Hacker News Reader

Comment by cs02rm0 | Hacker News Reader

I don't know what the situation in the US is like, it's probably relatively well insulated. Normally, I'd expect the middle-of-the-road to stick, and the shining stars to twist, take the money and find something else in short order.

But across Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere, it's an absolute bunfight to get a new role in software at the moment. Thousands, even tens of thousands of applicants for every role on LinkedIn, in relatively short order. Invariably, if the role exists, it's too many for them to sanely process. Not just desperate applicants but qualified ones that meet the spec comfortably.

If that's coming to the US eventually, there will be lots more layoffs to come and nowhere else to jump to.

View on HN

We are recruiting in Sweden and apparently its very hard finding good candidates. Most are fresh from very short (2 years) educations or other special cases as opposed to having had 4-5 years of university and maybe some experience.

Fun thing though, we recently let a consultant go due to relying too much on LLMs.

If you re hiring remote across EU I know a dev with actual experience who can still engineer using his own brain (me) :p

Do you restrict your hiring to candidates with fluent Swedish?

This is not true at all. Last year maybe, right now it's better. Still a little harder if you're into dev and one single stack, but still not as catastrophic as you describe

In London, lots of jobs (at least for senior SWEs)

How's the market there, out of curiosity? Good enough to compensate London's housing costs?

I suppose there's a wide range of salaries, but for "big tech" level, the salaries are largely sufficient to compensate for housing costs.

Really? I feel the opposite way

I thought it was the same for here (Hong Kong), but after talking with recruiters and HRs: most of them are just people using bots, and they never read the job description. Very few of these big numbers are actually real candidates that have a chance of getting the role.

Not true. Things are harder than precovid era but it’s still relatively fine to get a job as software engineer (perhaps except for juniors, but that’s worldwide)

I've got over 20 years experience, led teams, worked in interesting and highly technical places. I've never not been offered a job I've applied for before, barely noticed the GFC.

I'm now a couple of years and about 1000 applications deep for which I've interviewed only with two companies (Xero and Canonical). No offers. This isn't like it was. And I'm not alone.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com