[tern]

Curious about the perspective from anyone who has a skill set / reputation where finding jobs is easy right now.

I imagine people in ML or who've found a good way to demonstrate prowess with agentic systems may be highly in demand right now(?)

[fl4regun]

I work in an industry tangentially involved with the ML build-out (think companies like Broadcom, Marvell, etc.). We can't find enough people, if you have like 3+ years of experience with PCIe, Ethernet, DDR, you're a shoe in. Verification, Validation, Design, Customer Applications, Firmware, you name it, we need it. The pay is good too, especially for people who got in a year ago or more, stock base compensation has taken off like a rocket.

Hiring here is a little bit more old school, I guess? Especially because the types of roles we are hiring now are usually 5+ years of experience, we focus more on learning about what the candidates have done in the past, the leetcode type of question interview is just a small part, and matters more for prospective Jr. hires.

That being said, we aren't hiring that many fresh graduates anymore, we already have some we hired, we're focused on investing in them, getting them to learn more about our hardware and code, etc. and hoping to retain them.

[ponector]

If you cannot find enough people in current market then pay is not that good as you think.

[fl4regun]

my last year's taxable income was over half a million and I am not even staff level, and I am not in the US. The reason we can't find people is because we are looking for people with specific skillsets - there's not that massive a pool of people who know e.g. PCIe at a very in-depth level. And trust me, we pay way better than companies like AMD or Qualcomm would, but a lot of the people at those companies just prefer staying because they are comfortable enough. Not like AMD is giving people poverty wages for PMTS level staff.

[mchaver]

If you guys are hiring, I am interested. My email and personal website are in my profile. Thanks!

[mixmastamyk]

Hi, looking for your contact info or you can find mine from the beginning of the month hiring post. Cheers.

[fl4regun]

Sent you an e-mail

[ryandrake]

I feel like any advice you get from someone would be as useful as "how to be a good coin flipper" advice from the 1 person in 1024 who flipped heads 10 times in a row. In other words it would be purely survivorship bias.

[vanuatu]

I joined a new company 6 months ago. I interviewed at 16 companies and got 5 offers from a mix of ai cos / big tech / trading firms

Background is SWE at an AI co that's in the news sometimes

It felt about the same in terms of grind effort from my last search in 2022. the main difference was ai companies cared a lot about your understanding of agentic systems and harness / context engineering, and had much more practical rounds with less leetcode (usually 1 medium). More legacy firms (finance / some big tech) still expected you to solve 3-4 leetcode medium/hards throughout the process

[giwook]

Anecdotally I've seen the latter to be true and have had third-party recruiters echo that familiarity with AI use in coding has become a pivotal part of job interviews with startups.

That being said, I'm not sure how much job security having such prowess would convey because I feel AI will be better than us at that too eventually (if not already).

[colonCapitalDee]

I'm starting a new job in a few weeks, and can confirm (for startups at least) experience with coding agents is something companies are looking for. Multiple companies I interviewed with had a AI assisted interview session to go along with a more typical closed book programming session. I was asked about my use of coding agents in behavioral interviews. I'm not an ML guy, just a generalist SWE with 4 YOE. I only got one offer in my search, but it only took ~a month and I feel pretty good about being able to get more offers with more searching. It helps that I'm young, no dependents, and willing to relocate.

[rglynn]

What do you mean by easy? Do you mean FAANG or equivalent salary? What level of seniority?

Can speak to my experience that if you are a senior engineer in London the market is relatively easy at the moment (or was at the beginning of the year) even with no connections.

[lylejantzi3rd]

How much does it pay, relatively? The last time I looked into jobs in the UK and in Europe, I could make more money flipping burgers in the US.

[svobodovic]

Depends on how you look at it. For example, the average salary in my Central European country is about 27k USD per year. I work in an IT/telco business and make about a double that. While it may sound very low for US standards, I own a house, a car, and go for a few non-lavish vacations each year with my family (wife makes about a third of my pay). I don't stress about health expenses, and have a good small town community just outside the capital city. People who work in senior management in tech, or work for international corporations can make upwards of 120k yearly, and will have a very comfortable life where I'm at. It can't be directly compared I suppose.

[throw-the-towel]

I'm seeing offers of 150k GBP or more in London, no idea if they're real though.

[h4kunamata]

>Curious about the perspective from anyone who has a skill set / reputation where finding jobs is easy right now.

There is no such thing as easy right now!!

Engineers with years of experience are being dismissed from interviews, and they are solid candidates. I speak with recruiters since I am looking for job atm and it is a horror movie atm.

Companies literally have no idea what they want, they lost the touch with reality. There was a twitter post from a developer who released a tool being used left and right, then a role AD asking for more years of experience for that tool than the tool exists.

You need a miracle right now to find a job, also, you need to know the recruiter who knows the hiring manager to get you in.

Nothing is easy anymore, and won't be anytime soon although the AI bubble started to pop and companies are waking up to the huge mistake they made.

[programjames]

My perspective is it is impossible to cut through the three layers of bullshit between you and anyone who knows what they are talking about. The only way to do this is with brand-name qualifications, like "MIT graduate", not things that are actually impressive. This is also why you see senior developers saying, "the offers I'm getting are bigger and bigger," meanwhile skilled younger developers need to become a marketing professional just to get an interview.

Recruiters have utterly given up on being efficient in the market. I do not know why, but there is something very wrong given "spamming the same brand-name fish all the other recruiters are spamming" is their only strategy. My guess is there is a combination of bad (or an entire lack of) hygienic data filtering and a disconnect between compensation and terminal goals (hiring the best candidates).

[greygoo222]

I'm a new grad. It took me about three weeks to get two offers, both from cold applications. I applied to ~100 jobs in total and got first round interviews from 10% of the ones I cold applied to, much higher when I had an in.

I then, uh, turned both offers down because I thought the roles weren't interesting enough and didn't pay enough to make up for not being interesting (170k base). Now I am back in the process and, knock on wood, I am in the middle of final rounds with several companies and expect to have a much better offer by next week.

I have a background in ML and agentic systems, which did come up, but my resume isn't outstanding. No big tech or frontier lab internships, no published papers, no unicorn startup. I wouldn't say finding jobs has been easy, but it hasn't been remotely as difficult as this thread implies, and I believe the statistics back me up here. I suspect this is a "people who aren't struggling don't complain about it online" phenomenon.

Regardless, I wish everyone here best of luck in finding a job.

[IshKebab]

Silicon design/verification. In really high demand at the moment, I guess because of the death of Moore's Law - now it is much more worthwhile making custom chips.

[sublinear]

Easy hires are the same now as in the past. They have held several specialized roles before without letting it narrow their career path, and they have at least a decade of experience.

The problem with specialized roles is that nothing lasts too long in software. Given enough time in it, nobody really has an edge. Everyone is smart enough to have invented and implemented the very thing eating the world right now. They just don't have supervillain money or clout, so they work for you instead.

[iLoveOncall]

> Curious about the perspective from anyone who has a skill set / reputation where finding jobs is easy right now.

It's easy to find jobs in software engineering provided you have an attractive resume.

[Exoristos]

What, in your evaluation, are the top two or three attributes of an attractive resume?

[iLoveOncall]

There's only one: you work at a top-tier company.