka requirements

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PoopsCodeAllTheTime@reddit

It sucks still.

But, I was unemployed for like a year until early this year, interviews picked up in the past 5 months for sr-staff roles. Then again, a lot of them ghosted me after I completed the entire process.

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No-Response3675@reddit

Curious if you show the career gap on your resume? I’m in a similar boat

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PoopsCodeAllTheTime@reddit

Hell naw! I’m a professional masseuse when it comes to the timeline in my resume 😂

In my particular case I did a few short contracts, one was on and off. Etc. so I use that to pad all the gaps. If I was straight a year without anything then I would shift my entire timeline, or perhaps fill the gaps with some kind of real-looking work that I might have completed in the spare time.

That’s a lot of words for “it’s easy to fill the gaps without lying about your abilities”, take it as an opportunity to sprinkle some ATS keywords in there haha

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skidmark_zuckerberg@reddit

I’ve been on the market for 3 weeks. I’ve applied to about 60 jobs. 2 of those got back to me with a phone screen, waiting on interview scheduling for those. I’ve also had 2 other interviews post phone screen that were from recruiters who hit me up on LinkedIn, with a second round scheduled for one of them on Friday. No offers yet but I’m pretty early on in the process. Pay ranges are what I was making in my last role so far, which I’m not complaining about, but it seems moving to a new company for big pay bumps is not happening as often anymore.

But to be honest, it doesn’t seem that bad. I’ve got 7.5 YOE in modern tech that seems to be on most job descriptions. Primarily FE focused but I am full stack. I also maintain a LinkedIn and get random recruiters a few times a week messaging. No one in my network works anywhere that has open positions unfortunately. Still getting auto rejections 50% of the time, and other applications I just haven’t heard anything at all. But I am a little surprised (and overwhelmed with prep) considering what I’ve read on the internet. I recently read that the market seems to be back to almost pre pandemic levels so far in 2026, and I managed to get by in that market with little experience. I don’t have any clue what it’s like for entry level right now.

One thing I’ve been asked on just about every phone screen or recruiter call is if I know how to use AI tools. People seem pretty interested in you knowing how to use things like Claude or Cursor. Luckily I was exposed to that quite a bit in my last role over the last 12 months. I say luckily cause I was anti LLM’s for a bit but being “forced” to figure it out by management, it did give me a little bit of an edge on getting through phone screens to initial interviews.

Also I had to really focus on my resume to get it past ATS for those two direct applications to result in a phone screen. Still not perfect, but I paid for a technical resume writer, and I’m waiting on her to deliver here in the next few days. Probably didn’t need to do that but I was just tired of tinkering with my resume on top of needing to study and prep.

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huge-centipede@reddit

Remote/Senior FE React is still dead for me. No recruiters messages lately other than a few horrible ones that wanted me to straight up lie on my resume/my employment status (if you know those places they're like a net negative),. Sucks.

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Onedome@reddit

No.

You are still competing with more devs who lie on their resume and waste time fooling ai hr tools only to get rejected by the surprise 2nd technical interview that requires you to travel in person and can’t even talk because they don’t have Claude.

They can’t find you even if you have a direct referral and demo that you can do the job show that you can handle their system architecture and talk through how to communicate through real world problems. It’s as if they can’t find what’s standing in plain sight.

I’ve never seen it this bad in 21 years of doing the interviews and recently trying to go through them.

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PoopsCodeAllTheTime@reddit

Probably because the vibecoder is fine with $20/hr

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Onedome@reddit

Most of them are ok with a much lower salary and not accepting any promotions.

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janyk@reddit

I haven't seen any noticeable improvements lately in number of job postings or ability to get interviews.

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Material_Policy6327@reddit

Im seeing uptick in pings from start ups but dunno id trust a startup in this economy right now

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xOFSELFx@reddit

It’s so fucked

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GoTeamLightningbolt@reddit

I'm in a particular niche and I feel like I'm seeing more roles lately, but it's pure anecdote at this point.

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Gooeyy@reddit

Assuming you're US-based, there is a modest increase in hiring recently. It at least stopped getting worse. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE

As others have said, it's harder the less YOE you have. Also, people using AI to cheat during interviews makes proper remote interviewing harder, so references are particularly important lately.

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dragonowl2025@reddit

I seem to get on average one promising (lateral or better) call from a recruiter a week and all I’ve done is log into LinkedIn in the past 2 months , maybe lucky streak but they have led to interviews with the company. Feels hopeful that I’d find something quickly if I needed to but great offers (let’s say a competitive raise + full remote) are hard to come by.

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Groove-Theory@reddit

I'm not sure, I'm looking myself right now. I will say that recently I've been getting more linkedin messages about positions, for senior+ or management roles. All in about the past month or two.

I'm 12YOE and I'm pretty sure this wouldn't be the same experience for a junior dev.

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Massive-Survey2495@reddit (OP)

Thanks for the feedback.

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throwaway0134hdj@reddit

It’s pretty shit