What’s everyone’s take on the developer hiring market these days?
Compared to last year, the number of job postings has definitely dropped, but at the same time, it seems like certain stacks still can’t find people.
Here’s what I’ve noticed:
- Entry-level postings are down, and the market is reorganizing around experienced hires
- Backend roles are still plentiful, but the stack requirements are very specific, like “Java/Spring for a few years”
- AI-related positions have increased, but many are actually heavily focused on data engineering
- The salary ceiling doesn’t feel like it’s rising as much as before
What I’ve felt while interviewing is that they now ask much more about “why you made that judgment” than “what you know how to do.” Going in with just a list of tech stacks prepared is pretty tough.
How are you all feeling about job hunting/switching jobs these days?
10 answers
Agreed, being a newbie is absolute hell these days.
I have 5 years of backend experience and spent 6 months preparing for a job change. There are plenty of postings, but they all say things like "3+ years of Java/Spring, MSA experience, able to operate k8s," so I ended up getting filtered out by all of them. I barely got in by highlighting my experience operating our own service, but a resume that just lists a stack felt like it wouldn't even get read from the document screening stage. I also agree with the point that interviews keep asking "why did you choose this architecture?" In fact, I prepared for that question by organizing three past incident response cases, and the reaction was completely different.
Well, experiences vary so much from case to case that it’s hard to generalize from this post alone. Even the claim that “AI positions have increased” needs clarification—whether that actually leads to hiring, or whether they just write the JDs that way without actually hiring. I’m curious specifically which platforms you saw this on and roughly how many postings.
Is there a source?
I want to push back a bit on the claim that AI-related positions are increasing: when you actually open the postings, most of them cram the work of three people—MLOps, data pipelines, and backend—into a single role. They’re labeled AI, but they’re really just hiring a data engineer. And because these roles are designed to cut labor costs, the salary caps are set low.
Same here. Even as an experienced professional, I’m definitely getting fewer interview calls than last year.