July wasn’t a particularly pleasant month for me.
I was affected by the restructuring of the company I was working for, which meant going back into a job market I would politely describe as insane.
Over the past two months, I’ve interviewed mostly for frontend, SWE and full-stack engineering roles, and I’ve noticed quite a few things that feel very different from the last time I was interviewing, around two years ago.
I should preface this by saying that I’m not the best interviewee. My job is to be an engineer, not a professional interviewee or leetcode solver. I’m an introvert, and the job market increasingly requires a lot of soft skills: having a "brand", marketing yourself, selling your experience, being charismatic, thinking on-the-fly ideas and presenting yourself as the perfect candidate.
None of that necessarily reflects how good you are at your actual job, and when the interview itself is stressful, that gap becomes even bigger.
1. The expectation is to be the perfect fit
In older interviews I had, there seemed to be more room for learning or better said "potential". You didn’t have to possess all the skills but to be eager to learn. Now, I’m seeing much more of: “You don't have exactly the experience we're looking for? Rejected.”
If you don't match a large part of the job description already, there doesn't seem to be much appetite to invest in someone who could grow into the role.
Maybe this is simply the market correcting itself after years of aggressive hiring, but I do wonder whether we’re losing some of the willingness to hire for potential.
2. Interviewing well seems to matter more than engineering well
To me this is one of the biggest frustrations on the job market right now. Interviews are artificial environments. You are asked to produce your best answer, code, idea, product, under pressure, with very little time to think.
And yet we seem comfortable treating performance in that environment as a proxy for engineering ability.
In one interview, I received feedback that I had frozen because interviewing is stressful for me, and that saying “I don't know” when nothing immediately came to mind wasn't a good signal.
But isn't being able to say “I don't know” actually an important engineering skill?
I would much rather work with someone who says:
“I don't know yet. Let me investigate.”
than someone who confidently makes something up because they think that's what the interview expects.
3. Companies want you to be everything and salaries don't necessarily reflect it
The scope of some of the roles I've seen has become… ambitious. Frontend. Backend. Product. Design. Talking to customers. Making technical decisions. Owning the roadmap. Using AI. Moving independently.
Basically: be the engineer, product manager, designer and mini-CEO of your area. Don't get me wrong that's not necessarily a bad thing, I actually like having ownership.B
ut when a company expects one person to cover what used to be several different roles, I think it's fair to ask whether compensation and expectations have kept up with that change. Instead i see the salaries and budgets have..decreased?
Especially in expensive cities like Amsterdam.
You can live somewhere cheaper, that's true, but then you often trade money for commuting time, which is another cost.
4. Some job advertisements don't feel real
Many of the job descriptions are not real (or better said don’t feel real). Or if they are real, I’ve seen them sitting open for months.
I've seen job descriptions asking for extremely specific combinations of experience. And I've seen companies seemingly looking for a unicorn while complaining that they can't find people.
Maybe they really can’t find talent? Or there is so much talent in the market that they don’t know what to do? Or do they ask for the impossible? Or are some of these roles not really intended to be filled in the first place?
Because right now, we somehow have a situation where companies say they can't hire, while qualified people say they can't get hired.
5. Job applications have become unnecessarily enormous
We've all joked about uploading your CV and then being asked to manually enter every single thing that's already in your CV. Tbh, that's not even a big problem anymore.
Most roles have open-ended questions. With the dreaded “What excites you about this role?” being on the top of the list, which "paying my rent and bills" is not necessirily an answer to.
And then, my personal favourite (approaching the word pet-peeve):
Record a 2-4 minute video answering X question.
Have you ever spoken to an engineer before? Some of us are already fighting for our lives in a live coding interview. Now you want a casting audition too? I didn’t know i was getting hired to be an actor.
6. Job descriptions are generally bad
An other trend i see is an abundance of startups got their first founding engineers, followed by job descriptions that are obviously AI-generated. Five paragraphs of corporate language that nobody understands following 37 technologies in must-haves. You should of course move fast, own end-to-end, thrive in ambiguity, be 20x engineer and 45x productive.
My brain has already left the building.
And then companies complain about receiving hundreds of generic, AI-generated applications. But if you put little thought into the job description, why should candidates put significantly more thought into their application?
You get as much effort as you put into it.
These are simply observations from my own experience over the last two months, and I'm genuinely curious whether other engineers are seeing the same thing.
Maybe it's the AI transition/psychosis. Maybe it's a correction after the hiring frenzy of the 2020 mass hiring. Or maybe I'm just particularly unlucky with interviews. 😅
What have you noticed in the 2026 tech job market that feels different from a few years ago?
Top comments (23)
Thanks for sharing this piece!
That's relatable. The 2020s have been rough for a lot of people. I graduated with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 2020 and have yet to land a role that's genuinely fulfilling and has real growth potential. The timing couldn't have been worse: pandemic aftermath, a flooded job market, and companies simultaneously cutting headcount and raising their hiring bars.
"Politely describe" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. The market is structurally broken. Supply far outpaces demand, yet companies claim there's a talent shortage. What they mean is there's a shortage of people who match an impossibly narrow checklist at below-market pay.
Same 🫡. The irony is that the skills required to ace modern tech interviews, rapid memorization of algorithmic patterns, performing under artificial pressure, projecting confidence in real-time, have almost zero overlap with the actual day-to-day work of a software engineer. We're selecting for a completely different skill set than the one the job requires.
There are many additional, largely unspoken, reasons candidates get rejected beyond a mismatched skill set. One well-documented pattern is age bias: engineers in their 30s, mb u r in ur 30s judging by ur profile pic, routinely face discrimination despite being at peak competency. This is a well-documented in videos, like this one, and countless firsthand accounts across the industry. The argument that "age is just a number" is logically sound, yet it doesn't match how hiring decisions are actually made in practice.
This makes sense when you consider the economics: the marginal cost of building and shipping software has dropped dramatically. When software itself is cheap, companies compete on signaling and perception rather than substance. Hiring reflects that same broken incentive: appearances, interview performance, and optics are prioritized over demonstrated engineering ability. I've personally experienced the inverse of this: being favored in hiring processes for completely superficial reasons unrelated to my technical ability (e.g. being white and attractive.). I declined those offers. Companies that hire based on how you look rather than how you think are not places worth working at.
This may be the most underappreciated systemic problem in software engineering rn. The role has quietly expanded to include system design, DevOps, security, AI integration, product thinking, and stakeholder communication, yet compensation benchmarks haven't kept pace with that scope expansion. The total value delivered has grown; the pay has not.
Many, mb et all, aren't. A significant portion of job postings are ghost listings: maintained to give the appearance of growth, to collect resumes for future pipelines, or simply never removed after a role was quietly cancelled. Applying into that void is a statistically poor use of your time and energy.
Exactly. And there's a dark irony here: the people most harmed by lengthy, unpaid application processes are the ones who need the job most urgently. Multi-stage assessments, take-home projects, and 5-round interview loops are a form of gatekeeping that systematically favors those who are already financially comfortable and have time to spare.
Most, mb et al, are. Job descriptions are often written by recruiters who don't fully understand the role, approved by managers who list everything on a wishlist rather than actual requirements, and then used as a filtering tool against applicants who don't hit every bullet point. The document is broken at every stage of its creation.
Tbh, you need to stop sending resumes into the void. The internet has trained everyone to assume any inbound application is either an AI agent or someone who mass-applied to 500 companies. Neither assumption creates a compelling human connection.
The most effective thing you can do rn is go analog: print your resume, walk into a building, and talk to a real person in the department you want to work in. That interaction alone will put you in the top 1% of candidates, not because you're more qualified, but because virtually no one else is doing it. Referrals and direct conversations still convert at a dramatically higher rate than cold applications.
The online job market is a system that no longer serves candidates at all. Opt out of it.
Good luck 🙂!
Feel free to rant over!
I think you expanded my thoughts very effectively, thanks. My main issue with this pipeline is not that i don't get interviews. I would say that i am lucky enough to have a decent amount of first chats, many live coding, tech assignments. My main issue in the pipeline is the behavioural interviews, unfortunately for me, i cannot perfectly recite predefined text, and this seems to be a huge disadvantage to me. Combine it to my anxiety levels being higher than the average person, most (all?) my behavioural interviews turn to the disaster.
Oh, that's pretty cool! Glad you managed to conduct some interviews. But in my case, they assume I'm an AI agent or something. Dear recruiter, I'm a hooman bro :-(.
Same <3!
Beyond that, let's forget about the current job market for a sec and build some cool software together <3!
See ya around!
There are many ways to bypass ats nowadays, and I can't recommend enough the github project career-ops to find roles. I also have taken a different approach than most people and contacted recruiters directly, which works wonders!
Good luck 🍀
Yup, ATS is pretty easy for me to bypass. The much harder system to bypass is the human recruiter.
Tbh, I wasn't always this insane 😂. I used to be a pretty normal dev, writing software and doing all the usual stuff. But sometime in 2024, I basically decided, "You know what? Ain't no more job applications. I'm going to build open-source software and play video games with people on the internet instead".
I was also pretty fascinated by Russian culture, so I went down that rabbit hole and ended up investing my full-time effort into building deep lore around Open SASS and Wise AI.
At this point, working for a company just isn't that compelling to me anymore. I actually like getting paid for my physical work more than my software work, because building software comes pretty naturally to me. It's something I genuinely enjoy doing, so tying it directly to a salary doesn't feel particularly meaningful anymore.
And honestly, I don't see much personal growth in simply working at a company anymore, even if that company were Google, Anthropic, or somewhere equally prestigious. I'd probably end up being the same guy, sitting around, yapping all day and writing software 😂.
Never heard of it, but honestly, I'm not really worried about bypassing ATS or AI interviews. Those are relatively easy problems to bypass.
The harder problem is getting into an environment where the work itself is actually worth doing.
Yeah, I can definitely see that working. For me, what worked best was meeting people in real life, talking to them, making some jokes, having a good time, and eventually getting hired.
But there's a bigger issue: none of the jobs I've had up to this point were particularly fulfilling. They were mostly boring, repetitive, and didn't offer much room for meaningful growth.
So eventually I asked myself: why am I spending years of my life working for some random company that nobody has ever heard of, when there isn't much upside for me?
I could spend that same time building open source, playing video games, meeting people online, and creating something that actually has a life beyond my own employment.
That's the part that matters most to me. A job ends when you leave the company. A project, a community, or a body of work can outlive you. The things I build become part of the lore, get remembered, reused, remixed, and potentially passed on to the next generation.
That feels like a much better trade for my time than optimizing my resume for another company.
U too <3!
Interesting perspective, I guess I am the complete opposite!
I actually like the idea of working for a company. I like having a goal, working towards it for 6–8 hours, seeing something get achieved, getting paid for it, and then closing my laptop and going back to enjoying the rest of my life.
I've worked at both big and small companies, and what drives me isn't necessarily whether the work will have a life beyond me. I don't particularly mind if some of my work is repetitive or even boring. What makes my brain tick is having something to achieve and being able to see the result of that effort.
And honestly, getting my bills paid is also a pretty effective motivational system.
For me, if I were outside Lebanon, I'd have multiple streams of income. But because of the war and a broken government, I can't seem to make a dime from the internet.
If I were outside Lebanon, I'd probably never work for a company. I'd have multiple software businesses making money. I have so many ideas and so many software projects with real potential.
But you know what? Screw it. I'm open sourcing my thoughts, my brain and everything I have in mind. I don't care about my own existence anymore.
This is the way: getting paid for what you create, what you build, and what you work on.
Have a nice weekend!
A lot of this matches what I’ve been seeing too, especially the shift from hiring for potential to hiring for an almost exact checklist.
The “I don’t know” point is particularly important. Good engineers don’t know everything they know how to investigate, validate assumptions, ask the right questions, and get to the answer without pretending they already have it.
I also think the combination of broader responsibilities + lower compensation is becoming a real issue. Companies want engineers who can code, design, understand product, talk to customers, use AI effectively, and operate independently, but the compensation doesn’t always reflect that level of ownership.
And there’s definitely some irony in companies complaining about AI-generated applications while publishing generic AI-generated job descriptions. The hiring process is becoming optimized for appearing like a good candidate rather than actually identifying good engineers.
The interesting question for me is whether companies eventually adapt their interviews to evaluate how people actually work, rather than how well they perform under artificial pressure.
Great observations. I’d be interested to compare notes with other engineers going through the same process.
To be honest, I see very little adaptation in interviews to the current state of things. Many companies still interview with LeetCode and system design in pretty much the same way they did two years ago. And I get it, interviewing people is genuinely hard, and there’s no obvious replacement.
My stats so far:
If AI is part of how engineers work now, I’d rather be evaluated on how I use it: what I delegate, what I keep, how I validate the output, and whether I actually understand and can defend what I produce. That feels much closer to the job than pretending AI doesn’t exist.
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Thanks for sharing. it has been three years for me and it's the same, though my issue is compounded by the bad economy in my country, and that international companies generally don't like to hire here. though the most rage inducing thing is the applications and interviews I did only to discover it is just a startup gathering data to train their hiring AI.
I have to recommend that if you feel that your CVs are sent into the void, try contacting local recruiters in your area, it always worked for me better than sending an application
Interviewing well vs actually being able to do the job well has always been a problem in the job market. I have suffered the same a few times over the years.
You might find this useful
I know finding a job is a pain, especially with the constant "Please add your LinkedIn" - translation: We wont actually look at you, our AI will pull your profile and determine if you're good.
"Please record an intro video for the team" - translation: Nobody will ever see this, but atleast we have you on recording, not like it matters.
"What excites you" - translation: Say you'll make us money, or else.
So any and all tips and tricks, please drop em in the comments there, so I can add em to the post. My goal is for it to be community driven, not just single authored, so we can give eachother the tools and techniques to stand out. Eg. My brainchild method for mass CV production, without any of it being AI generated (though your AI of choice will be judging you). If you download it and give it a try, do let me know how it works for you and if there's anything I can improve about it (I'll likely need it myself soon)
i found the problem is not "not getting an interview" (for me), but that i miss the charisma or the acting skills to thrive in interviews.
Fair, but sofar the guide only covers getting to interview stage, any advice on the next part is appreciated!
Thank you so much for sharing your experience, it really gave me a lot to think about. I completely flipped my life around 5 years ago, and while I finally feel ready to work in the field, the idea of working for someone else again is a bit daunting. It's just scary out there in the unknown, but your insights made things much clearer for me. Thanks for sharing, this was really useful!
It's funny you said that, because for me the opposite is the scary part. Working for myself, searching for clients is so daunting. I really like the idea, but it sounds so scary!
I can really relate to this, especially the part about companies looking for the “perfect fit”.
I'm currently transitioning from QA, after 8 years of experience, into Cloud/DevOps. I've invested a lot of time in certifications and hands-on projects, but I often feel that companies value having the exact previous job title more than transferable skills or the ability to learn.
The interview point resonates too. Being able to say “I don't know, but I know how to investigate” should be a strength in engineering, not a weakness.
It definitely feels like there is much less room for potential in the current market.
I kept having "oh, so it's not just me feeling this" moments when I was reading this!
I'm transitioning into tech from another industry (libraries) but it seems like there's a lot of crossover between the two when it comes to job markets and hiring.
Have you seen a shift in the tech stacks for the roles you are interviewing for?
I don't think so, I mean I worked in Web dev and TypeScript is more or less what you get.
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