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Comment by jonnycoder | Hacker News Reader

Hindsight sucks sometimes. I was looking at my linkedin messages and I have many from FAANG recruiters reaching out back in late 2020 and early 2021, and my profile is mostly private with not a lot of detail. The current market for senior/principal software engineers is dismal. The listings are there, including remote, but it's as if there is a hiring freeze across the board yet they leave up the job postings.

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Hang in there. January was really disheartening for me. Like literally dead, no replies, in a market where I'm used to just waiting for the recruiters to hit me up and pick between them. In the second half of February things are picking up a little, some leads from recruiters, some replies to my resume. I expect March to be when things really pick up as budgets for the year are approved.

It probably won't be the easy pickings, sellers market it was at least until the market has had time to absorb all these laid off engineers, but I have hope it'll be much better.

The market for junior dev is even worse, imagine being fresh out of college in a market with 100,000 freshly laid off mid-staff level engineers

That's true, however I've been seeing complaints for a little longer than that. Perhaps in FAANG they were hiring, but in general I remember seeing a lot of junior devs (not from elite colleges) commenting about how they applied for 50 positions sometimes during COVID. Something unthinkable in my time.

eh, this was life foe me in rhe eaely 2010s too. Super hard to get into a good spot back then.

The junior dev market has been terrible since the COVID lockdown.

Remote is hard to make work with juniors, unfortunately.

Tell me about it. I don't mind helping someone, but when they don't pay attention the first time and I have to have the same exact meeting again, it's kind of a bother.

We've had some success with recording meetings and using automated transcriptions, though we don't have any fresh out of college juniors now.

My current place does that, but we still don't really hire juniors so who knows if it works.

It was pretty shitty in the late 2000s/early 2010s IIRC.

Checked mine too and the difference is stark. However just setting Linkedin to "looking for a job" was enough to get a lot of attention in early February. I didn't want to wait for layoffs on my company, so, in advance, I got a much better paid job in about 2-3 weeks. Listings always suck, btw. Recruiters is where it's at.

I wonder what recruiting looks like as a career right now in comparison. I’m sure many will have to switch fields.

Depends. In Ireland, the tech recruiters will all move back into pharma. Dunno what'll happen in the US, maybe a bunch of them will do sales?

I see experienced ones remaining calm, where rank-and-file is a bit desperate: too many calls, sending me nonsense jobs, badmouthing companies, pushing it too hard to accept offers. Unsurprisingly, there was a boom during COVID, and a lot of those new people started around that time.

I see a correlation with development positions. There is just too many candidates for junior positions, but if you're a company trying to hire senior, principal or leadership your chance of success without a recruiter is very slim.

Are you looking for a new job? If so, what are you looking for? Where are you at?

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