Ask HN: Is the Job Market Actually Bad?

I would have had a new one earlier except I was aiming for fully remote and a big raise, and I failed their correspondingly difficult evaluations. Never got ghosted, never had to deal with AI, never had to fill out an application. I took a local, in office offer that I would have ignored if I were still employed.

Currently I’m waiting for a final decision from another fully remote company and I’m in midstage with 2 more.

I’m not a super genius engineer, and I don’t have any fancy companies on my resume. How unusual is this experience?

As someone who has made hiring and firing decisions at the Board level, the people who are the most severely affected were either (in no order):

1. Working remotely in North America but demanding Bay Area salaries without the chops to justify it.

2. Working in Western Europe (they complain more about stuff irrelevant to the business but shy away from business critical decision making when offered the opportunity, unlike their Czech, Polish, Romanian, and Bulgarian peers despite us paying €90k-150k TCs across the EU, and Warsaw+Prague becoming Berlin level expensive).

3. Bootcamp grads who never fixed skills issues (foundational knowledge is foundational for a reason).

4. Getting paid Bay Area or Seattle salaries while living in LCOL regions like RTP. The whole point of a Cary office was inshoring - the talent was meh but if we needed a cheap QA engineer or move ops for a stagnant part of our business in 2019 we'd move that job and BU there. They didn't realize they were viewed as at the bottom of the totem pole skills wise.

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So long as you keep your skills sharp, have foundational computer science and engineering knowledge, and live in the primary tech hubs globally, it's a pretty good market.

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Edit: can't reply

> What, in your opinion are the “foundational” CS skills the #3 people are missing

If you've survived this long, I think you will be fine. But I'd recommend anyone from a bootcamp to take an OS course comparable to CS61 [0], an algos course comparable to CS170 [1], and a programming language design course comparable to CS421 [2].

There is foundational design and architectural patterns and knowledge that are taught in OS, Programming Language Design, and Algos classes that cannot be taught in a bootcamp.

My recommendation for people in your shoes is to do GATech's OMSCS or UPenn's online MCIT to learn some of the foundational stuff you were never introduced to at a bootcamp.

[0] - https://cs61.seas.harvard.edu/site/2025/

[1] - https://cs170.org/

[2] - https://cs421-sp26-web.pages.dev/