[mitchitized]

Although I agree with the overall sentiment of the article, the reality in 2025 is that it is a totally dead market and we are still trying to figure out WTH is going on.

Some companies are holding their breaths due to political instability, others are in sectors that are already getting decimated (likely from the same instability above), yet others have reached a point where they (and "they" appear to be in a majority in their respective industries) are more centered on efficiency than headcount.

I'm employed and I'm grateful... I know plenty of people searching and are getting nothing but silence in their search. I think both sides of the hiring equation are getting a hard reset right now.

[rachofsunshine]

The market is definitely not dead. It started warming up last summer and has continued to do so throughout 2025.

But the market is two-tiered in a way it hasn't been before, particularly w.r.t. remote hiring. Almost all engineers want remote jobs and a small number of employers offer them, so the remote job hunt still puts employers in the driver's seat. But (good, senior) engineers hold the cards right now for in-office roles.

[mixmastamyk]

No offers here, local or remote. Hoping Section 174 fix helps.

[rachofsunshine]

To where are you local, what are your desiderata, and what does your resume look like?

I can take a look privately if you'd like, or publicly here if you want broader opinions / to serve as a data point for others.

[mixmastamyk]

SoCal... I'll email ya, thanks!

[OhMeadhbh]

Yes and No... My take on the current job market is this has been a slow-slide into oblivion. When I was a kid, we used something like engineering practice to develop software. You would have someone across the hall with a title of "product manager" or something who understood the business and the problem they wanted to solve (and how much money people would likely be willing to pay for it.) Then you would get a set of 15 requirements, 5 of which needed to be met before the product could be shipped. As an engineer, you put your head down and thought about how you would build each feature and there was a back and forth about which features got built at which time and you built something that looked like a product roadmap for the next three to five years. [ This was in the commercial embedded space. Aviation, government and banking all lived in slightly different worlds. ]

Around 1999 there was so much money in the dot-com run-up that the only thing that mattered was shipping something quick before the investors wised up and sued you for fraud. Engineering methodology took a back seat to expediency and this crazy bunch of weirdos practicing eXtreme Programming were used to demonstrate the spiral methodology the big guys used wasn't the only game in town. People took time out from their lunch meetings with VCs to read books by Fred Brooks and Tom DeMarco, if for no other reason than to memorize phrases like "Technical Debt" and "Mythical Man Month." If you say "Fail Quickly" and "Show me your flowcharts..." and you'll sound like a mysterious, wizardly futurian with a deep understanding of the hidden world of the matrix. But most of the people in the 90s in sili valley were ponces.

So where was I? Oh yeah... what we're seeing is the eventual end of a 25-30 year slide away from anything resembling "engineering" and "engineering practice". And I'm not saying that's completely bad. I mean... yes... please hire "real" engineers to design, build, test and deploy avionics firmware. You do not need an engineering degree to create a vibe coded web page that texts your fiends with name suggestions for their children or pets. MyTripToSacramento.Com can probably get by with a product manager and a dog. The dog is there to bite the product manager when they try to change the web site.

The 2025 job market has been dead for 30 years, we just didn't notice it until today.