Hiring here is a little bit more old school, I guess? Especially because the types of roles we are hiring now are usually 5+ years of experience, we focus more on learning about what the candidates have done in the past, the leetcode type of question interview is just a small part, and matters more for prospective Jr. hires.

That being said, we aren't hiring that many fresh graduates anymore, we already have some we hired, we're focused on investing in them, getting them to learn more about our hardware and code, etc. and hoping to retain them.

Can speak to my experience that if you are a senior engineer in London the market is relatively easy at the moment (or was at the beginning of the year) even with no connections.

It's easy to find jobs in software engineering provided you have an attractive resume.

Background is SWE at an AI co that's in the news sometimes

It felt about the same in terms of grind effort from my last search in 2022. the main difference was ai companies cared a lot about your understanding of agentic systems and harness / context engineering, and had much more practical rounds with less leetcode (usually 1 medium). More legacy firms (finance / some big tech) still expected you to solve 3-4 leetcode medium/hards throughout the process

That being said, I'm not sure how much job security having such prowess would convey because I feel AI will be better than us at that too eventually (if not already).

There is no such thing as easy right now!!

Engineers with years of experience are being dismissed from interviews, and they are solid candidates. I speak with recruiters since I am looking for job atm and it is a horror movie atm.

Companies literally have no idea what they want, they lost the touch with reality. There was a twitter post from a developer who released a tool being used left and right, then a role AD asking for more years of experience for that tool than the tool exists.

You need a miracle right now to find a job, also, you need to know the recruiter who knows the hiring manager to get you in.

Nothing is easy anymore, and won't be anytime soon although the AI bubble started to pop and companies are waking up to the huge mistake they made.

Recruiters have utterly given up on being efficient in the market. I do not know why, but there is something very wrong given "spamming the same brand-name fish all the other recruiters are spamming" is their only strategy. My guess is there is a combination of bad (or an entire lack of) hygienic data filtering and a disconnect between compensation and terminal goals (hiring the best candidates).

I then, uh, turned both offers down because I thought the roles weren't interesting enough and didn't pay enough to make up for not being interesting (170k base). Now I am back in the process and, knock on wood, I am in the middle of final rounds with several companies and expect to have a much better offer by next week.

I have a background in ML and agentic systems, which did come up, but my resume isn't outstanding. No big tech or frontier lab internships, no published papers, no unicorn startup. I wouldn't say finding jobs has been easy, but it hasn't been remotely as difficult as this thread implies, and I believe the statistics back me up here. I suspect this is a "people who aren't struggling don't complain about it online" phenomenon.

Regardless, I wish everyone here best of luck in finding a job.

The problem with specialized roles is that nothing lasts too long in software. Given enough time in it, nobody really has an edge. Everyone is smart enough to have invented and implemented the very thing eating the world right now. They just don't have supervillain money or clout, so they work for you instead.