The cofounders of Hello Interview said the tech job market is tough right now due to multiple factors.
There are fewer positions than at the height of hiring in 2022, and that means companies can be choosier.
Junior engineers face the toughest challenges, Evan King and Stefan Mai wrote for “The Pragmatic Engineer.”
Just a few years ago, you only needed to be a “competent” software engineer to land a job. Now, you have to be perfect.
That’s according to Evan King and Stefan Mai, cofounders of interview-prep startup Hello Interview. Previously, King worked as a staff engineer for Meta, while Mai has experience as an engineering manager at Amazon and a senior engineering manager at Meta.
“There is little incentive to pass someone who doesn’t get everything entirely correct,” King and Mai wrote for the The Pragmatic Engineer newsletter. “This is the grim reality of what happens when there are so many qualified candidates in the interview pool.”
A series of unfortunate circumstances have created the perfect storm for out-of-work engineers, they said. For one, there has only been about a 40% increase in the total number of jobs available since the market hit rock bottom in 2023, and companies are increasingly picky about who they onboard.
And with engineers of all experience levels competing for a reduced number of roles, candidates are increasingly facing interviews that King and Mai said are only becoming harder to clear.
“While the core interview structure at Big Tech remains largely unchanged, the bar has shifted approximately one standard deviation higher across the board, and performance that would have secured an offer in 2021 might not even clear the screening stage today,” they wrote.
Engineers in niche specialties are doing better, King and Mai said, with the hiring market seeing an increased demand for those who have knowledge of “AI infrastructure” and “machine learning operations,” among other things. Those in “core domains,” though, which the authors designate as frontend, backend services, and mobile development, are seeing fewer openings.
The challenges aren’t all equally punishing, though. King and Mai write that junior engineers, particularly those first entering the market after graduation, face the toughest field of competition.
They spoke to a job seeker who graduated from the Indian Institutes of Technology — which the authors describe as the “most prestigious computer science university in the country” — and has been trying to land a position for 6 months, having applied to over 100 companies. The former student hasn’t received a single offer.
