I promise you there are a ton of companies desperate to hire talent right now. It's hard on both sides of the market. Lots of noise, but there is demand for this supply. Unfortunately, that means personal connections are more valuable than they used to be, just to get the ball rolling.
Are you sure? Can you share some of those companies that are desperate to hire talent right now? I'd like serious teams as I need to find work. I do keep an eye on HN, Wellfound, Workatstartup, X, etc.
My company is hiring (small, but definitely happy to talk to you and all the people who made stuff run on your team at Cloudflare!) https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/blaxel
I know Waymo is trying to hire like a thousand engineers this year.
There are always a ton of companies looking for good talent. However there are not nearly as many as a couple year ago: there is more good talent looking for a job than there are jobs. This has happened before, it will happen again (this is easy for me to say - I still have a job, but I've been there before and I know first hand how bad it is when you need the job).
Good luck to those of you looking for a job. My company is hiring a few people, but if someone leaves today there is only a 20% change we hire someone outside to replace them so I can't really offer leads worth looking at.
Like us :) We are not mandating AI tokens but asking people not to ship slop code. Naturally that means more people required; but in the age when everything is slop, imho having good taste becomes a competitive advantage. And that... requires good people.
I've been laid off from every job I've held (and once I was even re-hired a month later!) so I know the feeling. There seem to be others here who are also impacted and I fear the overall trend will only continue, so I wrote up my thoughts on how to future-proof your job search. I do think the GP comment about institutional knowledge could be a key part of it. Hope this helps: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48067459