A friend got laid off in January. Senior backend. 6 years experience. Built systems handling millions of requests. Solid GitHub. Good communication.
200+ applications over three months. Three callbacks. Two ghosted after the first round. One offered 40% below his previous salary.
He's not an edge case. He's the norm right now.
In 2021, companies were hiring 500 engineers. In 2023, those same companies laid off 200. In 2024, those 200 people flooded the market.
Supply went way up. Demand went way down. The result? Your LeetCode score doesn't matter nearly as much as it used to.
Two years ago, companies were fighting over engineers. Sign-on bonuses. Remote work anywhere. Counter-offers on counter-offers. Then interest rates went up. VCs tightened their belts. The ZIRP party ended. And now everyone's competing for the same shrinking pool of seats.
Every job posting now says "AI experience preferred." Half the companies don't know what that means. They just need to say it because their CEO read a LinkedIn post.
The real shift isn't AI replacing engineers—not yet, anyway. It's that AI makes each engineer more productive. Before, a team of 15 engineers shipped X features per quarter. Now a team of 10 with Copilot ships the same. That's five fewer seats needed per team. Multiply by a thousand companies. That's thousands of fewer jobs.
Fewer seats. Same number of people wanting to sit.
You'd think with so many candidates, hiring would be easier. It's actually worse.
Five-round interviews for mid-level roles. Twenty-hour take-home projects. System design interviews for what's essentially a CRUD app. Culture fit interviews that are just vibes.
I watched a company reject someone who'd built their exact product at a competitor—because he didn't solve an algorithm puzzle fast enough. The puzzle had nothing to do with the job.
We're filtering for people good at interviews. Not people good at engineering.
Senior engineers are now applying for mid-level roles. Mid-level engineers are applying for junior roles. Junior engineers can't get in at all.
Everyone takes a step down. Companies get senior talent at mid-level prices. That "competitive salary" in the job posting? It means competitive with the 50 other desperate applicants. They know you'll take it.
I've watched people navigate this market successfully. Here's the pattern:
Stop mass-applying. Ten thoughtful applications beat a hundred spray-and-pray. Research the company. Reach out to engineers on the team. Show up knowing the product. The difference is stark.
Build in public. Not "30 Days of LeetCode" tweets. Actual projects. Blog posts about real problems you solved. The kind of stuff that makes a hiring manager think "this person can do the work" before they even meet you.
Lean into what AI can't replace. System thinking. Cross-team communication. Understanding the business problem, not just the technical one. The soft stuff nobody wants to hear is important.
Take the imperfect job. The 50-person company with okay salary might teach you more than waiting for FAANG. Sometimes the best career move is the one you didn't plan.
The market will recover. It always does. But it won't go back to 2021.
Remote jobs stay hyper-competitive—the whole world can apply. AI keeps making teams smaller. The bar for "good enough" keeps rising.
The engineers who thrive won't have the most years of experience. They'll adapt fastest. Learn before being told to. Solve problems instead of waiting for tickets.
It's not fair. Nobody said it would be.
The best time to build your reputation was two years ago. The second best time is today.
— blanho
Everyone's drawing boxes and arrows. Nobody's shipping code. System design matters, but not as much as Twitter thinks.
Cloudflare went from 'that CDN company' to a full cloud platform. Most startups should look there first.
Everyone defaults to OpenAI. Grab built a 1B model that's faster and cheaper. When should you stop renting?
