It's a Weird Time in Tech Hiring
Talented engineers apply to dozens of jobs and never hear back.
Hiring managers post openings and get flooded with unqualified applications.
It feels broken on both sides.
Why is this happening?
Here are a few things, but there are more:
1. Too many candidates, too few roles
Post-layoffs, the market is flooded — especially with mid- and senior-level engineers — making competition intense and hiring teams overwhelmed.
2. Applying is too easy
One-click applies and AI-written resumes mean companies get swamped with low-quality or irrelevant applications.
3. Job ads are now part of global competition
Hiring is no longer local — job ads attract applicants from all over the world, raising the volume but making it harder to identify the best local or relocation-ready talent.
So how do we fix it? Feel free to add your own recipes.
1. Improve your online presence
Make sure your LinkedIn and resume clearly reflect your skills, role, and value — don’t make hiring teams guess.
Write a tech blog, join podcasts, solve HackerRank challenges, contribute to open source — anything that helps show your expertise beyond just a job title.
2. Use referrals (even weak ones)
Even a loose connection can help you bypass the noise and get your profile seen.
3. Build your network before you need it
Stay active, share your work, and connect with people — opportunities often come from conversations, not applications.
With everything happening in the tech hiring lately - how are you navigating it all?
Wages have taken a noise dive.
Whoppie de da, I can get an "VP" position that pays 130k in New York!
I'm so ready to cash out one of my retirement accounts and try to hide in a cheaper country until things get better.
Google is spamming LinkedIn with roles, in Poland. Guess they got tired of paying 300k TC to Americans.
I'm lucky with a fairly decent remote job, at least for the time being. I missed my chance to get a FAANG job and retire by young.
Now I'm in my 30s. Old and bitter. Gone are the dreams of raising a VC round and making millions of dollars. If I ever do come up with something, I'll just bootstrap it.
I don't want a board of directors telling me what to do.
I have a very unique idea for project management of all things and I reckon I could build it for 50k or so.
I was laid off from a startup last year and sent out 187 applications over two months. Zero interviews. It was demoralizing until I changed how I approached job hunting. I started sharing small projects, coding tips, and lessons on LinkedIn and GitHub, and people started reaching out. Then I started talking to old coworkers, joined tech groups, and helped with open source. Most interviews came from these chats, not job boards. I moved from being just another resume to being a known and helpful human, even if only to 5–10 people. That was enough.
The system may be broken, but you can still stand out by being real, relevant, and visible. It worked for me; I hope it helps someone else, too.
Your advice is perennial, I would have given it to people any time after 2005 or so when blogs, LinkedIn and things like that have been entrenched. People sung the praises of "networking" before then, at least since the 1990s.
The market has been flooded with H1B Employees and their spouses. Few opportunities for everyone, from college grads to veteran tech talent.
Companies are choosing cheap contract H1B labor. Some companies find that too expensive, and open their own shops in India where employees earn a fraction of what a US-based employee would earn for incredibly long working hours.
The transportation industry leaders are a great example of that.