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👋 Hi, this is Gergely with a subscriber-only issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, I cover challenges at Big Tech and startups through the lens of engineering managers and senior engineers. If you’ve been forwarded this email, you can subscribe here.
State of the software engineering jobs market, 2025: what hiring managers see
Observations by 30+ hiring managers and tech recruiters about what’s happening: a flood of inbound applications means more selective hiring, there’s increased demand for product engineers, and more
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Last month, we published a deepdive on the tech jobs market based on data that revealed a slow, steady rise in recruitment across Big Tech and startups. There’s also predictably massive AI engineering demand, fewer remote roles, and the growing significance of location, among other things.
The job market feels pretty weird right now: hiring managers say it’s hard to fill positions, but software engineers also get fewer responses to their applications. Also at the same time, news articles go viral with headlines like The Job Market Is Hell in The Atlantic:
“Young people are using ChatGPT to write their applications; HR is using AI to read them; no one is getting hired”.
The Atlantic’s article isn’t about tech positions, and blames the current conditions on AI. But is this what’s really going on? Based on my research: not really.
For today’s issue, I spoke with 30 tech hiring managers and 3 recruiters about what they are seeing, and just as importantly, why they think it’s happening.
One reality that’s different from the headlines is that I haven’t found AI to be the main thing to blame for the strange market. Today, we cover:
Flood of applications. 1,000+ candidates for a single role is not uncommon, and LinkedIn Jobs is the home of low-quality inbound applications, and is being abandoned by some companies.
Few hires via inbound. Despite so many inbound applications, many companies hire most engineers via reachouts and referrals.
‘Top’ candidates are hard to find. While the market has not seen so many applicants, standout engineers are hard to find and often can choose from several offers.
Remote jobs: more competition for less comp? Businesses hiring remotely can hire better engineers for 10-15% less than before.
Fake applicants + AI: a growing problem. Full remote and crypto startups are plagued by fake applicants who spoof their locations and play “switcharoo” to deceive recruiters. Cheating on interviews using AI tools is pretty rife.
Higher demand for founding engineers and product engineers. In the UK, founding engineers can be offered up to £200K ($270K) in salary, plus equity. AI startups seem to be pulling up compensation for product engineers across the market.
Early-stage startups have their own hiring problems. Attracting senior engineers from reputable companies is still a challenge, and standout ones often have competing offers.
1. Flood of applications
The biggest trend that nearly all hiring managers and recruiters at startups and large tech companies told me about is how much bigger the volume of applications is. A few cases:
James McWalter, founder and CEO of Y Combinator, startup, Paces:
“23,000 applications in the last 30 days for 8 open, in-person, New York-based roles”.
That’s nearly 3,000 applications per job! Here is one of the 8: fullstack software engineer in New York. It pays $150-190K, plus equity.
An engineering manager at Spotify, based in New York:
“We got 1,700 applicants in 15 hours for a role I recently released. I understand Spotify is popular, but we usually don’t see this many applications!“
A digital agency owner in the US, based in New York, who’s hiring nationwide:
“We went from 1-5 resumes a week, to about 300 or more a week. It feels insane how easy it has gotten to hire in the agency space.
“Never seen anything like this market in my 25+ years working in the industry. Our turnaround for new hires was averaging about 6 months or more of lead time, with fairly midrange engineers in terms of skill set. That’s fairly normal in the Digital Agency space. Now, we basically have our pick of any skill set, and can convert within weeks if we need to move quickly on new projects.
A CTO at a 20-person, UK-based media agency:
“More than 100 applications in 2 hours for a fullstack engineer role I posted the other day. For the Lead Engineer role, we got 60 in the same time period after posting”.
A hiring manager at a startup in Switzerland:
“We got 600 applications in 2 days for a senior frontend position. In the first few hours alone after posting, we got 150 applications. When we got to 600, we stopped accepting new ones.
Around 50% of the applicants were immediately rejected because we do not sponsor Swiss visas. Another 30% were rejected due to non-tech reasons like poor spoken English, or no desire to move to Switzerland. We moved forward with about 20% of applicants in the end”.
It sounds like hiring managers are flooded with resumes, so are not responding to recruiters pitching more applicants. Liz Fong-Jones, field CTO at Honeycomb, posted on LinkedIn:
“It’s so weird watching third-party recruiters pitch their candidates to us. Literally everyone with an open req is drowning in applicants right now. We don’t need more applications which we don’t control the quality of!
“The problem is no longer trying to attract enough applicants to roles, it’s sifting through the noise!”
LinkedIn: home of low-quality inbound applications
A hiring manager at a startup paying top-tier compensation in India, didn’t mince his words:
“LinkedIn is an irrecoverable hellscape for inbound applications. It is only useful for outbound via the recruiter product. At my company, we turned off the job postings for inbound because of the high volume of low-quality applicants, or AI-enhanced inbounds that tailor applications to our listing, when the person doesn’t have the claimed qualifications”.
I’ve heard the complaint by several hiring managers that LinkedIn applications are noticeably low quality. As a result, lots of startups are trying out smaller, more focused job boards like Wellfound and JustJoin.it, although the quality is reportedly patchy on those as well.
And it’s not just hiring managers: here’s an early engineer at a startup describing his LinkedIn inbox being clogged with applications, even though he’s not in recruitment:
“We have a few open postings at my startup and students are adding me as a contact en masse. Some add an intro asking if they can learn more about the position, and some are just straight up without any intro.
I get 5-10 LinkedIn requests per day. I try to filter through and respond to the ones who give good intro messages, but it’s a lot!”