Ask HN: Is the Job Market Actually Bad?

This matches my experience as well as a sr. Ruby/Python engineer (NE USA based)

The market was pretty barren in late 2025, but wasn't too terrible in Jan 2026 and I progressed nicely through two interview processes. Got an offer from one. Made it to the final round with the other but timeframes did quite not align.

    shiny new budgets

I was curious about this aspect. Lot of companies have fiscal years (and, presumably, budgets) that do not start at the same time as the calendar year.

    No degree seems to be a bigger gate now than it was the last time I was searching

Anecdotally during late '25/early '26, I didn't seem to see an increase in sr. engineer roles with explicit requirements.

I did have one surprise rejection during a screening call due to the fact that I had 4 years of compsci but no degree. I don't recall that happening before in ~30 years. I don't believe it was listed as a hard requirement, else I wouldn't have applied.

   requirements, even for lower roles, seems to be higher than before.

My (small sample size) experience was that the "nice to have" lists of keyword soup got larger, but companies remained pretty flexible about them. Probably because for most roles, LLMs can help developers paper over these experience gaps.

ie - React shops were cool with my recent Vue experience as a substitute, since I was primarily a backend guy anyway

Not rejecting your experiences, just adding to the anecdata

Started with attending Burning Man starting about 12 years ago. Got jealous of my friends who were doing “real” engineering on these kinds of projects, and started volunteering, applying for and winning art grants, meeting other artists, and climbing the skill ladder.

If you attended Burning Man in 2019, Climate Week in SF in 2023, or Verge in San Jose in 2024, you may have seen my project Awful’s Gas & Snack. I also worked on the Love Blocks and the Jacks at the Conservatory of Flowers in SF (among many other projects).

I now run a small art fabrication business that just barely makes my studio rent most of the time, and is currently supplementing unemployment to pay my bills. It’s really, really hard to turn this kind of work into a livelihood, but it’s happening by necessity because I have no other work right now.

It’s also given me legitimate hardware experience — I’ve written code from scratch in Arduino and written modifications and extensions to WLED, and built custom controllers, remote sensor devices, and power systems (solar and batteries, relevant to the clean energy field). But I don’t quite know how to present this work as “legitimate”, even the stuff I’ve done as a full-fledged professional (like the work I did at Urban Putt San Jose, which you should definitely go see, it’s fun!)

Yeah, I think so. It’s so bad that I pass 2nd and 3rd round interviews and when I email about it the recruiters email bounces alongside several cc’s that were on the thread.

I'm doing OK, I can get phone screens / interviews at big tech. Can't manage to get any from AI labs.

My current company is highly abusive and is doing a bunch of saber rattling over layoffs and I'm honestly fed up at this point.

They want us to work 7 days a week and are like "ohh maybe we'll lay half the company off, we'll see". And all of the reorgs are making my life fucking hell. (It's a large company that's run by an asshole. Guess which one)

The hard part is just getting the time to prepare for interviews properly. I'm not even bothering interviewing at the more leetcode heavy companies right now.