The 2025 Developer Job Market, as Summed Up After Quitting and Taking 3 Months Off
I quit in March as a backend developer with six years of experience, and I've been taking time off and preparing for my next job since then. I'll summarize mostly based on what I've experienced firsthand. This is just a brain dump, so read it for fun.
First, the market itself has clearly frozen over compared with last year. Based on the companies I applied to, last year about 30% of my applications passed the document screening; now it's less than 10%. In particular, SI/solution companies are barely hiring, and pre-Series A startups have closed hiring altogether.
What has noticeably increased instead:
- AI-related backend positions (LLM serving, vector DB setup)
- Data platform engineers
- Security positions (steady, perhaps due to regulations)
There are also changes in interviews.
1. Until last year, questions were at the level of "Why did you choose this technology?"; this year, they persistently ask "What numerical improvements did you actually achieve?" Keeping troubleshooting logs organized helped a lot.
2. AI-related questions come up as basic knowledge. You should be able to answer about experience using LLM APIs and concepts like vector embeddings.
3. Coding test difficulty actually feels lower. Instead, live coding and design-oriented assignments have increased.
One thing I regret while preparing: not building up side project results while I was employed. After quitting, I had nothing new to add to my portfolio, so the time feels wasted. Everyone, prepare before you quit.
I'm currently waiting for final interviews at two companies, and I hope they go well.
7 answers
Fr, resume screening rejections are brutal these days lol. I have 5 years of experience and only passed the resume stage for 3 out of 20 applications.
How did you organize your troubleshooting logs? I’m preparing too, but I’m just piling them up by date in Notion, so when I try to talk about them with numbers in interviews, it keeps getting fuzzy. If you have a template or something, could you share it?
Which company are you basing that on when you say the coding test difficulty has gone down? I actually feel like platform companies are the same or even tougher.
Well, isn’t 30% for document screening a bit of an exaggeration? If last year was at that level, that’s a 2021–22 story. Even in the second half of last year, it was already below 10%. It’s a bit ambiguous because you didn’t specify which company’s pipeline this is based on. If you could roughly tell us which companies you applied to, it would make the post more credible.
It's true that basic AI question literacy has become a requirement, but asking backend developers to even build a vector DB is a bit much. To do that, you'd need to understand infrastructure and everything else, and they're trying to fit someone who can do all that into a single backend role. In the end, they're asking one person to be worth two.