I just talked to a bunch of recruiters (we're hiring) and their main piece of advice was: The market is crazy. Move fast. We're seeing people getting jobs within days of starting to look, bailing on offers after signing because they got a better offer somewhere else, etc. 24 hours is the longest you can leave a candidate waiting. You have been warned
edit: I am in SFBA. Your reality may be different. People have spilled some 2 trillion dollars onto the area in the past 2 years. A lot of that is going to software engineers as everyone tries to shove AI down consumers' throats. Rents are up 60% in 12 months, which is not the sign of a cold employment market :)
Regardless, it's not like that was the only job I applied to. I had a policy of applying to at least ten jobs a day, so I applied to about ~1500 jobs, and literally all of them rejected me except for the one I have right now. I had about twenty other interviews (edit: 15, checked my calendar from last year), a few that got to late stages, and they didn't pan out [1].
I psychotically save money so I wasn't worried in any kind of existential sense, I could survive for years if I needed, but man I would have killed to be in a situation where I even had the opportunity to bail on an offer.
This has been the worst economy for software engineers I've seen in my ~15 year career. I am slightly optimistic that it will improve eventually but I suspect "eventually" might mean several more years.
[1] And one at a one of the world's largest bank (that my lawyer/mom has advised me not to name publicly) where my interviewers were potentially the most incompetent people I have ever talked to and who didn't seem to know what an atomic was in Java, and "corrected" my counter code with a mutex. And I put "corrected" in quotes, because what they corrected it to would deadlock. Morons.
That doesn't scale to 10 jobs/day for very long because almost nobody has a network that big. If you don't land something through referral to the hiring manager, it's mostly a crap shoot these days.
What I had tried to do was start randomly requesting connection invites with people on LinkedIn in fields I was interested, and a surprisingly large number of them accepted my requests, but that didn't actually pan out to anything productive, which is a little depressing.
I hope I don't get laid off from my current gig, because now I really don't have a clue on the best way to find a job. Maybe I could try that "CEO at a big corporation" thing, it doesn't look too hard and apparently you can lay off half your staff and still be rewarded.
I think recruiters will just carpet bomb emails out and then only respond like ten percent of the people that email them back.
https://www.citadelsecurities.com/news-and-insights/2026-glo...
Unless I'm getting whooshed now lol, but yeah the market here is just super hot because all the AI money sloshing around.
With my current job search I've got the sense that sf is once again the place to be. Everything else kind of sucks, lots went back on remote work.
- I'm contacted less often
- Offered Salaries are lower, despite inflation
- They basically all required being in office, and relocating at my expense
- Most of them are from AI startups that have a decent chance of not lasting more than a few years.
In the last three transitions I applied to a grand total of 5 companies.
Also, looking at the recruiter emails I've been getting, they've been ramping up over the last few months, and I'm back up to one or two cold emails per week.
But again, I'm fairly senior, and I have deep domain knowledge in a few key areas. I understand the market is brutal if you're early career or your knowledge isn't "T" shaped.
Around 12 calls if I remember correctly. With the exception of those who ghosted me, every company was very prompt, respectful of my time, and had a reasonable process that went from first to final interview pretty fast. I got a ton of outright rejections to my resume, which I sent around a lot. Getting the first call was the hardest part. YC job board ultimately led to finding my new role.
The company I went with had the best, warmest process that reflected how they like to work and was built to find people who had overlapping priorities. Thinking back, I think that most companies either deliberately or inadvertently wind up with processes that sync up with how they are organized internally and what kind of people they hope to hire.
Need to tell more recruiters.
and fwiw i dont know any swes struggling to find work personally
swe is so broad and in bubbles its hard to get an objective analysis
Really? So no take-home projects? No leetcode? No six rounds of interviews? Just show up and express interest, you're hired!
