Something is way off with the current job market

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c0ventry@reddit

I have 25 years of experience and can do infra, devops, backend, frontend whatever. I've done it all. I've built several startups and worked at fortune 500s and everything in between and I still get passed over haha. I'm currently working for a network of casinos and I've completely rebuilt their infrastructure and CI/CD systems and now took over core services and modernizing those.. I'm very underpaid, but it's work and I get to be remote... I don't even bother applying to jobs anymore because my resume is lost in a deluge of spam.

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TyroleanDevel42@reddit

Unfortunately, senior developers are often overlooked these days due to their age. The only exception is if you have connections.

a quick search on any LLM

BetterWhereas3245@reddit

This is when you just lie. If you're a senior you should be able to switch lang/stack without issue.
You only need to pass the interviews, if a place asks gotcha questions about language trivia, it's a red flag anyway.

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Known-Ice5903@reddit

im running into this, employers want u to use the exact combination of skills they use or they drop off

its horrible, ive been searching since april of last year and cant find anything

tanepiper@reddit

Hantavirus has entered the chat

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franktronix@reddit

Honestly on the hiring side, I’m wondering whether resumes with mistakes would be better to act on, like a human dog whistle that they’re not AI. The scammers are great at matching the automated filters and having a polished packet.

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new2bay@reddit

I've exhausted my network long ago. What now?

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MathmoKiwi@reddit

Build a new network

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ConstructionInside27@reddit

I use AI to assemble my CVs but entirely as a curator of a 5 page long list of bulleted bragging points I've written. When it points out slightly off use of punctuation I tell it not to fix precisely because it's good to be human. But I'm habitually careful about outright spelling or grammar mistakes and i think at this point I should put a typo in my opening sentence

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MathmoKiwi@reddit

I use Opus to assemble my CVs but entirely as a curator to cut down a 5 page CV down to 2 pages leaning toward the skills that ad wants.

That's the way to do an "AI CV" right

Have a massive big CV that covers your whole life, then for each job get the LLM to cut it down to match just the right perspective of you that this employer needs/wants to see

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MathmoKiwi@reddit

Honestly on the hiring side, I’m wondering whether resumes with mistakes would be better to act on, like a human dog whistle that they’re not AI. The scammers are great at matching the automated filters and having a polished packet.

As soon as more than a small minority of hiring managers do this, then the new meta will shift from perfectly crafted AI CVs to instead perfect CVs + an AI created error. (that you won't be able to tell apart from a human error)

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TheWheez@reddit

But will those kinds of resumes even reach your eyes? How much will a typo be penalized by filtering algorithms?

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franktronix@reddit

It’s not the way it works now but we need a better way to get past the automators. I’m in eng so I made an AI pipeline to screen the scammers which seems to work pretty well at fighting fire with fire but there’s so many of them.

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TheWheez@reddit

Damn, yeah it's a tough problem. Any particular signals that indicate a BS application?

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franktronix@reddit

There’s a lot but with the not very sophisticated scammers you often catch multiple names/people somewhere in the app (e.g. metadata).

We had a recruiter screen recently for someone who said they would need time to relocate to come to the office and the address they gave was a 15 min drive from the office..

We require all applicants interview on site now and have almost no remote positions (also because of the overemployed thing).

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Groove-Theory@reddit

The "overemployed" thing should not be a reason to remove remote roles. An employee has a right to work however they want and wherever they want (as long as they're doing adequate work).

There's no monogamy with employment.

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franktronix@reddit

It's a standard expectation by people who pay you money for a full time job that you are not splitting your time with another job, regardless of what you produce. If you are up front about it and it's part of the agreement, all good, otherwise it's almost always cause for termination.

Some employers don't want to deal with the headache of having to think about and police this, and that's better for the non over-employed coworkers too.

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Groove-Theory@reddit

Yet C-Suite folks are allowed to be on boards on multiple companies and split their time as such. So much for that "standard expectation"

> and that's better for the non over-employed coworkers too.

Citation needed

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franktronix@reddit

CEOs aren't hiding being on multiple boards.

You're really going hard on rationalizations. If you want to try and get away with it, go for it, but don't act like it's on the up and up and that it doesn't affect coworkers or employers decisions to end remote work.

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Groove-Theory@reddit

> CEOs aren't hiding being on multiple boards

No they're not hiding. They're explicitly on them. And there's no conversations had about "well what about your committment to X" during negotiations. It's not a conversation at those levels. Only at the IC levels is it a "problem"

> doesn't affect coworkers or employers decisions to end remote work.

Why do you think employers do that decision? It's not because of loyalty or occupational monogamy.

A company can (and have) literally:

lay you off with zero notice
freeze promotions
demand unpaid on-call after-hours availability
quietly increase workload after attrition
outsource departments
run employees through 6 rounds of interviews for ghost jobs
and terminate "at will" for almost any reason

.....but the second a worker diversifies income streams without asking permission, suddenly we're invoking a sacred covenant of loyalty lmao. Be serious.

And "because that's the expectation" is not a reason either. Expectations are not self-justifying. Dude, feudal lords also had expectations. The question is whether the expectation is rational and mutually applied.

If an engineer can hits deadlines, attend all meetings, maintains code quality... what exactly is the problem? At that point the objection is not operational. It's ideological. You are upset that labor regained bargaining leverage under remote work and became less physically surveillable.

The rest is just management choosing collective punishment (ending remote work) because they dislike a subset of worker behavior. Because there are also companies that are both encouraging RTO, while ALSO outsourcing work away (proving remote work is still possible). All they want is desperate workers, that you are only tied to ONE employer for your well-being, and not having multiple redundant streams of income to buffer you from any action the company wants to impose on you.

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franktronix@reddit

I don’t disagree with everything you wrote, but most of your points are rationalizations on this specific topic. You pay people for a given service and if they violate the explicit or implicit parts of that, talking about feudal lords won’t help.

I hire senior engineers mostly and don’t spoon feed tasks to them. I hire and retain people who are self driven and use hours (within reason) when they finish their tasks to find other useful things to do.

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Groove-Theory@reddit

The biggest problem I have with your viewpoint is you're treating a historically specific management preference (Fordism) as though it's an objective law of nature, and then you're viewing workers through that same lens.

In knowledge work, especially our line of work (engineering), companies do not actually buy time in the industrial sense. We're not factory line workers. They buy outcomes, judgment, availability windows, institutional knowledge, and problem-solving capacity... from US. That's what we do as engineers. And that's why your own example immediately shifts away from measurable labor-time and into vibes like "self driven" and "find other useful things to do" etc.

Notice the contradiction. You claim the issue is violation of agreed service..... BUT, then you admit the actual expectation is effectively infinite discretionary labor expansion.

What part of that is a clean contractual boundary. Really it's a culturally normalized expectation that workers must continuously donate surplus cognitive effort beyond explicit task completion. Because companies have internally modeled salaried employees as expandable throughput containers.

And THAT is why I'm pushing back on this framing.

Also... also you're doing the exact rationalization you accused me of. You assume your preferred labor arrangement is INHERENTLY legitimate because it's familiar inside current corporate norms. If the expectation is truly important, define it contractually. Exclusive employment, response-time guarantees, hourly accounting, etc

Some companies do! Cool. Then workers can consent transparently. But instead a ton of companies want the deniability and flexibility of loose salaried knowledge work ALONG WITH the exclusivity expectations of 1950s internal labor markets. That mismatch is exactly what remote work exposed.

> I retain self-driven people who find more work

Imagine so. I've put personal pet projects as stuff I've done at work before I got my current job otherwise I didn't see a way forward, which sucks for both parties really. Again, I hate to lie, and I imagine people hate being lied to, but in the current market as you've said, many people need to at the very least exaggerate otherwise it's borderline impossible to land a job. If I had 10 years exp maybe it wouldn't apply but with 4-5 yeah, especially if the projects are nothing wow.

I mean. just say something Anti-Semitic it immediately proves your not a bot since every A.I platform.

has specifics to intentionally not be Anti-Semitic or criticize Israel or Islam or whatever.

would make for an awesome captcha.

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klowny@reddit

I notice a lot more activity on my LinkedIn profile before a recruiter reaches out, as if someone's checking whether I have reputable connections at reputable companies that they know.

Networks have always been important, but it seems like that's the only thing that can be trusted now.

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EddieJones6@reddit

As an applicant, cover letter is now the true chance to stand out.

fensizor@reddit

I feel like nowadays you have to do networking, talk to recruiters directly on LinkedIn, etc. Basically do anything that helps you to bypass the job application hell. Have to knock on any other door

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gefahr@reddit

Networking is the only way I'd recommend trying to get a job right now.

That doesn't have to mean having a preexisting relationship at a company you're targeting. It could mean finding the right contact and reaching out to them.

and even creep Reddit profiles for candidates.

It took all my composure not to tell him off and that he can do all the interviewing in the future.

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MathmoKiwi@reddit

Scoring a 2 seems crazy low though?

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IPv6forDogecoin@reddit

On a 4 point scale, not really.

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bmag147@reddit

Did you push back?

I'm asking I've been in situations like that before. Members of the team interview someone, everyone is happy with them, but there is a policy in the company that someone from another team must interview them too and they don't pass them. We pushed back multiple times and had about a 50% success rate at overturning their decision.

Man I could have typed the exact same thing. Got the rejection a few days ago. I had multiple rounds and was a bit unsure on my technical. Recruiter told me that technically I was on point but felt short on the final behavior round which I thought I did well.

The HR Industry tried to optimise their work by standardising application inputs (so they can scan for keywords and not have to think), which of course opened the gates for automated job application spam.

Now they're burning money trying to use AI filters which puts them temporarily ahead in an arms race of their own design, all to avoid performing their actual function in the business.

You can sometimes tell if the technology stack doesn't make sense. Like they'll reference using some .NET library inside of a Python application. Maybe it could make sense, but often it's just really weird.

My go to is to look at a linkedin profile and see if dates line up. I'm fine with a little bit of inconsistencies, but if there are entire FAANG like positions and years of experience discrepancies, then it is a red flag. It's also easy to see when the linkedin profile was created. I legit had one guy, during an interview send me a new link to his profile after I commented the one in his resume was broken. No joke, that account was created earlier that day. If you want to be getting hired, I'd encourage everyone to have a real looking linkedin.

We switched to in-person interviews to address most of these issues

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dronz3r@reddit

This! It is so fucking annoying, unless you game the system faking your resume and interviews, it's hard to find the job.

This is putting all the genuine people out of the jobs.

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uriejejejdjbejxijehd@reddit

If only businesses hadn’t been so hung ho about laying off and otherwise getting rid of all those old developers who had a proven track record but seemed so much more expensive than AI…

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SquiffSquiff@reddit

As some have already commented, OP is in a niche market with a niche stack. Speaking generally from my experience in UK:

a lot of employers have unrealistic expectations, stupidly so in many cases. It's not uncommon to see places where they're happy to supposedly spend 8 months trying to recruit for someone with the exact specific set of skills that they're looking for when it would take anyone half decent maybe a few days to skill up on the 'missing' elements
there are a lot of fake job ads. Companies think that they will look busier if they have a lot of vacancies advertised and even interview for them, but they have no intention of filling those positions because they don't exist. Then you have recruiters doing the same thing on top.
as others have said, AI inflated candidates and resumes mixed with applicant tracking system screening means that the time wasters float to the top.

Why is our product not ready?

We are missing a key developer to link system A with system B, needs to know tech C, must have done that before.

Ok carry on, here is rhe HR approval for budget.

Even if by any chance they get that dev in the pipeline there is always "culture fit" round that can be used stall the application.

There is lots of mediocre devs that used the covid rush to entrentch themselves in orgs and now are paranoid of losing their jobs. Canceled job searches count as layoffs, so better keep them open forever.

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2this4u@reddit

I wonder what the response would be to invoking the GDPR right to request a human make a decision rather than it being automated 😅

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davidbasil@reddit (OP)

PHP is not niche at all in my market. It has the same demand as java/.net and node

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gregthebunnyfanboy@reddit

im confused by “ExperiencedDevs” not realizing php is effectively an entirely new language today and pretty successfully halted losing market share after \~php7.

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gregthebunnyfanboy@reddit

exactly. someone pretending its still just a weird overlay on html are showing their ass.

Yes, it's true that high-quality DevOps, platform, and software engineering jobs are "handled" through contacts or recommendations. Often it is enough to know someone who knows someone who has heard of you, or to have demonstrated competence in some community project.

DeterminedQuokka@reddit

ExperiencedDevs-ModTeam@reddit

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I'm on the hiring side of this and have watched the floor drop out from under us for about 18 months.

Two things changed and most people are only seeing one of them.

First, the volume problem everyone in this thread is describing. AI-assisted mass application means a single role gets 1000+ resumes in days, almost all keyword-optimized for whatever ATS filter the company runs. That alone breaks the funnel. But those candidates are mostly real, just annoying.

Second, the part nobody outside hiring is talking about loudly enough. Mandiant's CTO Charles Carmakal said at a security conference earlier this year that every Fortune 500 he's looked at is getting dozens to hundreds of applications from North Korean operatives, and that almost every CIO he's spoken to has admitted to having hired at least one, sometimes a dozen. Amazon's CSO publicly said they blocked over 1,800 suspected NK operatives in 2025 alone. KnowBe4, a security training company whose entire business is teaching other people not to get fooled, hired one who started installing malware on day one.

I was laid off from the mining software company I mentioned in a recent thread, because they were acquired by Dassault Systems who have this exact model.

Mmm, from the top of my head, here are some reasons:

Automation wars. Platforms don't work for either side. When searching for a dev, you post the job description and instantly get 1000 posts. So, you setup a platform that automates screening, and there you go, interview hell. On the other side, you are seeking for a job and post to many searchs. You never get a reply. So, you automate posting to 1000s of job searchs... wellcome to automation wars.
Some companies involve HR for screening. Usually those filter by whatever criteria they seem to like, are not technical and have no clue what the CTO or whoever is searching for.
Big tech corps are submerged in unintelligible bureaucracy, so may be who posted the job description never gets notified of submissions and everything just get lost somewhere in the corporate cloud.
With so many fake candidates, that I kid you not, hire someone speaking fluent english to impersonate them in interviews, the amount of technical examination is simply overwhelming. The interview is setup to find problems not to seek for a candidate.
There are so many opportunistic recruiters that want to get a piece of the cake, that finding a real one is near to impossible.

Have you tried in-person jobs in Atlanta? remote is fiercly competitive rn.
and my stack is Laravel/PHP."

not sure if joking but Georgia the country not Georgia the state. Tblisi is halfway around the world from Atlanta. Tblisi has probably double the population of Atlanta.

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scelerat@reddit

closer to 3x than 2x

Tblisi: 1.4 million Atlanta: 0.5 million

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Unlucky-Durian-2336@reddit

I'm afraid it's not the Georgia you were thinkg about xD

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Banquet-Beer@reddit

One of Reddit's many flaws. Put foreigners in their own subreddits

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MHIREOFFICIAL@reddit

fuck me.

Have you tried in-person jobs in Atlanta?

Wrong Georgia man

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cocoapuff_daddy@reddit

Ah yeah, distance shouldn't be an issue

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The market is currently absolutely flooded with Senior Engineers who have been laid off. I’m experiencing the same things as you.

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Few-Impact3986@reddit

Look you got out of college maybe a couple years before peak SE hiring and salaries. It might have been better pre dot come better but I am not going to do the research.

The only places even responding right now are contract roles for former employees onsite in the heart of the city, presumably because they need bodies in the big buildings to avoid admitting that the buildings are useless.

If you are comparing the past, you are already old compared to other candidates. And in my personal experience who conducted a few interviews and has a few hire hires in my dev team, old candidates are more risky than younger devs.

By week 6, I had done coding and system design rounds with 8 companies.

By week 7 I had offers from 3 companies, with others still trying to push me through their process because they knew I had offers.

I accepted an offer week 8, and turned down 4 others (one more came in just before I made my decision).

My stack is nothing special; I’ve been working 90% in Python for the last 5 years.

I work in FinTech, so that is a little more niche, but only four of the companies that I interviewed with were FinTech, and 2/4 offers were for FinTech companies.

All offers were for fully remote positions.

So…I don’t know what to tell you. I’m in the US, so I’m sure that plays into it some, but I haven’t experienced any of the doom and gloom I see everywhere online.

I have friends who are struggling too, some of them never making it past the initial interview phase, let alone the hiring manager phase before any sort of technical interview.

A couple have asked me for advice, and honestly, as much as engineers hate to hear it, soft skills are damn important, and most engineers really suck at them.

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physx_rt@reddit

I would like to add that I got two offers within a month and a half in the UK after leaving my previous role, with 5 years of experience as a python backend dev.

I agree that many listings are fake, as in many of them seem to just send a rejection after a couple days, but there are opportunities out there.

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10199@reddit

I work at bank as C# dev, I have enough experience and skills for typical backend C# job. I apply to a vacancy of C# to another bank at job site and was rejected in 3 seconds. Then I went to their site, found HR email, messaged her and was rejected too. I mean, if you need devs, why you cant spare 10 minutes to talk to real human over phone?

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engineered_academic@reddit

Stop complaining that the hiring machine is broken and start building a machine you actually own. If you're tired of being a digital janitor waiting for a recruiter to accept your request, you need to stop selling your time and start building your own infrastructure.

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charging_chinchilla@reddit

it's not complicated.

due to year after year of mass layoffs, there's a ton of much more qualified, proven talent out there looking for jobs. you don't stand out. why would a company want to bring you in for an interview when they can get someone with more experience at more presitigious companies, possibly with referrals to vouch for them?
there are fewer jobs available. AI is going to automate most of the programming aspects of the job away very soon, so there's little need to hire people whose main strength is programming.

No, the pay is above market level. IKEA is the kind of company with work balance and is family oriented. That means there is no real event or AW. Instead you get higher pay. Benefits are also quite low.

Due to the unique business model of IKEA, the organization is very complex with a lot of domain knowledge. Once you are hired, they want to keep you a long time

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Colt2205@reddit

It's good to diversify but also important to focus on a stack at first because of needing to gain architectural knowledge that is shared across stacks.

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davidbasil@reddit (OP)

Laravel is/was always used for startups. It's the second most popular stack in my country after .NET

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redditnotmereddit@reddit

Might be. PHP and .NET I would say is still commonly used in big enterprise companies. And if you are going with those companies, they still see IT as a cost center and not part of revenue center.

Expect a larger pool of candidates and outsourcing with enterprise tools like .NET and Java.

deodorel@reddit

I think the solution is going back to the pre COVID times with mostly on-sites. 99% of the scammers are not able to either come or actually hold their own in an on site interview.

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Rare_Appointment_604@reddit

> senior developer with six years of experience

The issue of juniors has been building up for years. The fact is that the shortage of engineers isn’t the same. There is a firm belief now that if you hold out you will find someone so don’t settle. Historically it was very much true you might never find that person so you should settle.

It’s not one or 2 things it’s many things. And a lot of them are around the industry maturing.

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uber_neutrino@reddit

I refuse to believe the world changed so much in such a short period of time. It feels like we are missing something. Something is waaay off.

It's the difference between being in a bubble and a recession. This is the first time in a LONG time that we've seen degrowth in terms of tech jobs. So you are used to being the belle of the ball but now are like a regular jobber.

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cwmyt@reddit

I am looking for job right now in PHP/Laravel space located in South Asia. As I see it, expectation from candidate is way too much. Majority of vacancy I see requires developer to know one or more frontend framework, backend and AWS and VPS and micro services concepts and what not. Its just too much for me even with 8+ years of experience.

So, I just don't apply if I see too much buzz words in JDs. Someone else might apply tweaking their CV to reflect what the job is asking for. HR would definitely call them since there is a nice overlap but at the end of the day its extremely unlikely that one person will know the whole dang thing.

I started working as a developer in 2019 as well and I'm now a senior dev. I'm based in Japan but the situation feels pretty similar here. I think people who can only write code are having a tough time. It's hard, but I believe you need to be able to handle some management responsibilities too.

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Complete_Fly_96@reddit

I work in IT and I was in job hunting almost six months until few weeks ago, when this person helped me with my resume and LinkedIn profile. To be honest with you I was reluctant at beginning but was a great choice for me.

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Unlucky-Durian-2336@reddit

I wonder, OP, how did Russian attack on Ukraine impact market in Georgia - I can imagine that IT companies will have less opportunities to win clients due to geopolitical uncertainty, and it could be additional factor adding to how market did really change last few years around the world.

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throwaway09234023322@reddit

Seems like a resume issue tbh. They get spammed with a ton of AI generated resumes and shit. They only have time to interview a few people out of the hundreds or thousands of resumes they get.

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Chuu@reddit

I think it's time to accept it's a different world than 2019. We've had three major shocks to the system since then, the massive hiring boon during the pandemic, the pandemic itself, and the huge rounds of layoffs over the last two years. Saying nothing of companies trying to figure out how AI integrated into their strategy and some using it as an excuse to reduce headcount.

Also 2019 was seven years ago. A lot can change in seven years in general.