[noprocrasted]

It's primarily a discovery problem, on both sides of the market.

Candidate-wise, everyone is slinging ChatGPT'd resumes left and right, which just leads to an arms race where the other side has to use LLMs to filter them, which just makes the situation even worse. The bar for "senior software engineer" is insanely low right now (and no, Leetcode doesn't count - I'm talking more pragmatic skills like being able to use a *nix terminal).

Employer-wise, everyone wants a unicorn that will lick their ass but isn't willing to pay (in either money or benefits) well for said service. Then they complain that "nobody wants to work anymore" or that there are no good candidates. Well, it's just that the good ones don't even bother applying.

As a result, lucky, good actors on either side find themselves via networking, while the less lucky ones are left to swim in a sea of trash.

[FireBeyond]

> Candidate-wise, everyone is slinging ChatGPT'd resumes left and right, which just leads to an arms race where the other side has to use LLMs to filter them, which just makes the situation even worse.

Everyone had to start doing that to get through the often dumb-as-a-brick ATS system filtering that became farcical - I remember applying for one position that was around building care and management systems for pregnant mothers - EHR, practice management, claims benefits, etc., all of which I had over a decade of experience in. "Name something that might stand you out from the crowd." "In addition to all this I've also delivered 12 babies as a paramedic". Twenty minutes later "we are looking for candidates whose experiences and skill sets are more closely aligned with the role we are looking to fill". That was my push to realize "I need to do something to ATS optimize my resume and plan otherwise I'll be unemployed for months."

> Employer-wise, everyone wants a unicorn that will lick their ass but isn't willing to pay

"Principal Product Manager. Must have 10-15 years experience, much of it in healthcare domain, including leadership and team ownership. Salary range: $90-130K".

Yup.

[devinprater]

Wait, you mean there are senior software engineers who don't know how to use a *nix terminal? I've been using them since I was like 16 or so.

[pibaker]

You can 100% work your way to a senior position without ever leaving windows. The people who are like that just don't tend to be hanging out on platforms like HN.

[mattmanser]

I am, although I have used nix occasionally.

In Europe C# fills the role of Java.

You're just in an American echo chamber.

Now the number of senior C# engineers in Europe who couldn't fix a broken deploy on IIS or SSL cert problem on a windows server? That is rather high in the windows field too.

[noprocrasted]

To be clear, this was developing software running on *nix environments, and they were all using Mac (or WSL) and the usual open-source *nix dev tools. This is not a case of developers purely targeting Microsoft environments (indeed it would be excusable in that case).

[idunno246]

i was hiring for a senior devops role a few years ago. part of the interview was ssh into a machine and debug some web server configs we purposely broke. step one was email an ssh public key to me. now, i dont remember the command cause i do it so rarely, i dont expect them to, but for a senior role we expect you can google this, its not supposed to be hard. the number of people that could not generate an ssh key was crazy. i had people emailing me their current company private key. and if we did spend half the interview on the key, they never could pass the trivial part of how we broke it, which effictively just required reading the log file.

[noprocrasted]

They know that it's a magic box into which you paste whatever incantation is in the README.md or spoonfed to you by an LLM, but otherwise have no mental model of how it works. Hell, they didn't even have the reflex of pressing "arrow up" to correct a mistyped command. And don't get me started on the lack of mastery of their tools - whether Docker, package managers or other tools they use daily.

(and speaking of LLMs, those can actually be a wonderful teaching aid - but they don't seem to be bothered by their lack of knowledge and so don't even try to take advantage of them)

I bet the guys are good at Leetcode though, or whatever bullshit interview process that hired them. This is in a Western European company that has adopted all the "best practices" possible, and places high importance on career progression, and these are considered senior SWEs on track to become engineering managers.

[pbgcp2026]

@noprocrasted - thank you for your 100% spot on comments. +1. And you summarised it so well that I hope they will be remembered by job seekers of today.